MIKE MADIGAN, JOHN CULLERTON, AND PENSIONS: SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR?

6/19/13

The Chicago Sun-Times today ran a page 6 story, trumpeted on page 1, asking a question I asked back on May 8  (See my post of that date, THE CULLERTON PENSION PLAN:  “THE (PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONS) FAMILY DON’T EVEN HAVE THAT KIND OF MUSCLE ANY MORE”???):  Is the House Speaker Mike Madigan/Senate President John Cullerton disagreement over the solution to Illinois’s public pension problem a genuine “feud,” as the Sun-Times put it, or, as I called it on May 8, “part of some Machiavellian dance to avoid doing anything about our pension problems” in order to somehow give Lisa Madigan a boost in her run for governor?

 

Not knowing either Mike Madigan or John Cullerton, and being quite sure that even those who know either gentleman are not privy to such inner thoughts, I don’t know whether the two legislative leaders genuinely differ on pensions or are trying to pull some sort of elaborate maneuver to discredit Pat Quinn and help Lisa Madigan.  I suspect, however, that the disagreement is genuine.   Mr. Madigan is too smart to try to pull something so likely to backfire in his face and that would seemingly involve too many people (more than one) to keep very far under wraps.  Furthermore, perhaps I am naïve, but I genuinely don’t think that Mr. Madigan is so callous, so uncaring about the direction of the state, and/or so silly that he would further imperil our state’s nearly broke finances in order to hand his daughter an even more hopeless set of circumstances should she run for governor and should he be able to deliver the office for her.

The speculation that the whole Madigan/Cullerton thing is a Potemkin feud, though, gives me the opportunity to tell a story about the last time I thought two Chicago pols were putting on a fake fight worthy of the WWE….

In early 2005, Governor Rod Blagojevich shut down a landfill operated by Frank Schmidt, a cousin of Blago’s mother-in-law, Marge Mell, the wife of Dick Mell, one of Chicago’s then and now most powerful aldermen and committeemen.  The Governor contended that the landfill was taking illegal material while Mr. Schmidt was assuring shady customers who thus violated that law that there would be no trouble because of Mr. Schmidt’s connection to Mr. Mell.  This set off a public feud between Mr. Blagojevich and his father-in-law, and political Godfather, Dick Mell that reached epic proportions.

I suspected that the Mell/Blago feud was an elaborate ruse, designed to distance, for the naïve, the Governor from his father-in-law, whose reputation as a take no prisoners, old time ward boss from Chicago didn’t play well in the suburbs and downstate.   Blago would be running for reelection in 2006 and a charade of a crusading environmentalist young governor standing up to an old time, favor dispensing ward boss at enormous personal and political cost to himself would enhance his chances downstate while not hurting him in the city due to the winks, nods, and “say no mores” that would be part of such a ruse.

However, I started to hear from people who knew and worked with Mell in the 33^rd ward that the father-in-law vs. son-in-law feud was very real.  I sort of brushed off these assurances as part of the play.  One evening shortly after the fireworks started I was at a function at my old high school and heard from a Jesuit priest who was active in politics on the northwest side that the Mell/Blago feud was very real.   While this claim had more credibility, I have long adhered to my trusted formula of not trusting anybody whom I have not known for at least twenty years, and then not completely, and still thought Blago and Mell could be jerking everyone’s chains.

When Dick Mell several weeks later accused his son-in-law’s new best friend, Chris Kelly, a corrupt contractor who ultimately committed suicide at least partially due to the troubles that grew out of his association with Blago, of trading commission appointments for “$50,000 campaign contributions,” we all knew, or soon would know, that Messrs. Blagojevich and Mell were not playing some game of three card monte.   All doubt was removed by Mr. Mell’s comments regarding Mr. Kelly, which Mr. Mell doubtless regretted later and which ultimately led to his son-in-law’s taking up residence in federal housing.

That incident may have nothing at all to do with what some, including the Sun-Times, are labeling the Madigan/Cullerton “feud.”  But that quick, and wrong, presumption of Machiavellian machinations did reinforce for me something I have long known but that the more sensationalist among my fellow Chicago politics aficionados can’t seem to grasp:   sometimes things are as they seem, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…even in the labyrinthine world of Chicago politics.

See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge, A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.