Word: chicago
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEY SAID IT couldn't happen. Even after the old man died Christmas time, 1976, the Chicago Democratic Organization--the only remaining big-city political machine in the nation--pulled itself together under the sure hand and compromising nature of Michael A. Bilandic, a smooth party pro from Daley's own back-of-the-Yards ward. All the nascent fiefdoms popping up across town fell before the power of the new mayor and the still viable party machinery...
...Bilandic is a loser--a victim of the only force that has ever beaten the Machine in more than 50 years: Mother Nature. It didn't snow inches in Chicago this winter, it snowed feet--seven and a half of them. More than 100 people died of snow-related causes and for six weeks everyone else in Chicago had trouble walking across the street and getting their cars out of their driveways. The incumbent's diminutive challenger, a venomous former consumer sales commissioner by the name of Jane Byrne, branded the Mayor "the Abominable Snowman" for his lackadaisical clean...
...wife lent a much-appreciated cultural air to the city. His fiscal and political leadership proved skillful and he moved to innovate in areas ignored by Daley for years. Polls showed him popular. If not exactly a reform independent, neither was he a hack. Bland was a better word. Chicago politics seemed to be turning into something of a snooze--a change from Daley's iron-fisted but always colorful 20-year reign. Bilandic was considered such a shoo-in that no one but Byrne bothered to challenge him. It was pointless...
...powers. The challenger showed snow-bound commuters and photos of herself with Daley. Laboring under Byrne's verbal barrage and a charge that one of his aides was improperly awarded a no-bid snow-removal contract, Bilandic played the martyr--an ill-advised ploy in a city like Chicago. He compared the attacks against him to the crucifixion of Jesus and the persecution of Jews and blacks...
...progress of women in politics may well have been set back by her victory. Jane Byrne is mean-spirited, less-than-competent, less-than-intelligent. Her election will mean only the end of the machine's invulnerability, not of its influence in Chicago politics. The city is set up on a weak-mayor, strong-city council system, which with a non-machine mayor suggests a return to the feudal, pre-Daley years when free-wheeling bosses ran wild, getting their hands into more cookie jars than modern-day Chicagoans can imagine even exist. Some of the more wily power-brokers...