Is the VMA dead? Failing for the first time ever to nominate a candidate for village president. Not good. Unable to fill out a complete roster of trustee candidates for the first time. Embarrassing. Screwing up the petition-gathering process so that only by a generous interpretation of election law, your undersized slate of candidates even makes the ballot. Pathetic. Offering newbies slots on your slate and having them choose to run as independents instead. Troubling. Having those newbies win. Disturbing. Not electing a single one of your candidates. Not even the clerk! Code blue!
The venerable Village Manager Association had dominated Oak Park politics since the 1950s. Dominated — as in every single one of their candidates won for multiple decades. The cracks appeared gradually in the 1980s as splinters from the main trunk ran anti-VMA slates and then started to pluck off trustee seats and then the village presidency itself.
Now we have a new board with fundamentally no ties to whatever is left of the VMA. Anan Abu-Taleb beat the VMA four years back and ran for re-election as mayor this year unopposed. Deno Andrews and Dan Moroney easily won trustee seats after rejecting offers of slating from the VMA. Simone Boutet was elected readily without VMA support. Vicki Scaman ran rings around four other candidates for the nebulous office of village clerk. And of the three continuing village trustees, two were appointed by Abu-Taleb. That leaves Bob Tucker as the nominal VMA representative on the board. And what exactly is the least nominal a person can be?
We had most every candidate announcing their candidacy first to Wednesday Journal. In the glory days, that would have been a mortal sin in violation of the VMA’s narcissistic super-secret selection process. The vanity and self-importance of the secret selection process was the initial clue that the VMA would not survive in a more transparent day and age.
Then there was the incessant declaration, as recently as a few weeks back, that the VMA “is not a political party. We’re a good-government group that selects candidates. After that, the candidates run their own campaigns.”
Maybe the few hangers-on actually believe that. Maybe they think calling what passes for governance in Oak Park “politics” somehow sullies the brand. Nonsense. Politics is about belief, about persuasion, about strategy, about smarts. Those are good things and the VMA has chosen this odd middle place that only works when your candidates run unopposed, as happened for too many years.
So this year we had an entire campaign season run under the cloud of lawsuits trying to knock the VMA trio off the ballot. The election has come and gone and the suit lives on in some fragile state. But the non-political VMA didn’t step up its campaign and its candidates tried to both run for office and fend off the lawyers.
Then we had the odd circumstance of three tried-and-true VMA-elected trustees — the New York-based Ray Johnson, the departing Colette Lueck, the recently resigned Adam Salzman — jointly penning a letter to the Journal’s editor. In it they only endorsed one VMA trustee candidate. That was the quite terrific Glenn Brewer. But they publicly smote the only other VMA trustee candidate, Peter Barber.
You know you’ve lost your mojo, your power to make cower, when your own chosen ones are cherry-picking who to support.
I think the VMA is dead and that no one really cares or maybe even has noticed. They’ve got two years until the next election to prove me wrong. They could start by standing up and admitting some faults, by pounding their chests and declaring that the values of the VMA can be adapted to this moment, that politics is OK, even good.
But I don’t see that happening.
