There are many reasons for this situation. However, in those years, especially in the Reagan and Bush administrations greed became fashionable again. Companies dropped older employees because their salaries were said to be too high. They fired men and women just before they became eligible for pensions. They outsourced jobs to companies who paid substandard wages. They fought to destroy unions. They exported jobs overseas. They canceled pension programs to escape bankruptcy. They cut jobs when they had made serious mistakes, so they would be lean and mean—though they always had been mean. They closed American factories. They cut workers’ salaries but never their own. The top executives paid themselves exorbitant salaries that were unrelated to their success in leading the company. They called them golden parachutes. One man’s parachute was a hundred and forty million dollars, though the company’s stock went down twenty-five percent during his years in charge. They played all kinds of merger games which brought big gains to themselves but lost a lot of jobs for workers. All the time this was happening, the government did not try to stop them. Rather it encouraged them. The main villains are Big Oil, Big Pharmacy, and Big Insurance—all of which are gouging us day in and day out. It’s time to stop them. That means it’s time for a Democratic Congress again. This could be a turning point election, time to take government out of the hands of the rich and give it back to the people. It’s time for the government to stop supporting the haves and have-mores and become concerned about those who have less.
MEDIA: Tommy are you ashamed that you were Mr. Mom for a couple of years?
CANDIDATE: Why should I be? I liked it. I got to know my children better. They got to know me better. Poor dad was so hapless and helpless that they tried to make life easy for him. I think they liked Mr. Mom. Now even when they’re becoming teens they seem to like him too, which as you all know is against the rules.
MEDIA: Do you think all dads should be Mr. Mom for a couple of years?
CANDIDATE: I’m not prescribing for anyone but myself. It was the thing to do for us at that stage of our family life.
MEDIA: If you win will you continue to be Mr. Mom and a Senator?
CANDIDATE: No!
He didn’t say that he became Mr. Mom because his wife was prone to a PPS syndrome. I had to do it because of my crazy wife.
MEDIA: Don’t you think it’s wrong to use a foreign language in your campaign?
CANDIDATE: Spanish isn’t a foreign language. It was the language of vast sections of our country before English came along. Is it really a foreign language in Los Angeles, the city of Our Lady Queen of the Angels? Most Latino Americans don’t want a separate culture any more than did the Irish or German or Italian Americans. They don’t see a contradiction between being Americans and keeping alive the best of their heritages. I’ll talk to people in any language they know.
MEDIA: Isn’t the Mexican music inappropriate?
CANDIDATE: Those who aren’t Latinos seem to like it too.
This was our first big surprise in the campaign. The mostly “anglo” audiences in the suburbs wanted the mariachi band. They would join in the singing with the Latinos in the crowds. We had to buy Mexican dresses and sombreros for our daughters. The winter winds kept stealing the hats.
That phase of the campaign was dense with good will and excitement. We were having a good time and so were our crowds. We ignored the Examiner just as Rodgers Crispjin ignored us.
Tommy and I found ourselves deeply in love again. It was the first time since the Law Journal that we had worked together. We didn’t need the Bushmill’s to find the right mood at the end of the day.
I was dragged before the TV camera to defend myself against the charge of exploiting our three beautiful daughters.
TV: Don’t you think people flock to your husband’s rallies so they can ogle four beautiful red-headed women?
MARY MARGARET: In the middle of winter? They could watch Kirsten Dunst on DVD in the Spider-Man films.
TV: Did you take your family to that resort in Mexico every summer because you knew you were going to run for office?
MARY MARGARET: No. My husband felt that it would be good for our kids to learn about another language and culture … And it wasn’t a resort. It was a small bungalow.
TV: Didn’t your children resent losing their summers?
MARY MARAGARET (laughter): My kids are adventurers. They love Hermosillo. We’d put it to a vote every year and it was always unanimous.
The trickiest of Tommy’s talks was the one aimed especially at the Latinos. He had to praise them without seeming to pander.
Every immigrant group has made an important and unique contribution to the country. I for one am fed up with the stereotype that the bigots today use to attack new Mexican immigrants who are trying to improve the lives of their families just like the rest of us once did. We hear nothing about the long-lasting Mexican contribution to American culture—the names of cities, the mission churches, the art, the music, even the sombreros which my daughters have a hard time protecting from the winds.
I never hear these bigots acknowledge that Mexican Americans are hard workers, that they have a strong family life, excellent health, and a deep religious faith which influences everything they do. If I’m elected to the Senate I will try to bring an end to the senseless immigration policies which kill so many men, women, and children in the desert. This slaughter has to stop. It was once said of my ancestors that they could never become really good Americans. They drank too much, they were lazy, they were shiftless. Well, that wasn’t true. The same things are said against Mexican Americans today. And they aren’t true now either! Finally there is a tremendous contribution that Mexicans are making to American life. Their religious faith emphasizes that God comes to Mexican families and celebrates their feasts with them. Our dour country needs more of that festivity and joy!
