How Blago Made My Novel a True Story

Newscom The author of Windy City, the bestselling satirical novel about Chicago politics, on why Blagojevich’s wiseguy politician’s linguistics might just save him from prosecution. Plus: An excerpt from the book.

My novel Windy City (Random House: 2008) opens with the mayor of Chicago assassinated by a pizza (deep dish, artichoke, and prosciutto, to signal that this is today’s Chicago, not Al Capone’s old town). Over the course of the story, there are sting operations, sex scandals, bribes and a suicide.

I would have drawn the line at having a governor try to sell a Senate seat, as if he was hawking a stolen widescreen TV from the back of a truck. In these days of email surveillance, wiretaps, and the 24-hour news cycle, who would believe such a thing?

“Crafting dialogue between politicians entails aping the euphemisms by which they so often communicate. This is because coarse entreaties are considered unnecessary and unsophisticated—or, as one of my characters puts it, ‘like asking for a blow job over the breadbasket.’ ”

I can’t say my novel was prescient about political corruption, Chicago-style, any more than Robert Penn Warren’s All The Kings Men prophesied corruption in Louisiana—or that Mario Puzzo’s The Godfather predicted the rise of La Cosa Nostra. But ever since US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald unveiled his case against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, my novel has been cited as a primer on how Chicago politics is played.

I’ve been repeatedly asked whether any particulars of the Blago scandal reflect directly on President-elect Obama, who was schooled in Chicago’s tough politics. The short answer is no. The more complete answer is: No, but. The president-elect sounds so high-minded that you can easily forget his roots are in the nitty-gritty of big city politics (a trait he shares, perhaps, with big city Boston’s John F. Kennedy).

Obama’s enthusiasm for reform is global, not local. He has aligned himself with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, while Blagojevich came to office courtesy of his father-in-law, Alderman Richard Mell, head of a city council faction that has co-existed with the Daley brothers while openly resenting the political fortune conferred by their name.

Rich and Bill Daley supported Obama for senator, president, and, in 2000, for congress against Bobby Rush just months after Rush had lost to Daley in the Democratic primary for mayor. Obama has returned their favors. If Mayor Daley runs for re-election for a seventh term in 2011, don’t expect Obama to endorse some reformer who doubts the mayor’s integrity because four of his top aides have recently been convicted of rigging hiring and promotion of city officials.

In politics, like figure skating, you get points for style. If Blagojevich had appointed someone President-elect Obama favored to fill his seat, my Chicago political sense tells me that Obama—who is surrounded by former top aides to Mayor Daley—would not need any vulgar reminders he owed a favor to the governor. He would quietly make certain that a bridge in Rockford got resurfaced with federal funds. He might invite the governor to hear Bruce Springsteen at a state dinner, or to sit near Scarlett Johansson at the National Prayer Breakfast.