Right-wing Democrat Rahm Emanuel's rep hurt

The Chicago Tribune:

The long, stressful path to getting a contract in place offered a glimpse that Emanuel perhaps is not as multidimensional as he tries to appear. Repeatedly, the mayor turned to one tool: the attack.

That singular approach contributed to the first teachers strike in 25 years and served to heighten organized labor's suspicions of the new mayor, whose union bashing kept him from playing a hands-on role at the negotiating table.

On Friday, after spending more than a year attacking the teachers union, Emanuel sought to strike a conciliatory tone as word spread about the much-improved prospects for a deal.

The dialed-back rhetoric stands in contrast to what came before. Emanuel's argument for a longer school day and year started out as an accusation, not a conversation.

In building his case, the mayor said Chicago Public Schools teachers had regularly received pay raises, the city had labor peace and students got the shaft. Emanuel's contention, made last September shortly after his hand-picked school board took away half the teachers' previously negotiated raise, implied that educators were lazy, resistant to change and didn't have students' best interests in mind.

Emanuel treated the teachers negotiations as just another political campaign: Win the message of the week, then the month and ultimately the war. It's much the way Emanuel won other faceoffs with labor, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he passed for President Bill Clinton.

This battle was different. It was a collective bargaining agreement, not legislation. At some point, the two sides had to sign a deal.

Even in the midst of the strike, Emanuel couldn't resist his tendency to try to score political points in the rhetorical contest with the union.

Last week, he repeatedly compared Chicago's teacher union to its counterpart in Boston, which just resolved its own long-standing dispute. But Emanuel ran into a veracity problem.

"If we had a right to strike and we had to deal with such an obstructionist mayor as Mayor Emanuel, then we probably would have gone out on strike as well," said Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, who describes himself as a friend of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis. "Fortunately in Boston, we have a more collegial atmosphere."

Emanuel also suggested that the district's proposal would give Chicago teachers more money than educators in Boston. The mayor said Boston teachers accepted a 12 percent increase over six years while Chicago teachers were seeking 16 percent over four years.

Emanuel's math didn't take into account that Boston's contract also includes increases for teacher experience and education beyond the 12 percent.

Early into his tenure, Emanuel set out to make city workers the fall guy for Chicago's budget woes. He had slightly more political license to seek givebacks from labor because many of them did not back his candidacy and he was going after government workers when support for public sector unions had fallen to historic lows.

He's also made some city employees compete for their jobs with private industry in a battle to see which can provide existing services for less. Implicit in this strategy is the threat of cutting city jobs.

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