Picking Up the Pieces

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Indeed, despite his longstanding disdain for Boss Daley's lockstep army, Washington stressed that building coalitions has always been his political style. "I reach out to people," he said last week. "There will be no exclusions." He has already shown that he can seek accommodation with the city's conservative business elite by placing many corporate leaders on his transition team. "When the dust settles, Chicago's standing will not be impaired," promises James O'Connor, chairman of Commonwealth Edison and co-chairman of the transition group.

To govern effectively, Washington must mend fences with the city bureaucracy, which is composed mostly of machine loyalists. He will also have to make peace with the police department; many officers openly worked for Epton and the chief, under bitter attack from Washington, announced his resignation a week before the election. By declaring during during the campaign that taxes would have to be increased, Washington has allowed himself room to tackle Chicago's growing financial problems, that is if he can get the necessary support from the city council. For all his talk of conciliation, the mayor-elect quickly served notice that he concerns of his black constituents would not be neglected. He announced plans to push for he construction of low-income housing, a bugbear in the city's white neighborhoods.

Washington's win had important implications for the relations between blacks and the national Democratic Party. His candidacy represented the growing desire of blacks to share more of the power in the party that they have loyally supported for the past 50 years. Washington made the point when he announced his candidacy last November: "We've been giving white candidates our votes for years and years and years unstintingly, hoping they would include us in the process. Now it's come to the point where we say, 'Well, it's our turn, it's our turn.' " Jesse Jackson said the same thing more vividly after Washington's victory. "Blacks are like the Harlem Globetrotters in the Democratic Party," he told a press conference. "We provide the excitement, the soul, the margin of victory. But all the proprietors in the other room are white. That arrangement must change."

Jackson has been promoting the idea that a black should seek the Democratic nomination in 1984. (He seems to have himself in mind.) Although a black would stand virtually no chance of getting the nomination next year, Gary, Ind., Mayor Richard Hatcher argues that "winning is not the only reason to run." A working paper by the Joint Center for Political Studies, a black-run think tank in Washington, cites several advantages: giving prominence to issues of concern to blacks, increasing black voter registration and providing a bloc of delegates that could play an important role at the Democratic convention.

But the paper notes the disadvantages of a black candidacy. It could draw support from viable liberal candidates sympathetic to blacks, intensify racial polarization among voters and even lead to an embarrassingly small show of strength. For these reasons, many black leaders, including Mayors Andrew Young of Atlanta and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, oppose the idea. The election of Washington, many argue, worked to mitigate the need to challenge the Democratic Party power structure.