As President Obama was back in town Thursday, in part to raise millions of dollars, Rickey R. Hendon, a k a Hollywood Hendon, was surely green with envy.
The qualms of Mr. Hendon, the West Side state senator, about his onetime colleague have been thinly veiled and are now memorialized in his unbridled political primer, “Backstabbers: The Reality of Politics.”
“A wannabe will usually try to form a clique within your organization, a small group of people who band together against you,” wrote Mr. Hendon, a Democrat who besides a life in politics also fancies himself a musician-filmmaker. “There was a time when President Barack Obama was a part of Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer’s organization.”
“She got kicked off the ballot by members of that organization, and Obama became their candidate,” he wrote. “The rest is history. I know Senator Palmer, and I know she feels as if someone stabbed her in the back.”
Well, Mr. Obama gets treated just a tad more charitably than Emil Jones, the former State Senate president, of whom Mr. Hendon wrote, “He stabbed me in the back on the way out the door, after my years of loyalty.” Or Maria Pappas, the Cook County treasurer, whose first campaign Mr. Hendon ran. He wrote that she “dropped me and many of her close friends as soon as she won” the treasurer job.
Or Senator Roland W. Burris, whom Mr. Hendon said let him down more than anyone else when Mr. Burris did not support him for lieutenant governor in the Democratic primary in February, which was won, briefly, by Scott Lee Cohen. Or an unnamed Hispanic political organization that “played games and did not help me” in the primary.
But those are mere asides in a street-level, how-to guide by an author as hot and raucous as Mr. Obama is cool and restrained. Mr. Hendon’s world is all tactics, scant policy and driven by all-consuming suspicions and a craving to bring home the pork.
His credo is that one has no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.
“Watch those whom you trust, including even your family and friends,” he wrote. It’s shaft or be shafted, a somewhat less aspirational notion than what took Mr. Obama to the White House.
Mr. Hendon’s book provides local political wannabes with a tour d’horizon of the game, at least as played in his neck of the woods, including pages of dos and don’ts of petition drives. For example, it advises aspiring candidates to personally double check that their petition circulators aren’t producing “garbage.”
There are tips on the best places for billboards and posters; on rehearsing for debates in front of a mirror but not feeling compelled to answer a moderator’s questions; on using low-cost buffets for fund-raisers rather than pricey sit-downs; and on how to uncover “saboteurs” and “informants” in your organization.
When it comes to a politician’s most important moment — Election Day — the stylistic devotee of the upper case urges candidates not only to “GRAB SOME LAST MINUTE CASH” to have on hand, but also to be wily in procuring the favor of election judges, especially in a close race.
“If you’re in a situation where you must do these kinds of things, remember that men will let their guard down with attractive women, especially if the woman flirts with him and pretends to like him.”
No one, certainly not any board of elections, can be trusted. “IF THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH CHEATING YOU, THEY WILL CHEAT YOU,” Mr. Hendon wrote.
Published by Academy Chicago Publishers, the book concludes with a self-pitying passage in which Mr. Hendon calls his February loss the day “my political life ended.” But he is serving out his State Senate term and may well run for re-election, “to protect my district from the vultures who lie in wait for my political carcass.”
His unfettered rhetoric is in sync with a man who once asked a female colleague on the Senate floor if she was a “true blonde.” His West Side office is festooned with giant blow-ups of state checks he has arranged for churches, businesses and individuals.
If only it had been him, not Mr. Obama, to have soared from the muck of the state legislature, imagine a different course for America — or just the parceling out of federal stimulus dollars.
One can imagine a President Hendon, “Hollywood” style, repaving every street in the Fifth District and proudly buying a Cadillac Escalade for each of his old precinct workers — though not necessarily in that order.
this is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in Illinois politics. You would think Mr. Hendon would put others first before himself. Its so sad that this is not the way that public service is perceived any more.