Surveying the crowd at the W City Center Hotel last Tuesday night, Todd Stroger held his head up high.
The now-deposed Cook County Board President smiled and laughed, relishing his cheering supporters.
They, he must have thought, got the message.
So few people in Cook County got the message that Stroger, the incumbent, was unceremoniously disposed of, threatening only Clerk of Court Dorothy Brown for a distant third place in the race for the Democratic nomination for County Board president.
His election bid was an uphill battle from the start. It would have taken a lot of work to undo the perception that he is a Machine stooge, incapable or unwilling to do away with sweetheart contracts and family ties. Or to focus attention on the county's balanced budget, and the programs that, under his watch, staved off 25,000 foreclosures.
Stroger had the talking points, and he hit them at every event.
But the campaign never succeeded in turning up the volume on that message to the point that average voters could hear it.
The campaign’s failures can be pinned in part to its minimal fundraising ability – it earned just $103,905 in the second half of 2009 and about $160,000 in 2010, helped by a $100,000 donation by former Illinois Senate President Emil Jones. Then there was the stinging lack of endorsements from Mayor Richard M. Daley and U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, who sided with Clerk of Court Dorothy Brown, who he said had the best chance of winning.
But its messaging arm never hit full stride, either.
For months after the campaigns of Democratic nominee Alderman Toni Preckwinkle and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District President Terrence O’Brien began using Facebook, Twitter and the granddaddy of them all, e-mail, to promote their candidacy, there was nothing from Stroger. At least nothing distributed to the media.
No word of campaign events, no promotion of the Stroger brand, no attacks on opponents. It was as if the campaign were operating in a vacuum.
It was January before the campaign was able to muster media alerts, though even they came sparingly, and not until late in the month before Stroger's commercials hit television airwaves.
When he did try to reach out to his foil, the press, it had forehead-slapping results, such as when he invited African-American reporters to his office to discuss his accomplishments and just didn't show up.
There were other gaffes, too. He failed to authoritatively denounce a series of racist fliers circulated by the unofficial campaign group Soldiers for Stroger. He ditched a candidate forum in November, evidently because he was upset at a Sun-Times story connecting efforts by the Brown and O’Brien campaigns to depose him.
Campaign milestones passed without much of an attempt to rally press coverage; I was the only reporter to attend an event where Rep. Bobby Rush endorsed Stroger. The event was attended by a vocal group of about 300 supporters, but even then it appeared the campaign was trying to appeal only to its base of ministers and community activists.
In another instance, his people sent out a press release promoting the passage of an immigration resolution he supported – five days after it happened.
When Stroger conceded to Preckwinkle Tuesday night, he told several dozen supporters, “Sometimes your message doesn't get out. Sometimes people don't see what's at stake.”
Indeed, the message apparently missed many of the voters in Stroger's own 8th Ward. He survived a scare, carrying it with 41 percent of the vote to Preckwinkle’s 36.
Last week, I reached out to Stroger’s campaign manager Vince Williams, and his chief publicist, Carla Oglesby to find out why the campaign had such a tough time building an effective messaging machine.
Neither returned my call.
Windy Citizen 