Todd Stroger is Barack Obama’s legacy in Chicago. In 2006, Obama helped save Cook County’s Political Machine Dynasty by endorsing Stroger for Cook County board president as “a good, progressive Democrat.” In doing so, he preserved the status quo in Chicago and thwarted a serious attempt by bipartisan reformers to clean up their city’s politics.
Immediately after being elected with Obama’s blessing, Stroger laid off hundreds of nurses and dozens of prosecutors in Cook County, and to push (successfully) for higher sales taxes, giving Chicago the highest tax rate of any major American city (a combined 10.25 percent).
With the money he thus saved and raised, Stroger put several family members and unqualified friends into six-figure county jobs. He was continuing a tradition he inherited from his late father, the former Cook County president, who raised more than half of his campaign money from the county contractors and politically connected county employees whose pockets he was filling with taxpayers’ money.
Just before Thanksgiving week, President Stroger
presented a budget to the Cook County Board of Commissioners demanding a new $740 million bond issue. If he does not get it, he is threatening to lay off one quarter of the Sheriff’s department and three-quarters of the County Treasurer’s staff if. The
Chicago Tribune summed up the objections of critics on both sides of the aisle, which are shared by its editorial board: “By claiming a crisis, Stroger secures more money to reward financial consultants with bond deals and constituents with jobs, all to beef up his campaign fund and power base. . . .”
Contrary to the narrative he sold America during the election, Obama was never a reformer in Chicago. And his embryonic administration is already giving signs that he will not reform Washington, either.
Think of the federal government as a much larger version of Stroger’s Cook County — only far more pretentious. It is illegal for U.S. senators to hand out campaign keychains in their Senate offices, or to receive free lunches from lobbyists. It is perfectly legal for them to make millions of dollars cashing in on their access to government after leaving office. It is legal for their family members to do so while they are still serving.
Through his early personnel decisions, Barack Obama has already blessed such arrangements. Obama has chosen Tom Daschle for his secretary of Health and Human Services. As former Senate Majority Leader, Daschle shaped the bipartisan post-9/11 airline bailout and steered it through the U.S. Senate. His wife, Linda, was simultaneously bringing millions to her firm by lobbying for most of the major players in the aviation industry. Her portfolio included major airlines, Boeing, United Technologies, and Loral Space Technologies — which had been awarded a $1 billion FAA contract when Mrs. Daschle served as FAA deputy administrator. For his part, Mr. Daschle became a well-paid “consultant” for a lobbying firm after leaving the Senate. When Obama’s health-care plan comes into effect, what role will Daschle play in awarding contracts to insurers, medical providers, and drug companies? Will the winners hire him when he leaves office?
As his chief of staff, Obama has chosen Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel left the Clinton White House in 1998 to make over $16 million in the financial sector over the next three years, working for one of Clinton’s largest fundraisers. If Emanuel lacked any obvious expertise in finance, he at least had access to government. Emanuel simultaneously collected more than $250,000 as a board member at Freddie Mac, where he and others failed in their oversight roles and allowed a multibillion-dollar accounting fraud to take place. Upon returning to Congress in 2003, he became the preferred recipient of Wall Street’s campaign donations, and he reciprocated their generosity this year as one of the staunchest boosters of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Does anyone believe that the industry which treated Emanuel so well will not have special access to President Obama?
Obama’s administration shows few other signs of rocking the boat. He will keep President Bush’s defense secretary and appoint a vocal booster of the Iraq war as his secretary of state. Journalists friendly to Obama are already
presenting the theme that he will not be able to cut the federal budget after all. He is
appointing the architect of Bush’s Wall Street bailouts as his treasury secretary, and he has promised to expand Bush’s policy of bailing out failed businesses in the financial industry to the auto industry, as well. Even
the tax increases that he promised during the election appear to be off the table for now.
Barack Obama remains an enigma. Some of his critics voice fears that he will bring a damaging revolution upon America — that he is a socialist hell-bent on redistributing wealth, who merely aligned himself with Chicago’s corrupt politicians in order to facilitate his meteoric rise.
Perhaps this will still prove true. But the opposite case for Obama appears stronger so far. What if he is not so much the dangerous ideologue as he is the political opportunist who merely manipulates the Left? What if the same cynical politician who stuck Chicago with Todd Stroger goes on to protect government profiteers?
Obama was elected on a platform of changing Washington, but the early signs offer little hope that he will fulfill that promise.
— David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.
