Yesterday here I told you about a profile I wrote in 2003 of then-rising Chicago Alderman Walter Burnett, Jr. It was rejected by a Chicago Reader editor who didn’t see the wisdom in exploring the humanity of a politician. Now that Burnett has become one of the leading political figures in Chicago—and as we consider the kinds of people we are voting for—I wonder: Is a politician’s humanity relevant, or not? Let’s have a read. And if you don’t make time for the whole thing—and I do understand—make sure you scroll to the end, for the painful postscript. —DM
***
Yes Man
27th Ward Alderman Walter Burnett, Jr. has hustled and charmed his way to a prominent place in Chicago’s City Council. But is he independent enough—from the mayor, from his political sponsors and from his dark past—to make a difference on the one issue that’s nearest to his heart?
If politics is the art of compromise, aldermanic politics in Chicago is the art of the compromised.
Chicagoans have every reason to assume that their aldermen are, if not corrupt, at least dangerously beholden to powerful forces: Aldermen get their reelection campaigns funded from business interests in their ward. They’re also compelled to please Mayor Daley, who has the power to make or break their election bids by lending his endorsement and support either to them, or their more agreeable opponent.
So it’s no wonder that, on the rare occasions when an alderman is credited for doing something good for the rank-and-file residents of the ward, an ulterior motive is generally assumed.
Nevertheless, at this writing 23 Chicago aldermen had signed a petition in support of a dramatic fair housing ordinance that brazenly rankles both the mayor and the real estate developers whose support local politicians need most.
No doubt some of the aldermen made this move for political reasons—to demonstrate courageous support of constituents on the eve of the Feb. 25th aldermanic elections. Some of these signers may wiggle out of actually voting for the ordinance when it finally finds its way to the City Council chambers, which it might as early as March 5.
But one alderman—Walter Burnett, Jr. of the 27th Ward—who’s been prominent in news stories about the ordinance, insists he will vote in favor of the ordinance, the mayor and the developers be damned.
Many City Hall watchers are surprised at Burnett’s move, which seems an unlikely act of independence, particularly from a man who’s seen as even more beholden, more compromised than most of his colleagues.
And the more you understand the dynamics in Burnett’s ward and how he got to be its boss, the more you surprised you’ll be, too.
But get to know the man, and you begin to see where his courage comes from—and where other Chicago alderman might get theirs.
There may be some people living on the near northwest side who think Walter Burnett is the mayor of Chicago. Or, conversely, that Mayor Daley is a handsome black man.
Nattily clad in an overcoat and fedora, Burnett stands before City Hall in a heroic pose on billboards and benches from West Humboldt Park to Greek Town, from the Henry Horner Homes to Cabrini Green, from Old Town to the United Center.
The alderman’s billboards even reached outside his 27th Ward before 42nd Ward alderman Burt Natarus asked him to remove his smiling mug from his turf on the corner of LaSalle and Chicago. (Burnett recently stopped paying for the billboards to free up money for his reelection campaign, but the benches remain.)
It’s not just the outdoor advertising that makes Burnett ubiquitous. He’s got a twice-a-month public-access cable TV show, he has produced a rap CD and video telling his life story, he acts in community theater, he never turns down an interview request, and he probably shows up at more community events than any other alderman in Chicago.
“If it’s in the 27th Ward, he’s there,” says Danny Davis, U.S. House Representative from the 7th District, which contains most of Burnett’s ward. Davis adds almost wearily: “If he’s not there when I get there, he’s there before I leave.”
Burnett has made a name for himself in Chicago politics through sheer hustle, inspired by a desperate desire to escape what once looked like a dismal life.
Shorty was born in Cabrini with little stuck in the middle
Where bangin’s a way of life
Maintaining’s a way of keeping your sanity
Walking past prostitutes talking fast
Drug dealers counting they cash. …
—these lyrics and those that follow later in the article are excerpted from a song “Changed Man,” written by Walter Burnett, Jr. and Richard “Ready” Wilson and recorded on a CD of the same title.
Though you’d never tell it from his billboards, Walter Burnett stands only five feet, four inches tall. His appearance would be immaculate—his nails are manicured, his afro is short and his body is sculpted—if his fine suits didn’t always look about one size too big. Sometimes, he looks like he’s wearing his father’s clothes. `1
And, even at 40 years old, that’s often how he feels.
