There’s one kind of intelligence that doesn’t make these lists, however, even though it seems to me as real as any of them. I’m talking about political intelligence. It can be slippery to pin down, but the more you think about it, the more you have to concede that there’s something to it.
Leaders can have political intelligence without being articulate, well-read, mathematically skillful or even especially self-aware. There are all sorts of modern examples.
Dwight Eisenhower, who never saw a battle in his life, orchestrated a magnificent political achievement on D-Day by melding dozens of feuding personalities and stubborn egos into a solid fighting unit. Fiorello LaGuardia possessed an uncanny instinct for coalition-building that enabled him to serve three improbably productive terms as mayor of a Depression-wracked and war-torn New York City.
More recently, Ronald Reagan reached the pinnacle of American politics, and largely thrived there, without demonstrating any of Howard Gardner’s versions of intelligence except perhaps the one Gardner labelled as “interpersonal,” reflecting an ability to appreciate what others are thinking. Reagan may have had that, but I’m more comfortable narrowing his gifts as a distinctive form of political intelligence.
On the local level, I would cite Thomas Menino, the long-serving mayor of Boston, who was so inarticulate and tongue-tied that critics derided him as not being very bright. But politically, Menino was smarter than any of them, and he achieved an economic and cultural revival that made him the most accomplished mayor of his city in modern times.
Conversely, there have been political leaders who would have scored high on Gardner’s checklist but seemed lost at persuading others or getting a program enacted. President John Quincy Adams was Exhibit A in this department. In much more recent times, and admittedly more controversially, I would place President Jimmy Carter on the same list.
I think we can agree that there is such a thing as political intelligence. But what does it consist of? Let me throw out a few nominations. Political intelligence demands the quality of anticipation — the ability to think several moves ahead while others are stuck in the same place. It involves the skill of reading others when they aren’t communicating their intentions directly. It often requires a certain kind of audacity — the prescience to pursue and succeed with tactics that others consider too risky. And on top of these, it seems to demand a certain balance, an instinct for knowing just how far one can go.
I THOUGHT ABOUT ALL THESE THINGS as I read The Daley Show, Forrest Claypool’s incisive account of Chicago’s Richard M. Daley, the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history, and also found myself pondering the career of his father, Richard J. Daley, who served nearly as long and just as commandingly. Claypool was a longtime aide to the younger Daley, but he’s an even-handed student of Chicago politics. Both Daleys had their flaws, as just about everyone knows and Claypool concedes, but if there is such a thing as political intelligence, there’s no disputing that both of them had it.
University of Illinois Press
Richard J. Daley has rarely been portrayed as a political visionary, but he thought clearly about what needed to be done on the routine governmental side to keep his regime in power. Daley is often derided for his declaration that “good government is good politics,” but he meant it, and he understood better than most other politicians that it was the mundane operations of his regime — picking up the trash, responding efficiently to emergency calls, keeping the neighborhoods safe, operating a functional transit system — that mattered more than grandiose visions of the city’s future.
All of these everyday operations were made possible by a quasi-feudal network of machine-loyal precinct captains and dictatorial, payoff-collecting ward committeemen, but it was the results on the street that mattered to the residents, and Daley was able to manage these so well that when he referred to Chicago as “the city that works,” he was believed not only on his own turf but in the nation’s media as well.
When it came to corruption, the elder Daley demonstrated another crucial element of political intelligence — the need for balance and restraint. Daley’s achievement of the physical rejuvenation of downtown Chicago was accomplished through quasi-legal contracting subsidies, grants, waivers and special permissions for political favorites, but he also knew that overreaching by any of these allies could bring the whole regime into disrepute, and he let his cronies go only so far and no further. “I let them take so much but no more,” he once told an associate. Daley believed that an effective local government, at least in Chicago, was dependent to a great degree on the tolerance of misbehavior, but he knew when to stop it. He was a manager of malfeasance. This was a lesson that many ambitious mayors and governors never seem to learn. It was perhaps the senior Daley’s most striking demonstration of political intelligence.
WHEN RICHARD M. “RICH” DALEY BECAME MAYOR, 13 years after the senior Daley’s death, it was commonly said that he was his father’s equal when it came to verbal clumsiness but was no match for him in ordinary political smarts. The Wall Street Journal quoted a seasoned observer of Chicago politics saying that the younger Daley was “dumb as a box of rocks.” Perhaps there have been more erroneous judgments of an American politician in modern times, but if there are I don’t know of any.
What the younger Daley possessed most of all was a preternatural ability to pursue policies whose long-term benefits many of those around him thought questionable. The most dramatic was his determination to build a public park over defunct railroad tracks south of downtown. Millennium Park was a half-billion-dollar gamble, but it not only paid for itself but became a civic icon and global tourist attraction, almost an Eiffel Tower of the American Midwest. In the first six months after its opening in 2004, it attracted more than two million visitors. After 10 years, it had generated visitor spending of more than $2 billion.
Perhaps the most eventful political strategy of Daley’s long tenure was his careful cultivation of a Hispanic political base. Chicago was divided roughly in thirds among Black, white and Hispanic residents, and Daley began his first term as a figure of suspicion in the Black community, having succeeded an African American mayor. But he quickly grasped that if he could attract sufficient Hispanic support, he wouldn’t be vulnerable to a Black challenger. That was the genesis of the Hispanic Democratic Organization, which Claypool describes as “the most powerful political arm of Daley’s new machine.”
MUCH OF WHAT DALEY DID REFLECTED HIS SHEER AUDACITY. When earlier school reform plans produced meager achievements, he took over the school system himself. Looking to rejuvenate neighborhoods that had fallen into decline, he saw the benefits of massive tax increment financing (TIF) schemes when others did not. It’s plausible to argue that Daley’s heavy deployment of TIFs went too far and contributed to the financial problems that grew worse toward the end of his reign. But it’s unarguable that they transformed much of the city, and most of the communities they transformed were healthier when Daley left office.
It’s only fair to point out that superior political intelligence can overreach itself, and Claypool is careful to document some of the excesses and failings that Daley’s overconfidence generated. When he wanted to build a park on the site of a small, privately used downtown airport, he had the airport demolished in the middle of the night without any real legal authority. When an embarrassing scandal emerged in the public truck leasing system, he was reluctant to do anything about it. When the city’s budget deficit grew unmanageable in his last term, Daley negotiated a sale of the city’s parking meters to a private company that ended up costing Chicago hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those are important lessons. No matter how much political intelligence a leader possesses, in the end he or she sometimes forgets the need for balance and assumes it’s possible to get away with almost anything. Rich Daley succumbed to that. But if you look at the city he inherited in 1989 and the one he left in 2011, I think you have to conclude that Chicago was better off as a result of his six terms in power. That’s what Claypool believes. “Daley’s errors and misjudgments,” he writes, “should not diminish what was a momentously transformative mayoralty, one that not only reversed the fortunes of a great city but also provides a template for future urban leaders.” That seems a fair appraisal.
