The Democratic Machine’s New Monarch
Policy Director Colin Williams was quoted in this article.
Via – Chicago Magazine
“In the early 1960s, a businessman named Arnold Maremont decided he wanted to run for U.S. Senate. So he made the pilgrimage all aspiring Democratic politicians were required to make in those days: to meet with Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley wasn’t sure whether the Baptists of Little Egypt would vote for a Jewish candidate, so he told Maremont to go downstate and find out. Maremont reported they would, and so Daley slated such a candidate: Rep. Sidney Yates, a machine Democrat.
Maremont felt used, but, as Mike Royko points out in his biography of Daley, “he wouldn’t have even tried had he ever heard Daley explain why he is so dedicated a party man: ‘… The rich guys can get elected on their money, but somebody like me, an ordinary person, needs the party. Without the party, only the rich would be elected to office.’ ”
Back then, millionaires needed the party. Today, the party needs millionaires—or even billionaires. In his bid for the governor’s seat, J.B. Pritzker, a Hyatt hotel chain heir born with not just a silver spoon but an entire cutlery set in his mouth, has positioned himself as a political outsider who, because of his money, is immune to the influence of special interests and political bosses. Nonetheless, the Democratic candidate has been embraced by House speaker Michael Madigan, Illinois’s most powerful machine boss, in no small part because a win for Pritzker would allow Madigan to thrive.”
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