“Sometimes it gets overwhelming,” he says of his job as alderman of one of the most economically and ethnically diverse wards in the city. “Sometimes I just have to remind myself I’m just a poor kid from Cabrini in the middle of two rich people fighting.”
Make that, poor ex-con.
Walter Burnett says he had two great parents who taught him the value of education and hard work. His mother gave block parties in the Cabrini Green housing project where they lived, and his father was a truck driver for the city.
They were divorced and he lived with his mother, but his father came around often. “It was so exciting when Dad used to come,” Burnett recalls. Walter Sr. was a precinct captain in what was then the 42nd Ward, and he took his oldest son with him as he went door to door. Later, Burnett’s father paid him to knock on doors by himself. The experience taught Burnett to associate ward politics with good feelings as early as the age of eight: “I was proud to be with my daddy.”
Nevertheless, shortly after graduating high school, a 17-year-old Burnett was an accomplice in the armed robbery of a bank and a convenience store in Kankakee, Ill. He says he didn’t know the two older boys he was with intended to rob the bank. He says alcohol was involved. He says he was trying to show his friends he was cool, and he thought that driving them out to Kankakee would do the trick. He says he sobbed when he was busted, while his buddies yelled at him to shut up. And, he says, “I can only blame myself for being there. It was so stupid.”
And that’s about all he’ll say about the crime that sent him away for two years. He doesn’t mind talking about his time in prison, however.
It was at the medium security prison in Graham, Ill. and the minimum security pen in Vienna, he says, that he found God, there that he read Malcolm X. He read motivational books on the power of a positive mental attitude and listened to motivational tapes like Think and Grow Rich “every day,” he says. He learned how to box and he ran track. And during those two years he was “away,” as he sometimes refers to it, he got an associate’s degree as well as certificates as a paramedic and a draftsman.
He was trying to learn everything he could to succeed on the outside—“soaking up information,” he says—and some of his black cell mates criticized him for it: “I used to listen to white guys in prison, and guys used to get upset about that.”
It wouldn’t be the last time he’d be accused of selling out to the man in his zeal to make a better life for himself.
Looking at 3 to 5, the need to stay alive that unbarren sound
Only thing on his mind is this cell, and he let his parents down
To the Lord he confessed, picked up a book about Malcolm X
Then unlocked his brain, it felt like he was taking a thousand tests. …
It would be impossible for any alderman of the 27th Ward to disregard the desires of the mayor and the condo developers that are swarming the area.
For the last 10 years, much of the ward has been a din of demolition and new construction. The wrecking ball has hit many buildings in Cabrini Green on the east side of the ward and Henry Horner Homes toward the west. Expensive condominiums are being built on those buildings’ place, and the whole area is central to the mayor’s vision of a revitalized near west side.
In the eight years he’s been in office, Burnett has toed the line to a great extent. His voting record on controversial issues is 100 percent with Mayor Daley. And though he hasn’t exactly laid down for developers—more on this later—he’s well liked by business interests in the ward.
Too well liked, some people say.
In a space built just for criminals, guards clocking every move he made
Got his trophies from hard boxing
God’s watching, he had to humble himself, focus like Ghandi,
With self-discipline he don’t see the spirits but he know they listening.
When Burnett got out of jail he was 19 years old and ready to take on the world: “I was a man with a plan. You couldn’t tell me anything.” He moved back in with his mother at Cabrini and hit the streets to find a job in suits he bought at the Salvation Army.
But he had no luck. He was told he was overqualified for fast-food jobs and turned down for better jobs because he didn’t have any experience. “It didn’t even get to the point of whether I had a record or not,” he remembers.
In the short period between Burnett’s high school graduation and his incarceration, Walter Sr. had offered to introduce him to then-Cook County Board President George Dunne, for whom he worked.
He says he turned him down, telling his old man he didn’t want to depend on the city for his livelihood.
But when he couldn’t find a job after getting out of prison, “I told my dad to take me up to Mr. Dunne. The next day I had an interview with the Highway Department.” He passed what seemed to him a “primitive” engineering aptitude test and he was working as a draftsman the next day.