Then we’d segue into the mariachi, often expanded to include O’Malley cousins with horns and drums and even the good Rosie with her lovely voice. The crowds sang with us. The nice thing about Mexican music is that you can vocalize along with it even if you don’t know the words.
It all seemed to work reasonably well, dead of winter or not.
By the middle of March we were running on nervous energy. The primary came not one day too soon. Fortunately for us the snow storm held off till mid-evening.
We decided not to buy space in a hotel for a vote-counting party. The Moran basement was still our headquarters. The nine o’clock news on a Chicago channel reported an “upset victory” for our side. We had collected twenty-five thousand more votes in a virtually uncontested primary than Senator H. Rodgers Crispjin had piled up in his similar primary.
The anchor person was usually an airhead, but she was correct in her hasty analysis.
“It looks like Senator Crispjin has a horse race on his hands.”
Tommy and I walked out in the falling snow to face the two cameras which were waiting. He was coatless, as he always was.
“As Winston Churchill said after the battle of El Alamein, ‘It is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.’”
We walked back into the house, arm in arm.
Leander Schlenk dismissed the outcome in his commentary the next morning.
TOMMY’S “VICTORY” DOESN’T MEAN MUCH, POLS SAY
Veteran Chicago political observers discounted this morning the apparent “victory” in the primary beauty contest between househusband Tommy Moran and incumbent Senator H. Rodgers Crispjin. The Senator had remained in the national’s capital during the campaign while upstart Tommy campaigned vigorously, if not always tastefully. “The Senator’s campaign has not even begun,” one pol said. “When it does, he’ll bury Tommy.”
“He’s right,” Tommy said the following afternoon. “Now the negative ads start.”
“He may overkill,” Dolly suggested.
“I wonder how many readers believe Lee Schlenk,” Ric Suarez said. “Their circulation is way down.”
&n
bsp; “Our job is to keep pushing,” I suggested. “At least they know we’re around.”
Congratulations and promises of support poured in from Democratic leaders all over the state. No one liked Crispjin very much.
“OK,” Joe McDermott said, “we got a lot of votes from Cook County, but we did better than the Senator in the collar counties, especially DuPage. That’s the first time something like that happened. Dolly, why don’t you get a statement out on that.”
“I’ll do better that that. I’ll say it on the five o’clock news tonight.”
We decided we would rent a store front on Chicago Avenue, just down the street from Petersen’s Ice Cream, as our headquarters—in keeping with our style of a surplus store campaign. We would at last take a breather to get ready for the main campaign which would start Memorial Day.
“We’ll visit every county in the state,” Tommy promised. “Let’s begin with a big song festival in Grant Park—ethnic music: American, Polish, Italian, Irish, German, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican.”
“One from many,” Ric Sanchez agreed.
Tommy and I were supervising the work on the storefront the following week when a TV reporter caught us with the first poll.
“It shows Senator Crispjin 30 percentage points ahead of you, Tommy, 55 percent to 25 percent. Do you have any comment.”
“How large was the sample?”
“Four hundred and three voters interviewed by phone.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “He is after all an incumbent Senator running against an amateur. I’d comment that 55 percent is his maximum and 25 percent is my minimum. We’ll catch up.”
“Four hundred respondents,” I said, “isn’t very many.”
“It’s probably a good guess, however.”
He sat down under a huge picture of himself, surrounded by kids of all colors.
“Do you think the other side could be faking polls?” I asked.
“Bobby Bill is capable of that,” he agreed. “No one ever promised us a level playing field.”
The negative ads came like the deluge. Tommy househusband versus a real man. Tommy the demagogue against a great unifier. Inexperienced Tommy against the experienced and veteran Senator, whose previous job description was a real estate developer, but it was against the rules to say that.
We hunkered down and waited. I activated some more of our volunteers to compile phone lists for October and then went back to the firm.
We took the kids to Grand Beach for a winter weekend. They pummeled us with snowballs. The TV cameras which had invaded the village caught some wonderful pictures of the kids attacking us and then of the grinning little demons throwing snowballs at the camera person. They were smart enough not to hit her.
CHAPTER 11
WHILE I was away at the firm, we hired some veteran Illinois operatives to help us understand the various downstate. counties. Volunteers came pouring in. The negative ads tapered off because the Daily News and the TV stations were talking about overkill. A poll in early May showed that we had gained ten points and the Senator had lost six points—49 percent to 35 percent.
“We’ve cut his lead in half,” Tommy told the interviewers on Chicago Tonight, a PBS program. “We’re in striking distance. Frankly we’re closer than I had expected to be.”
“Tommy,” Lee Schlenk jumped in, “it isn’t true, is it, that you’ve gone back to being Mr. Mom during the lull in the campaign?”
I wanted to claw my way through the control room glass.
