This is getting to be more appropriate for another thread just for this purpose, but it is so bogus to compare Chicago to other Midwest cities, or to Chicago 30 years ago, as some kind of proof of Daley's brilliance that I don't even know where to begin. Any ninth-grader can tell you the question isn't "Are you better off than you were 30 years ago" but "Are you better off than you would be had you done something different." No knowledgeable person ever believed that Chicago was going to be "like Detroit," period, unless they believed that about all American cities. And Chicago was so bad 30 years ago? Name one single major American city that wasn't. We like to preen and crow, but Chicago's comeback is no more spectacular than that of half a dozen major cities in this country. There were bigger forces at play than Daley, and he doesn't get all the credit.
So that kind of thinking is totally beside the point. It makes a lot more sense to look at things that Daley has actually done. Many of these things are politely left undiscussed here. Probably the most important of these is TIF. The city collected
$550 million [pdf] from TIF in 2007, an amount that has grown explosively during Daley's mayoralty. If that money were included in the City's
budget [pdf] (it's actually excluded from the budget even though we pay it), it would have increased the total amount of reported appropriations by 10%. Anybody who looks at the way the Daley budget completely ignores TIF--neither "TIF" nor "tax increment financing" appears ANYWHERE in the published budget--can only conclude that the administration's level of willful misinformation about appropriations in its budget is matched only by that of the Bush administration.
The Community Development Commission is supposed to oversee the TIF program, but over 99% of the individual votes cast in the CDC are yea votes (from Cook County Commissioner and soon to be Congressman Mike Quigley,
here [pdf]. That is a rubber stamp if ever there was one. It is a system with essentially zero oversight, and it covers one third of the land in this city. Many studies conducted at UIC have concluded that the TIF program raises taxes and does not improve neighborhoods enough for the extremely high cost.
Think about where Chicago would be if, instead of giving that money away to developers, we had used it to lower taxes, contribute to schools and police, and spend it on transit repairs.
Everybody complains about corruption. But only about the aldermen and the county. Tell me, who is the most powerful politician in Cook County? Do you really think Mayor Daley has no influence whatsoever over the corruption in the city? I don't mean that he profits personally, but it's clear that there is a general agreement between him and the aldermen: they get carte blanche over developments in their wards, and in return they look the other way and let him do as he pleases with everything else. Do you really think the mayor has no ability to stop spot zoning? No ability even to get on the soap box to speak out against it?
Can anybody here, by the way, name one single thing Mayor Daley ever did for transit in this city that even begins to make up for his decades of neglect? He famously said that transit has lost its constituency, and he has continued to govern under that apparent belief since then. He left Kruesi in charge of the CTA LONG after he was known to be harming the agency's position. He virtually ignored the CTA's funding problems until they reached the breaking point, then threw a fit about how the state had to do something about it without actually working toward a solution himself. He is known to never take CTA except for publicity events. During that glorious boom he takes so much credit for, at no point did he ever even appear to consider a campaign to improve our desperate, dying transit system. On transit, he gets an F.