George Dunne knew Burnett was a convict, but for years it remained between them. Dunne told Burnett to tell the truth about his record if anybody asked him, but “it never came up,” Burnett says.
Burnett worked his way up in the Highway Department, taking various engineering jobs that culminated in his being named a mechanical assistant. During this time, he worked various odd jobs, from selling newspapers on the corner before work to helping people move in exchange for money and unwanted furniture. In order to pay his father back for helping land him the job, he says, he also worked in the Cabrini Green precinct of the 42nd Ward, registering voters.
He also found time to do what he describes as “gopher work” for Dunne at the Cook County Board. Among other duties, he brought lunch to Dunne, who was also ward committeeman for the 42nd.
Burnett recalls that Dunne, a Catholic, would have McDonald’s fish sandwiches on Fridays. One day, he told Burnett to get lunch for himself, too. From then on, they ate lunch together and talked every Friday, and Burnett says, “Mr. Dunne never moved, never took a call until I was finished eating.
“How could you not work for a guy like that?” Burnett says, with a still-fresh look of astonished gratitude.
Soon Burnett joined the Cook County Young Democrats and moved up in that organization, which serves as a training ground for politicians.
It was in the Young Democrats, when he tried to leap from Special Events Chairman to Chairman that his secret caught up with him for the first time—although not the last.
A candidate running against Burnett found out about his felony record and threatened to expose it. “I was so crushed,” Burnett remembers. “This was the end of the world for me.”
He went to Dunne, and the grizzled political veteran reiterated his advice about avoiding political scandals: To tell the truth right away. “If you tell the truth, everyone forgets about it,” Dunne explains today.
So Burnett came clean with his supporters, and everyone told him “it was no big deal,” he says with still-palpable relief. “It was in the past.”
And, just about a decade after his release from a state prison, he won his first election.
Fresh out, stickin, his chest out, having less disturbs him
So thousand young men serving time, he made time work for him
Got to the crib, momma cooked for him
His daddy looked for him to do something
Holding all kinds of degrees knew he grew something inside him positive.
George Dunne is not Burnett’s only political godfather. Jesse White is the other.
Burnett’s first acquaintance with White came when he was the poor kid in Cabrini. Burnett’s younger brother was a member of White’s famed Jesse White Tumblers, and his mother chaperoned the team.
Burnett got close to White when he became a precinct captain at Cabrini Green; at that time, White was the state representative for the area. The two hit it off and soon White made Burnett deputy campaign manager for his run for the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. When he won, he named Burnett his administrative assistant.
White admired Burnett for his tirelessness, which, he says, compares to his own: “I sleep between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m. and I attend eight to 13 events a day.”
It was White, whose own mentor was George Dunne, who Burnett first approached in 1994 to share his ambition to run for alderman of the 27th Ward. A ward remap in 1990 had taken Cabrini Green out of the 42nd Ward and placed it into the 27th. Dunne, the Ward Committeeman of the 42nd, was “really hurting,” Burnett says, characteristically connecting politics and personal emotion.
Burnett explained to White that if he—Dunne’s unabashed protégé—could find a way to win the aldermanic race in the 27th, Dunne wouldn’t lose complete control of Cabrini.
Eventually, Burnett summoned the courage to ask Dunne, too. Dunne and White both said, “Try it.”
Trying it, of course, meant risking another, broader exposure of his felony record. Burnett went on the offensive, calling Steve Neal of the Sun-Times and telling him the whole story and the moral: “Politics helped save my life.” Neal ran the column, and as Dunne had promised, the truth diffused the issue.
Burnett did another smart thing: He staged a class reunion at his alma mater Wells High School and invited all the pols he knew to come and speak to the class on his behalf. “So I had all these politicians saying great things about me in front of all these people,” he says.
He was lucky, too, in that 1995 campaign. The incumbent, Dexter Watson, was disliked by Mayor Daley and so inattentive to ward business that, as White tells the story, he inadvertently spent six of the 10 miles an alderman gets annually for repaving in an adjacent ward. Watson didn’t even make the run-off, which was between Burnett and Wallace Davis. Daley backed Burnett.
