Chicago Tribune Editorial: Protecting Stroger

Chicago Tribune Editorial: Protecting Stroger
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
April 24, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0424edit1apr24,0,2813411.story


"What are the allegations that led to the firing of Donna Dunnings?"


-- Cook County Commissioner Tim Schneider, April 23, 2009

Cook County Board President Todd Stroger listened impassively Thursday as his top remaining aide said there has been "no misuse of county assets" related to the mysterious forced resignation of the county's chief financial officer. The irony: This whole ugly saga started with a blatant misuse of county assets: Stroger's capricious hiring -- with taxpayer dollars, but without a criminal background check -- of felonious steakhouse busboy Tony Cole. Last week's abrupt departure of CFO Donna Dunnings? If that was engineered to deflect attention from Stroger's hiring of a convict such as Cole without vetting his record, it didn't work.

On this crucial point, Stroger's operation looks worse than incompetent: Cole was hired last October, and the FBI and the Illinois State Police evidently delivered incriminating background checks to the county in November and December. Cole wasn't fired, for lying about his criminal past, until April. Why not do the checks before the hiring? A county personnel official told reporters Thursday that "in the war for talent," there just isn't time to check criminal records first. Right. It's not as if somebody big was cutting corners for Cole.

Stroger, who can't keep his stories straight, is the sole owner of the Cole scandal. And, each day Stroger doesn't come clean with a slow-walk recitation of facts and dates, the other machine Democrats on the County Board increasingly own . . . Stroger.

We don't know if the hapless Stroger understands that he's in the most perilous moment of his ill-starred tenure. Democratic committeemen slated him for board president in 2006 because he would sustain county government's two key missions: the employment of patronage workers in the thousands, and the awarding of insider contracts in the millions. His brazen, needless raising of the sales tax has yielded still more of the revenue flow that keeps this Chicago machine fortress standing erect.

Now it all could come tumbling down. Even before this latest scandal, we were writing about the Revolution of 2010 -- the likelihood that voters fed up with waste and corruption will use the next election cycle to clean house. More immediately: The County Board soon will debate whether to repeal Stroger's sales tax hike. Given the latest evidence of how Stroger has been squandering citizens' money, how many of the 17 board members will vote to keep all that revenue raining on him and his regime?

Many of Stroger's fellow Democrats do understand, and fear, the stakes here: They could lose everything.

That's why several of them tried Thursday to confine the County Board's discussion to a narrow topic: Yes, the CFO is gone, but county funds are safe. But when board members Schneider, Larry Suffredin and Tony Peraica tried to probe for details on Stroger's hiring of Cole and ousting of Dunnings, Finance Chairman John Daley and other Dem regulars cut them off. Two chronic Stroger loyalists, Joan Patricia Murphy and Deborah Sims, even tried in desperation to adjourn the meeting.

The obvious strategy: to protect Stroger as he stonewalls the public. These gambits rarely work. The full story of Cole's arrival and Dunnings' departure likely will come out. The sorriest aspect of Thursday's dodgeball was the failure of even one machine Democrat to urge Stroger to tell citizens the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Maybe Stroger will survive this episode, with his various explanations trailing behind him. But we could fill this page with questions Stroger hasn't answered and shows no signs of answering. We hope that County Board members keep pushing, and that Chicago reporters keep digging.

As the little calendar beneath this editorial attests, the Revolution of 2010 is fast approaching. There's a lot that voters still don't know about how Cole thrived in county government and how that led to Dunnings' departure. But those voters learn more every day about Stroger and the Democrats whose fate is increasingly lashed to his.