What does a mayor elected by the people of Chicago have in common with a mayor chosen by the city’s 50 aldermen? Invitations. According to the man who has had the job of telling both mayors where to go, Eugene Sawyer gets as many invitations as Harold Washington ever did. How a mayor arrives in office is not an issue. Personality and policies don’t matter. It’s the office itself that accounts for offers to attend more events than the world’s most ambitious hand shaker could possibly accept.
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Not all requests come through the mail or over the phone. The mayor might tell several different people that he’ll attend their events, not knowing that they conflict with a gathering he can’t afford to miss. “The mayor can sometimes get invitations to ten different events on a Friday night between six and nine o’clock. All of them are crucial to the people involved. But you know sometimes you can’t make more than three or four of them. I might have six people that are saying, ‘Well, that Ed Hamb, he’s an asshole,’ but four might think I’m the greatest thing going since peanut butter.”
Hamb chairs the the Friday meetings in which top aides decide where their boss will go the next week. “You have to go through the groups and say which ones will best suit what we’re trying to accomplish,” he says. “The next time around you try to make it up to the people you tell no. Usually they say, ‘I don’t want him no more ever again.’ But the next time they have the event, there you see the letter again in the mail.”
“Mayor Washington always said, ‘If an alderman asks me to an event, try to get me there.’ Aldermen are busy enough themselves to understand that the mayor can’t come to every event. But in scheduling, you try to make sure that the mayor touches base with each ward at least two or three times a year, even in the communities where you don’t have much support. You try to make all the ethnic neighborhood festivals because you can get a lot of exposure, even if it’s just in community newspapers.”
Hamb raises his hand to an imaginary plateau above his head. “Harold Washington was in a class by himself,” he says. “Few elected officials anywhere are as articulate or flamboyant. Eugene Sawyer has an altogether different style. But the common denominator is a genuine concern for people.”
