As David Orr was leaving his May 24 fund-raiser at Michael Jordan’s Restaurant, a young, somewhat paunchy man came up to him and said, “Mr. Orr, I’m a city policeman. I work here on my days off, and I want you to know that if you’ll run for mayor you’ll have 40,000 city employees behind you. I just wanted to tell you that. I hope you’ll run.” Orr shook the policeman’s hand, thanked him, and then he said, “I hear that all the time, every time I walk down the street, every time I get in a cab, every meeting I go to.”
When Orr says, as he does often, “You have to view government as community, where real power comes from the community, and you have to encourage the participation of communities in the process of governing,” the typical Chicago cynic is tempted to ask, “What is all this idealistic bullshit?” But then one is confronted with examples of Orr practicing what he preaches. He says, “I think people want basic fairness. I believe that you can build community support and win with it and then govern with it. Not the old political clout, but community clout. People are tired of hearing stories about how the machine got this or that soft job for their neighbors and how they only have to work half the time while their communities are in tatters. I’ve proved that you can win by building support in the community that is honest and reflects real grass-roots work.”
Orr has made more of the obscure office of county clerk than any clerk before him. His series of reform measures began with his first day in office, when he set out an ethics guide for his employees. Now he will decide by late summer whether to run for County Board president next year or wait another year and take on Mayor Daley.
“I would really like to believe that one could keep doing a good job in one’s office, could focus on doing a good job instead of always talking about politics. One of my weaknesses has always been that we [he and his 49th Ward political allies] didn’t spend enough time on politics. We’re so busy trying to provide services that perhaps we’re not as politically shrewd as we might be. But I have this highly traditional belief that the public rewards good work, not necessarily shrewd politics. So I’m going to continue to make changes here. By sometime late summer I’ll have to make a decision about what I’m going to do.”
Jack Quigley, a political strategist who was Orr’s press secretary until Orr asked him to begin planning the next race, says, “Everyone wants him to run for mayor, but the problem is that there is a real temptation to run for the County Board presidency, which is so eminently doable.”
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A serious consideration as Orr decides which race to enter is whether he can raise enough money to run successfully for mayor. Maverick that he is, Orr has never had access to the big money in town. “But that situation may have changed,” says political consultant Don Rose. “Since he won the clerk’s office so handily it looks like he’s a front-runner for president of the County Board, though running against Daley may still be something else. The real issue is that he would have the best shot anybody’s ever had against a Daley. David would get a tremendous amount of support from the black community based on history. He took Washington-like support in the clerk’s race.”