Walter Burnett, Sr. died two weeks before his son was elected alderman of the 27thWard. His grieving son kept on campaigning from door to door. His eyes are moist as he recalls it. After every campaign stop, he says, “I’d jump back into my car and start crying again.”
Cabrini Green’s finest they couldn’t see it but he could
And can walk in any building on these grounds cause he hood
Where dope fiends vomit from sickness, he started up his own organization
Studied the goals he wrote on his git list
Prayed to the Lord for strength, direction, cause tomorrow get better, but tougher
After eight years in office, Burnett is working as hard as ever.
Every morning, he does 100 push-ups and 200 sit-ups. His staffers say his daily schedule is typically 12 hours long and sometimes longer. He’s a deacon at the First Baptist Congregational Church and occasionally acts in church plays. He gives motivational speeches to inmates at the Cook County jail two Sundays a month. He helps coach Jesse White’s Tumblers. He spends so little time at home that his six-year-old son told him recently, “Daddy, aldermen and deacons gotta work all the time, don’t they?”
“That really hurt me,” says Burnett (as he stands on a street corner waiting for his car to pick him up at 8:00 p.m. and take him to a campaign fundraiser).
A lot of Burnett’s time is spent shaking hands. In one day on his campaign trail, this reporter guessed he shook a thousand at various meetings and events across the ward. He prides himself on greeting Hispanics in Spanish, and, at fundraisers, he enjoys demonstrating that he knows dances from every cultural group in his ward.
Burnett’s not just a glad-hander, however. By most accounts, he’s on top of basic ward administration. Riding around the ward, Burnett is constantly telling his driver to make notes—“We’ve got some graffiti on Grand”—and Burnett himself picks up empty bottles when he sees them, and if there’s no trash can nearby, he puts them in the car and they roll around on the floor.
Burnett embraces these unglamorous aldermanic chores. He’s less enthusiastic when constituents treat him like the ward handyman, demanding an immediate response to a personal need. He fields lots of those indignities on his two weekly ward nights and over the phone and he tries not to betray his wounded pride—pride that his religion teaches against.
“You gotta be humble,” he says.
But is he a little too humble—especially before the powerful Chicago politicians and developers who have designs on his ward—to fight the good fight on his constituents’ behalf?
Based on the way Burnett got from prison into public office—by doing his utmost to please as many powerful people as he could along the way—one might reasonably predict his behavior in office to be a little on the safe side.
And sure enough, the knock on Walter Burnett is that he’s a yes man.
When told of Burnett’s 100 percent pro-Daley City Council voting record, one longtime watcher of west-side politics said, “He’s probably sorry he can’t vote 105 percent and have the edge on all the other aldermen.”
Dick Simpson, the former alderman and University of Illinois at Chicago professor of political science who compiles aldermanic voting records doesn’t go so far in characterizing Burnett’s political compliance.
Burnett is not like the famous “Silent Six” black aldermen in the early 1960s who went along with Richard J. Daley’s every initiative and offered no legislation of their own. Simpson compares Burnett to the prominent black alderman from the 1970s, Wilson Frost. Frost would go to the mayor and get what Simpson calls “papal dispensation,” which meant permission to introduce his legislation as a “Daley bill.”
Burnett acknowledges he has voted with the mayor more often than he should have. He’s not sure he should have supported the mayor’s plan for the renovation of Soldier Field. And he regrets his recent vote for the aldermanic pay raise from $85,000 to almost $100,000 a year. He finds himself unable to explain why he went along with that vote except to say lamely, “I felt I deserved the money.”
But he claims City Council votes are no longer the best measure of an alderman’s independence. “You fight when you have to fight,” he says. But you don’t do it publicly. “If you fight, [the mayor’s people] try to handle it before it gets out into the public. You let [the mayor] know you have a problem and you say, ‘If I can’t have this, you can’t have that.’”
Though he won’t discuss specifics, Burnett says he’s used this method to get a number of compromises from the mayor. (He does recall one occasion when he took some constituents with him to the mayor’s office. “When they saw the way we talked to the mayor’s people, they were trippin’ out. ‘You were straight with them!’”)
