What does “off the record” mean?
My understanding is, it means you aren’t going to quote someone. That whatever conversation you have is only meant to improve your understanding of a situation. Or person. Otherwise, what would be the point of ever having an off-the-record conversation?
Still, even though I’ve been in this business 40 years, I don’t traffic in hard news much, and there are details of the off-the-record tradition I’m uncertain about. Can you even say the conversation occurred? That 45 minutes were spent sitting in a certain office on the 5th floor of City Hall last Halloween, talking to a particular elected official who, shall we say, didn’t have the best week? I believe I can.
Can I mention what I said? I wasn’t off the record. I made some suggestions. How about talking about the challenge of being a mother while running one of the largest cities in the United States? “It might humanize you,” is what I actually said. Tact, not my strong suit. I prefer to think of it as being blunt.
Officials sometimes try to slip a shiv, anonymously, into their adversaries without leaving any fingerprints. “A high city official said...” It’s also a fig leaf for the frightened. If you don’t trust yourself, or anyone else, or if you are so thin-skinned you can’t risk that anything you say that might be held in an unflattering light.
Elected officials are sometimes torn between seeking the attention they crave and receiving the scrutiny they shun.
Rahm Emanuel once invited me to ride Divvy bikes around Logan Square. Also off the record. At first. As we pedaled randomly around the broad boulevards, I argued with him. “You’re killing me here,” I said. “I’m trying to make a living.” A living helped by the illusion of having access to people and places that readers don’t. You can’t go bike riding with Rahm (and, quite honestly, you don’t want to — trust me). But I can and this is what it is like. He saw the solid Midwestern good sense in that argument and agreed to let me write about it. Resulting in not the most earth-shattering story, true. None of mine are. But it got in the paper and solved my quotidian dilemma for another day.
I told her the Rahm story, as a hint. But this individual would not be so easily persuaded. I had brought my new book, marked to the page presenting her election as a noteworthy occurrence in city history, alongside Fermi splitting the atom and the Great Chicago Fire. See? Friendly. I won’t bite. Talk to me.
She was having none of it. So I can’t tell you what she said in nearly an hour. None of it was memorable. Some politicians could utter a phrase so piquant, you didn’t have to write it down. “Rahm Emanuel thinks you’re stupid,” Chicago Teachers Union head Karen Lewis once told me — not referring to me in particular, though I’m sure that was the case. But to all people in general. He had, shall we say, an elevated sense of himself. Politicians tend to.
I don’t want to suggest any candidate failed to win election because she wouldn’t chat with me for publication. I was only one dot in a garish Seurat pointillist mural of alienation and offense. But I don’t buy the easy crime-is-up explanation for Tuesday’s drubbing. There were 922 murders in Chicago in 1991. Richard M. Daley was reelected with 70% of the vote. And he wasn’t Mr. Personality either.
I used to say trying to get to know Daley was like trying to peel a ball bearing with your thumbnail. There is some of that at work here. Nevertheless, I liked her, or tried to — we both grew up in Ohio, about the same time, less than 50 miles apart. Maybe that explains the unjustified affection.
Living just west of Cleveland, I saw, close up, a series of astoundingly mediocre mayors: Ralph J. Perk, Nixonian in his baggy gray suits, setting his own hair on fire with an acetylene torch he was using to the cut the ribbon at a factory. Dennis Kucinich, another diminutive person, a freckled Howdy Doody puppet of a man, scorned by schoolchildren. Maybe I was raised to expect a certain flailing fecklessness in municipal leadership.
Before I was ushered out the door, I asked if I could take her picture. She agreed. The photo is on the record, and I think it shows her as she is: skeptical, aloof, slightly amused perhaps. She tried her best. We’ve had worse, and might again. We may come to miss her.
