There are few places less hospitable on a Chicago winter morning than an “L” stop. But that’s where hundreds of thousands of us spend time and where candidates for political office occasionally show up, smiling and pressing the flesh and otherwise trying to coax our votes.
During his last campaign for mayor, Rahm Emanuel proudly claimed to have visited 110 “L” stops. He mentioned this in his victory speech in 2011. He added: “I know Chicago has a reputation for being windy and cold during the winter. But after meeting you at those (‘L’ stops) … I want people to know: Chicago is the warmest place in the world.”
Scott Jacobs might beg to differ. Emanuel may now beg to differ too, having been given a cold shoulder by the majority of those who voted Tuesday and thus been forced into an April 7 runoff election against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia to become mayor of the city. Both men, predictably, were doing the “L” thing Wednesday morning, and will be doing it again and again.
“It’s been pretty cold out there,” says Jacobs. “But I’ll still be out there as much as I can.”
Jacobs has been on many “L” platforms over the past few months, using a tiny video camera to catch the mayoral candidates in action, doing so on his own dime and out of his own curiosity. He has been cold but also passionately committed to offering insight into the ways politics really work.
“My aim wasn’t to delve deeply into the issues,” he says. “It was rather to produce short video pieces that might give people a sense of what I like to call ‘the texture of politics’ on the campaign trail. They’re all non-narrative and have a certain rough-hewn quality.”
That quality has made these videos not only fascinating but revelatory. In their raw and unscripted fashion they’ve been far more interesting than slick TV commercials or stay-on-point debates.
In prior video postings Jacobs gave us Bob Fioretti as he went, with admirable energy and enthusiasm, about an exhausting day that took him from an “L” stop to his 2nd Ward aldermanic office at City Hall to gatherings at the Merchandise Mart and a tavern. There was Willie Wilson at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally at the House of Hope in Pullman, displaying a terrific voice as he sang along with the gospel choir. William “Doc” Walls allowed Jacobs and his camera in a car with him as he traveled sorrowfully through his old South Side neighborhood, and as he stopped and talked to people at the Valois restaurant in Hyde Park and at a nearby gas station, and pulled over to help a woman who had fallen trying to make her way across an unplowed street.
Jacobs’ latest posting went up a few days ago and features Garcia and his wife, Evelyn, in their home on Valentine’s Day morning. She talks about how they met, their life together and his upcoming day, to be filled with 10 campaign stops. The video begins and ends with the couple kissing. (You can see these and others at gapersblock.com/mechanics.)
In that nine-minute episode, there is a glimpse of Emanuel at a black-tie event both he and Garcia attended. And, yes, elsewhere you do get an “L” glimpse or two of the mayor, and you can watch and hear in another segment Mary Naset, Emanuel’s digital director. But that’s it.
“I did try to get access to the mayor but there are so many layers to go through,” says Jacobs. “With the other candidates I just called or emailed and explained what I wanted to do and we’d make plans and in some cases I just showed up. But I couldn’t get to Rahm.”
Jacobs is not new to political games or campaign trails.
A child of suburban Milwaukee, he began his career as a reporter for The Milwaukee Sentinel, covering his first presidential campaign in 1972. He would come to Chicago to work for the Sun-Times but was soon seduced by the power of video. In 1975, he took a workshop in what was then a new technology. So inspired was he that he took a leave from the paper and hit the road with a Portapak, the bulky father of the VideoCam.
He would become a founder of Chicago’s Center for New Television and help create the long-running WTTW-Ch. 11 showcase “Image Union.” He was one of a group of videographers making documentaries for PBS special election coverage. In 1996 he began writing one of the first political columns on the Internet, when he served as the chief political correspondent of The Week Behind (theweekbehind.com); and he traveled and filed stories from the road during the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.
He did much of this using the nom de plume Stump Connolly, a rakish name that he charmingly describes as “an amalgam of that grizzled old reporter who’s been everywhere and seen everything and still gets up every morning to write a column, because that’s his job.”
He also has managed to produce documentaries for locally based Kurtis Productions and write articles for magazines. He published three campaign books — “Stump, a Campaign Journal” (1996), “Talk’s Cheap, Let’s Race!” (2004) and “The Long Slog: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House” (2008) — as well as a humorous and often wistful collection of essays, “Famous Ski Hills in Wisconsin (and other delusions of grandeur),” published last year and the winner of the Chicago Writers Association award for Non-Traditional Non-Fiction.
To accomplish this latest adventure in reporting, Jacobs used a Canon Vixia pocket cam, which is very small. He does believe, as he says, to be pioneering “not the same sort of old ‘Gotcha’ type of reporting but a new form of video journalism intended for the Web, not broadcast TV.”
It’s about time. American politics — whether given the brief once-over on the news, the talking-heads treatment of the Sunday morning gabfests or the exhaustive coverage of C-SPAN — is not the most respected commodity on TV. What Jacobs has done, and has been doing, is as refreshing as it is enlightening, pulling the covers off the process and showing that politics isn’t as well structured or dull as television often makes it appear.
It certainly is not predictable, as we just learned. But we can know that city airwaves will be awash in commercials from the two mayoral candidates for the next 37 days (and nights).
And Jacobs is determined to stay on the campaign trail, saying, “I’m hopeful that Rahm and his people will now see the advantage of allowing me to shoot him unscripted. What I am trying to do is let people see who it is they will be voting for … and not voting for.”
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