Burnett also points to several issues on which he has defied the mayor. Daley was for a zoning change toward residential in the Fulton Market area, but Burnett says he stood behind the businesses that wanted the area to remain commercial. He says he went “head to head with the mayor’s people” not only to help the businesspeople who were afraid residential encroachment would drive them out of the area.
He says he also did it for a guy named Willie, who moved fruit for a company in the area. Willie walked to work, and if the business he worked for had to move, he’d be out of a job. “Willie brought his whole family up on that job,” Burnett says, adding, “I help the powerful and the rich, too. It’s all about balance.”
Balance is a word Burnett uses a lot. He considers himself a master of balancing the interests of the 69,000 rich, middle class and poor people who live in his ward. He understands each faction personally, he says, because “I’ve been on all those levels.”
Nevertheless, money weighs heavily on any political scale, and it’s hard for some to believe that Burnett doesn’t favor the rich. After all, his campaign coffers are stuffed by developers. Also, Near North Insurance mogul and political operator Mike Segal supported Burnett financially in his first election bid. And some say west-side politico Oscar D’Angelo has undue influence on the ward.
Burnett denies that Segal has ever asked him for anything. He remembers working hard to get Segal’s attention whenever he’d see him in Dunne’s 42nd Ward office. “Everybody else was afraid to talk to him,” Burnett recalls. “But I just kept getting in his face. ‘Hi, Mike!’ I forced him to say hello to me.”
Burnett says he thinks Segal saw something of himself in the alderman—someone who came from humble origins who could make a little help go a long way. “Mike knows I’m not going to do anything that I feel is going to hurt me or that I know is wrong. I’m scared,” he says, referring to his jail time.
Segal spokeswoman Kitty Kurth insists Segal does not ask favors in return for the help he gives. “Walter is probably one of hundreds and hundreds of kids that Mike has helped,” she says.
As for D’Angelo—who didn’t return calls for comment—“I used to pray for Oscar D’Angelo every night,” Burnett says. “Because I was so mad at him and I didn’t want to lose my composure.”
D’Angelo, he says, made some helpful introductions when Burnett was first running for alderman. As soon as he won, “D’Angelo came to me and said I should down-zone the whole west loop area. I said, ‘I’ll consider that, and I’ll do it if the people who live on those properties agree with it.’”
They didn’t, and Burnett didn’t.
Nevertheless, Burnett heard rumors that D’Angelo was telling people that the 27thWard was “his ward. I told people to tell that guy to get out of my ward,” Burnett says, with rare truculence. “Jesse [White] don’t even tell me what to do in my ward. … The mayor don’t tell me what to do in my ward. Who does this guy think he is?”
Eventually, Burnett says, D’Angelo got the message. But Burnett is still dogged by a reputation as being too eager to please everyone, not enough of a visionary.
“Walter is supportive of whatever,” says Danny Davis. “Whether he initiates or leads—that’s a different question.”
No doubt: Burnett likes to please people. He’s something of a softie. Asked to name his favorite part of being alderman, he says, “When little old ladies come up to you on the street and give you a hug and make you feel like they’re your son.”
And his least favorite? The conflict created when he can’t make the system he works in work for everybody: “When 10 guys come into my office who are out of a job and I can’t help them.”
He doesn’t like tough decisions. When he first became alderman, “it would kill me,” he says, when he had to choose sides on an issue—say yes to one person and no to another.
“Sometimes I pray right in meetings,” he says. “God, let me make the right decision.”
This reporter got a taste of Burnett’s aversion to conflict when he sat in on a taping of a January telecast of “Straight Talk,” a show aimed at a black demographic, that appears on Cable Channel 25. During a commercial break, host W.L. Lillard told his guests that the real purpose of the show was to lend free support to incumbents in their races. Lillard leaned toward the five black aldermen and said that if someone wants to unseat an alderman, let them unseat “a white person somewhere.”
He added that if they’re asked about how they got on the show, the aldermen should tell people they paid money to get on. (An FCC regulation requires that if stations give free television time, candidates and incumbents be given equal opportunity.)
Burnett hardly needed such shabby help in his election; his only competition was an elementary school janitor who, by all accounts hadn’t done much campaigning (and who didn’t put forth a coherent platform in the 10 minutes he granted for an interview with the Reader).
