A former campaign manager for retiring Mayor Richard M. Daley and mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel has formed a new political action committee with the purpose of “heavily participating” in the Feb. 22 City Council elections, according to the group’s website.
Greg Goldner, who worked as campaign manager for Daley in 2003 and Emanuel’s first congressional campaign in 2002, is listed as the chairman of the new For A Better Chicago PAC, according to documents filed Friday with state elections officials.
Shortly after the Chicago News Cooperative attempted to reach Goldner on Monday, For a Better Chicago issued a news release announcing its formation and claiming that it has raised $1 million in donations. In the statement, Goldner said the group is in the process of deciding which candidates to endorse.
According to the statement, the group will promote candidates “who are prepared to make ‘the difficult decisions’ needed for sustainable improvement in the areas of education, economic development and job growth, and efficiency and transparency in city government.”
The effort appears to be an attempt to counter the enormous participation in local politics of organized labor, which was the biggest campaign donor by far in the 2007 council election. Goldner said For a Better Chicago would provide its endorsed candidates with “direct mail, survey research, voter education and get-out-the-vote efforts in wards throughout the city.”
Goldner is the chief executive officer of Resolute Consulting, a political consulting firm that worked with the now-defunct Hispanic Democratic Organization. Other Resolute employees are listed as officers of For A Better Chicago, including Rob Nash, a former director of government relations for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, and David Smolensky, whose LinkedIn page states he played a “critical role” in Daley’s public-education initiative Renaissance 2010, which is fiercely opposed by the Chicago Teachers Union because it closes down public schools and reopens them as charter schools.
Jerry Roper, the head of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said he’s aware of For A Better Chicago.
“We’re communicating with them but that is not our organization,” Roper told the CNC on Monday.
A three-part candidate questionnaire for the Feb. 22 municipal election can be found on the group’s website, and much of it focuses on issues that have divided labor and business interests. Under the “Economic Development and Job Creation” section, candidates are asked about their stances on tax-increment finance districts, new work rules at the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority that have been opposed by unions and the plan to expand O’Hare International Airport. Candidates also are asked in the “Government Operations, Budgeting & Transparency” section about their views on public-private partnerships, and in the “Education” section, candidates are asked about the closure of under-performing schools.
In 2007, a committee with close ties to Daley emerged shortly before the council election. That group, called the First C.D. Victory Fund, attracted donations from the business community and dispensed hundreds of thousands of dollars to sympathetic aldermen. But the group was not able to match labor’s expenditures, and several of its endorsed candidates fell to union-backed opponents.
Dan Mihalopoulos contributed reporting.
Rahm is the only candidate on the Democratic side to acknowledge the reality that our current pension system is bankrupt. Good for him!