It was all sweetness and smiles in Chicago on Monday as the famously hotheaded Rahm Emanuel shed his former White House persona and became the Windy City’s first new mayor in 22 years.
Out of the frying pan of national politics, and now, into an entirely new fire, the former Obama administration chief of staff’s voiced cracked with emotion. Fitting for a hometown boy who made good banging heads together in Washington, and now is putting his all into remaking the city that sired him.
But Chicago, beset with a budget shortfall the size of Lake Michigan, doesn’t expect a long honeymoon. The Tribune is already running a tongue-in-cheek “Pick the Moment Rahm Totally Loses It Sweepstakes,” timed to coincide with the rude fiscal awakening in store for Mayor Emanuel.
Flanked by his predecessor, Richard Daley, and a cluster of dignitaries that included Vice President Joe Biden, Emanuel took the oath of office under sunny skies in downtown Chicago’s Millennium Park — a stunning urban landscape built upon an abandoned railyard that stands today as the crowning jewel of the Daley era.
Emanuel heaped praise upon Daley — and then served notice that the old ways are over. Chicago, he vowed, is about to do more with less. Much less, given a spiraling budget shortfall projected to reach $655 million in 2011.
“New times demand new answers. Old problems cry out for better results. This morning we leave behind the old ways and old divisions and begin a new day for Chicago,” Emanuel told a crowd of several thousand Chicagoans.
“To do that, we must face the truth. It is time to take on the challenges that threaten the very future of our city: the quality of our schools, the safety of our streets, the cost and effectiveness of city government, and the urgent need to create and keep the jobs of the future right here in Chicago,” he said.
“The decisions we make in the next two or three years will determine what Chicago will look like in the next 20 or 30.”
Emanuel’s entry into Chicago’s notoriously bareknuckled political landscape comes replete with hard pledges. Last week, he spelled out the details in an 18,000-word Transition Plan that invites the public to measure progress at the 100-day and one-year marks.
Some of the challenges will ring familiar in Toronto’s corridors of power — not least to Mayor Rob Ford. Though they come from different places, politically, Emanuel and Ford now find themselves in charge of the two great urban metropolises on the Great Lakes, both known for their bull-in-the-china-shop approach to getting results.
Chicago’s budget woes, many suggest, may in fact be worse, with the city facing dramatically higher pension contributions during Emanuel’s first term that could demand an additional $500 million or more a year.
The U.S. recession, coupled with the American real estate meltdown, is believed to have cost Chicago an average of some $250 million a year since 2007. And unlike Toronto, Chicago is gripped with a chronic public education crisis, with high school graduation rates at barely 50 per cent.
Another time-bomb Emanuel must confront: The Daley administration left the Chicago’s powerful public-sector unions locked in to generous contracts for years to come, all part of its ultimately failed bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics (which were awarded to Rio de Janeiro, despite the 11th hour lobbying of famed Chicagoans Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey).
And, finally, population. Once more than three million, America’s third-largest city is now shrinking, having lost some 200,000 residents in the past decade.
Emanuel’s ascent marks the end of one of America’s longest political dynasties. Richard M. Daley and his legendary father, Richard J. Daley, held the mayor’s office for a combined 43 of the past 56 years. But that cozy power base lives on in Emanuel’s successor as White House chief of staff — William Daley, brother of the departing mayor.
The younger Daley, said Emanuel, achieved nothing less than saving the city over the course of 22 years.
“A generation ago, people were writing Chicago off as a dying city,” said Emanuel.
“They said our downtown was failing, our neighbourhoods were unlivable, our schools were the worst in the nation and our politics had become so divisive we were referred to as Beirut on the Lake.”
Among the thousands of Chicagoans who attended Monday’s outdoor ceremony, a conflicting mood of joy, anxiety and dread seemed the order of the day.
“I’m feeling all of those things. I’m nervous and I’m hopeful,” Karen Lewis told the Star.
“I think we’ll have a bit of a honeymoon and then we’ll see. We all know the problems. In some ways, I think Rahm Emanuel might be the only one who can do anything about it.”
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