But, ever reluctant to make a stink and eager to please, Burnett quietly replied, “Thank you, W.L. We appreciate that very much.”
Later, perhaps out of guilt, Burnett paid the station to run a commercial spot that he also didn’t need. He won the election, getting 88 percent of the vote.
He tired of watching his people suffer, got into politics to help em
The Lord felt him, we feel him
It’s all about rebuilding this here for the children
Willing and ready for the challenge
Where violence seems to command
When you look at this life, you see the life of a changed man
Clearly, Walter Burnett will never overcome the go-along nature that got him in jail as a teenager and then propelled him so far from it as an adult.
At times, he seems not only agreeable but almost guileless. When this reporter originally called him to ask about doing a profile, he said, “Sure.” When asked if the reporter could spend a whole week shadowing the alderman, Burnett didn’t hesitate a second. “Sure, that would be fine.”
Aside from refusing to discuss the crime that sent him to jail, the only request that Burnett evaded was to accompany him while he gave one of his talks at the Cook County jail. Burnett said he doubted he could get permission to bring me along, but his religious life is one area he likes to keep private. The only time he becomes angry at constituents, he says, is when they hit him up for aldermanic help while he’s in church.
“I came here to do God’s work,” he wants to tell them.
The uneasy split between the alderman and the deacon might be coming together in the other direction, too. That is, Burnett may politically and psychologically ready to do some of what he sees as God’s work through politics.
Aside from his overwhelming victory in the election, several factors point to Burnett finally getting his political back up in a dramatic way:
He no longer has his criminal record to worry about, since Governor Jim Edgar officially pardoned him after challenger Rickey Hendon made it an issue before the 1999 race. Hendon brought up a law that bans convicted felons from holding office in Illinois, and Burnett inspired a tremendous letter-writing campaign on his own behalf whose contributors included Dunne and White among many other politicians and other influential people. (Even the police officer who arrested Burnett wrote the governor, confirming Burnett’s story of crying when he was arrested.)
Burnett thinks there’s another reason he’s getting tougher: He’s beginning to see that devotion to powerful people is not the best way to political job security. He says he maintains independence from developers in his ward no matter how much money they donate to his election campaigns because developers come and go; they’re only your friend as long as they’re doing projects in the ward. When the projects are gone, so are they; if they’ve upset your constituents along the way, it’s your political mess to clean up.
Mayor Daley also gave Burnett a political awakening, when he declined to support Jesse White in his bid for Secretary of State despite what Burnett saw as White’s longtime loyalty to Daley. “That just blew my mind,” he says. When Illinois speaker Mike Madigan also failed to support White, Burnett says he walked up to Madigan and said, “You should support Jesse, and he’s going to win.”
Of course, it’s unlikely that Burnett will never cross White or Dunne. The three still have dinner every Monday night and both White and Dunne say they’ve never had a single disagreement with the alderman. “We have never had a heated discussion—we have not come close to having one,” White says.
But a conflict is emerging that may cause Burnett lots of heated discussions in coming weeks and months: Affordable housing is the most controversial issue both in his ward and the most charged topic in the black aldermanic caucus.
The issue is walking through the front door of his Chicago Avenue aldermanic office in the form of an endless line of poor and middle class people who can’t find proper housing—and who he can’t help. “It’s just killing me, man,” Burnett says, ticking off example after example of poor and middle-income Hispanics, whites, blacks and senior citizens coming into his office in need of housing.
With fewer public housing units in his ward he has no answers for these people.
“I can handle one or two, but when they just keep coming, I’m wondering, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Most people on the front lines of housing say Burnett is emerging as a leader on the issue—both in practice and in the public debate.
In his ward, he insists that developers devote significant percentages of their properties to affordable, and in some cases, to Chicago Housing Authority-subsidized units. Those percentages are variable and negotiable, but Burnett says he drives a hard bargain.
Affordable housing advocate Kevin Jackson agrees. The director of the Chicago Rehab Network, says Burnett’s leadership on housing is “noteworthy. It would be good if other alderman would model his effort” on projects like the condo redevelopment of the Montgomery Ward building on Chicago Ave. “He made sure people got affordable housing in what was a very complex deal,” said Jackson, adding that “it would be good if other aldermen model his effort.”