“I think it was known all along that Ms. O’Malley had a case before the Illinois Supreme Court during the spring session. She won it incidentally.”
“You don’t seem to show any sense of shame at taking a subordinate role in the family during a campaign. How do you think the voters will react to that?”
“Maybe they’ll understand that political candidates need to make ends meet.”
“Senator Crispjin has never been a house hubby. Won’t that give him an advantage over you in the election?”
“I made a promise that I would not discuss the Senator during the campaign. I will only say that for me every chance to spend some time with my daughters is a rewarding experience.”
A woman reporter from the Daily News asked, “Your children threw snowballs at a TV camerawoman at Grand Beach earlier in the year.”
“They didn’t hit her. They weren’t even trying to hit her as was clear from the tape.”
“Proving that they are smart politicians?”
“Proving that they are well-mannered young women who have been taught that the only people you can hit with snowballs are your parents.”
“Tommy,” a woman from the Chicago Defender asked, “is your wife a smarter lawyer than you are?”
My dear Tommy beamed at the question.
“The good Mary Margaret O’Malley is a brilliant and beautiful woman. We do different kinds of law, appellate versus criminal defense, so a comparison might not be fair to me. But whoever said fair. She is a much better lawyer than I am and I’m proud of her.”
Well! All right!
The host (male) asked, “Tommy, the accusation has been made that this festival of ethnic songs with which you’re launching your campaign is divisive and demagogic. What do you say to that?”
“It is really the opposite. We’re including every group we can find—including bluegrass and Yorkshire folk singers.”
“Come on, Tommy,” Lee Schlenk interrupted. “You’re including criminals who have invaded the United States across its borders.”
“Those criminals, as you call them, Mr. Schlenk, are human beings with the rights with which all humans are endowed. Moreover, most Mexican Americans are legally here and many are American citizens, just like you and me.”
The host cut Schlenk off and ended the interview.
“Do you think he believes all that crap?” I asked him in the control room.
“Who knows what he believes,” he said, embracing me, “and who cares as long as he keeps setting me up with those questions.”
“Thanks for the compliments,” I breathed, escaping his kisses.
“I didn’t say that criminal defense is a lot more difficult than standing before relatively civilized appellate court judges!”
“Beast,” I said returning to the kiss.
The other panel members congratulated him and wished him well during the campaign.
“You’ll catch him,” said the woman from the Daily News.
The ethnic festival and Grant Park was a huge success. There must have been fifty thousand people there in front of the old James C. Petrillo Band Shell, named after a “labor guy,” Tommy pointed out in his brief introduction. Several Mexican-American bands performed, proving that mariachi was not the only kind of Mexican music. Nonetheless the campaign band did perform with considerable verve, the full band backed up by assorted O’Malley cousins.
“These folks,” my husband informed the crowd, “are a thoroughly American phenomenon, made up of Mexican Americans and Irish Americans who have been seduced by mariachi.”
We outdid ourselves and the crowd screamed its approval. We had a lot of voters out there, most of them Chicagoans who would vote for a junkyard dog if he were a Democrat. Still there were great visuals which would appear in whatever ads we were able to pay for in late October.
Then something ominous happened as we were breaking up. The three girls had disappeared.
“Where are the kids, Tommy?
“I hear them screaming somewhere.”
The Chicago cops who were maintaining order heard the screaming too and pushed their way through the crowd. We followed right after them.
The scene we came upon was horrific—and bizarre. A woman, early thirties, was clutching our nine-year-old Mary Therese on the ground. She was screaming her lungs out. The child’s sisters, furies from another world, were punching the woman and pulling her off their little sister.
As we
and the police arrived, Mary Therese broke free and rushed into my arms.
“She tried to steal me, Mommy!”
“She kidnapped our little sister,” Mary Rose proclaimed to all around in her most dramatic voice as she pointed an outraged finger. “We stopped her.”
“Jesus told me to take her away from those terrible people,” the woman sobbed. “He said that she would be damned to hell if I didn’t take her.”
“I’m not going to hell, am I, Daddy?”
“God loves you too much to ever lose you, darling.”
The cameras were all around us. You can’t even have privacy in a kidnapping these days.
“Do you think, Tommy,” a woman reporter asked, “that this was a plot by the Senator to ruin your day for you?”
My husband needed a moment to compose himself.
“Of course not. I’m grateful to Chicago’s finest for their prompt reaction …”
“What about us?” Mary Ann demanded. “We found her.”
“I knew you would. But thank you too.”
The police took the woman off to their headquarters and an African-American woman detective led us to a dressing room off the stage of the band shell where we could regroup.
“She tore my pretty Mexican dress,” our little heroine protested.
“She was evil,” Mary Rose declared. “Mo-THER, sit down, you look terrible.”
I did sit down and realized that I was shaking.
“Do you have any bodyguards, Mr. Moran?”
He looked around.
The Senator and the Priest Page 8
