An AP story, which is getting picked up all over the place, about Obama’s controversial endorsements of Mayor Daley and Rod Blagojevich ends this way…
Obama‘s decision to support Daley turned off voter Alan Dobry, who‘s part of a Chicago independent-voters group.
“He‘s trying to play with the machine,” Dobry said. “I‘m very unhappy about it.”
They had to dig pretty deep to find that guy. Dobry is not just a “voter,” he’s kind of an infamous former Democratic ward committeeman from Hyde Parke. He has been affiliated with IVI-IPO over the years, but he’s not on the board these days.
Chicago Politics Ward by Ward (1988) has a brief passage on Dobry, who goes back to the old days of fighting Richard J. Daley…
Many of Dobry’s ideas are not shared by his peers on the Democratic Central Committee. For example, he does not bother to maintain a ward office, out of the belief that the alderman is the people’s elected legislative representative and thus the one to whom residents should take their problems.
From what I’ve read and can remember, he sounds like your typical old school, Daley-hating Hyde Park independent liberal. This passage is from Bitter Fruit: Black politics and the Chicago machine (1992)…
Thus, when the Machine’s slatemakers came together, only one of the fifty committeemen supported [Harold Washington over Jane Byrne and Rich Daley], and that was the white committeeman of the Fifth Ward, Alan Dobry.
But Paul Green wrote an illuminating piece about Dobry for Illinois Issues back in 1991…
Their [Tim Evans vs. Toni Preckwinkle 4th Ward] runoff was considered a toss-up until the last week of the campaign. Then came the heat. An Evans worker spotted Alan Dobry, a Preckwinkle volunteer and Democratic committeeman from the neighborhing 5th Ward, posting some racist and anti-semitic pro-Evans flyers in a heavily Jewish Hyde Park neighborhood. The crudely lettered flyers accused Preckwinkle of being part of a secret Mayor Richard M. Daley political plan because her husband is white and Jewish (Preckwinkle, like Evans, is black). Preckwinkle’s husband is white but not Jewish […]
Dobry claimed he was not guilty of dirty tricks. Rather he wanted to inform Hyde Parkers about the low level of Evans’ campaign.
He certainly had an interesting way of “informing voters.”
Even Rod Blagojevich doesn’t call himself a reformer any longer, having jumped neck-deep into patronage hiring and cronyism. But Dobry, who slams Obama for backing the current Mayor Daley, supported Gov. Blagojevich in the last go-around [also from an AP story]…
Blagojevich’s effort to energize the troops will pay off on election day, predicted compaign volunteer Alan Dobry of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. “They’ll stand out in the cold for an extra hour or so because they talked to the governor,” he said.
Like the man says, nobody’s got totally clean hands in that town. You touch it, you get dirty.
This is an Obama open thread.