Ethan Michaeli is publisher of the Residents Journal, a publication by and for increasingly angry residents of public housing. Michaeli cites Burnett’s ability to make a deal with Dominick’s several years ago. When the grocery chain wanted to put a store near Cabrini Green in anticipation of posh condo developments planned for the area, Burnett helped fashion an arrangement that put 300 Cabrini residents to work at the store and included city funds to train the workers. “Dominick’s didn’t do that out of the kindness of its heart,” Michaeli says.
“Burnett is not someone who’s going to take a stand,” Michaeli adds. “He’s not going to make trouble for the mayor, residents, developers, or anybody.”
Ah, but he might.
He’s already becoming an increasingly loud voice in the movement toward the “set-aside” ordinance that would require 25 percent of units in all large residential developments to be designated for affordable housing. Mayor Daley favors a voluntary set-aside program, but the housing activists are not backing down.
Burnett is “a real stand-up guy” on this issue, says 4th-Ward alderman Toni Preckwinkle, who’s driving the ordinance with the support of activist organizations like Jackson’s Chicago Rehab Network. She says Burnett has attended every strategy session and it’s clear to her that affordable housing “is dear to his heart.”
Burnett says he owes his passion to the fact that he grew up in public housing and his mother lived in Cabrini long after he left. “I can’t look my mama in the face if I don’t do the right thing on this one,” he says.
He thinks this housing issue might come down to a real fight with the mayor: “Misery loves company and people are gonna rise up. That’s how revolutions start.”
Tough talk; but can the great compromiser stand and fight? “If I feel God is on my side—when I feel like I’m doing the right thing—I have no fear,” Burnett says, adding that on the occasions when he does put his foot down, “this generally turns out well.”
Burnett leans on his religion when he contemplates crossing Daley: “The only person I’m afraid of is God,” he says. “The mayor is just another man.”
Burnett’s wife Darlena doesn’t doubt the courage of her man. Darlena, who also happens to be in government, as the deputy director of the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. “He likes to win battles by not having to go to battle,” she says. “But he has no problem going to battle.”
In time comes change, with change comes time
It’s a time for a change in my life, thinks ain’t the same in my life
I took the pain in my life and made a plan
When you look at my life, you see the life of a changed man
What’s next for Burnett? His political godfather Jesse White says he wants to be the “best alderman in the history of the City Council.”
But Burnett says he doesn’t want to be an alderman the rest of his life, and many see bigger offices in his future.
The first thing Burnett will have to do if he wants to reach higher office is “to get tougher, play harder,” Ethan Michaeli says. “You have to make some big decisions, you have to take positions and grow beyond the organization that brought you up.”
Michaeli points out that it took White a long time to emerge from Dunne’s organization. “Is Burnett going to wait until he’s 62 to move on?”
Danny Davis doubts it. Davis, whose U.S. House seat some believe Burnett is gunning for, guesses that the alderman goes by the Boy Scout creed: “Always be prepared. Whenever opportunity comes along, he’ll be ready,” Davis chuckles.
What about mayor of Chicago? “Every alderman has thought about running for mayor,” Burnett says. And he’s no exception? “No.”
His eventual ascendance from the City Council may largely depend on how he conducts himself on this housing ordinance and other controversial issues that come up during his next term. If he shows some independence and puts forth his own political vision, Burnett’s star could rise far. He’s still young, and his energy seems limitless.
But if he winds up settling for more quiet deals with Daley, you have to wonder whether this longtime yes man—or any of his colleagues in City Council, for that matter—will ever say no.
–30–
Postscript, 2024: If this were a school reading, the annoying questions at the end might be:
Is it useful, in a democracy, to try to understand the lives of political leaders?
Is it helpful to explore how a political system influences the people who work in it—and vice-versa?
And how (in the fuck, kids) do you think the author of “Yes Man” felt when the very same Chicago Reader ran a long, rather echo-y cover piece in 2012 titled, “The Making of an Alderman: Anyone who really wants to understand how Chicago works needs to understand Walter Burnett, Jr.”
Leave a Reply