Over the past several decades, social scientists have written extensively about many types of intelligence beyond the intelligence we all know from IQ tests. In the 1990s, psychologist Howard Gardner claimed to have discovered eight different brands of intelligenceincluding not only verbal but visual, mathematical and kinesthetic, to name a few. In 2005, journalist Daniel Goleman published a dazzling bestseller positing the existence of what he called emotional intelligence and explore its importance in navigating daily life.

There is, however, a type of intelligence that is not on these lists, although it seems as real to me as any of them. I’m talking about political intelligence. It can be hard to pin down, but the more you think about it, the more you have to admit that there is something there.

Leaders can be politically intelligent without being eloquent, educated, mathematically adept, or even particularly self-aware. There are all kinds of modern examples.

Dwight Eisenhower, who never saw a battle in his life, orchestrated a magnificent political feat on D-Day by merging dozens of conflicting personalities and stubborn egos into a solid fighting unit. Fiorello LaGuardia possessed an uncanny instinct for coalition building that allowed him to serve three incredibly productive terms as mayor of a New York City ravaged by depression and war.

More recently, Ronald Reagan rose to the pinnacle of American politics and largely prospered there, without demonstrating any of Howard Gardner’s versions of intelligence, except perhaps that which Gardner called “interpersonal ”, reflecting an ability to appreciate what others think. Reagan may have had that, but I’m more comfortable limiting his gifts to a distinct form of political intelligence.

At the local level, I would cite Thomas Menino, the longtime mayor of Boston, who was so inarticulate and tone-deaf that critics derided him as not being very bright. But politically, Menino was smarter than any of them, and he achieved an economic and cultural revival that made him his city’s most accomplished mayor in modern times.

Conversely, some political leaders reportedly scored high on Gardner’s checklist but seemed unable to persuade others or pass an agenda. President John Quincy Adams was Exhibit A in this department. In much more recent, and admittedly more controversial, times, I would put President Jimmy Carter on the same list.

I think we can agree that there is such a thing as political intelligence. But what does this consist of? Let me throw out a few applications. Political intelligence requires the quality of anticipation – the ability to anticipate many actions while others remain stuck in the same place. This involves the ability to read others when they are not directly communicating their intentions. This often requires a certain form of daring – the foreknowledge necessary to pursue and succeed in tactics that others consider too risky. And what’s more, it seems to require a certain balance, an instinct to know how far one can go.

I THOUGHT OF ALL THESE THINGS while I read The Daley ShowForrest Claypool’s incisive account of Chicago’s Richard M. Daley, the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history, and I also found myself thinking about the career of his father, Richard J. Daley, who served almost as long and with as much command. Claypool was a longtime aide to the younger Daley, but he is an impartial student of Chicago politics. Both Daleys had their faults, as almost everyone knows and Claypool concedes, but if political intelligence exists there is no doubt that they both had it.

University of Illinois Press

Richard J. Daley has rarely been described as a political visionary, but he clearly thought about what needed to be done on the routine governmental side to keep his regime in power. Daley is often ridiculed for his statement that “good government is good policy,” but he meant it, and he understood better than most other politicians that these were the mundane operations of his regime: picking up trash bins, responding efficiently to emergency calls, keeping neighborhoods safe, operating a functioning public transit system – these mattered more than grandiose visions of the city’s future.

All these daily operations were made possible by a quasi-feudal network of machine-loyal neighborhood captains and dictatorial, bribe-collecting neighborhood committees, but it was the results on the streets that mattered to residents. , and Daley was capable of handling these operations. so much so that when he called Chicago a “city that works,” he was believed not only on home turf, but also in the national media.

When it comes to corruption, the elder Daley demonstrated another crucial element of political intelligence: the need for balance and restraint. Daley’s achievement of the physical rejuvenation of downtown Chicago was accomplished through quasi-legal contractual subsidies, grants, waivers, and special permits for political favorites, but he also knew that excesses on the part of any one of these allies could bring discredit to the entire regime, and he let his cronies only go so far and no further. “I let them take so much, but no more,” he once told an associate. Daley believed that effective local government, at least in Chicago, depended to a large extent on tolerance of bad behavior, but he knew when to put a stop to it. He was a manager of embezzlement. It’s a lesson that many ambitious mayors and governors never seem to learn. It was perhaps Dean Daley’s most striking display of political intelligence.

WHEN RICHARD M. “RICH” DALEY BECAME MAYOR13 years after the elder Daley’s death, it was commonly said that he was his father’s equal in verbal clumsiness, but no match for him in political intelligence ordinary. THE The Wall Street Journal quoted a veteran observer of Chicago politics as saying that young Daley was “dumb as a box of rocks.” There may have been more erroneous judgments of an American politician in modern times, but if there are, I don’t know of any.

What young Daley possessed above all else was an uncanny ability to pursue policies whose long-term benefits many around him considered questionable. Most dramatic was his determination to build a public park on the old railroad tracks south of downtown. Millennium Park was a half-billion-dollar gamble, but it not only paid for itself, but became a civic icon and global tourist attraction, almost an Eiffel Tower of the American Midwest. In the first six months after its opening in 2004, it attracted more than two million visitors. After 10 years, visitors have spent more than $2 billion.

Daley’s decision to march in a gay rights parade during his first term as mayor was seen by many as a politically reckless move of audacity. But it earned him a loyal constituency that never abandoned him. In 2006, he was inducted into the Chicago LGBTQ Hall of Fame.

Perhaps the most notable political strategy of Daley’s long tenure was his careful cultivation of a Hispanic political base. Chicago was divided roughly thirds between black, white, and Hispanic residents, and Daley began his first term as a suspect figure in the black community, having succeeded an African-American mayor. But he quickly realized that if he could attract enough Hispanic support, he would not be vulnerable to a black challenger. This was the genesis of the Hispanic Democratic Organization, which Claypool describes as “the most powerful political arm of Daley’s new machine.”

Much of what Daley has done reflects pure audacity. When previous school reform plans produced meager results, he took over the school system himself. Seeking to rejuvenate declining neighborhoods, he saw the benefits of massive tax increment financing (TIF) programs when others did not. It is plausible to argue that Daley’s massive deployment of TIFs went too far and contributed to the financial problems that worsened toward the end of his reign. But there’s no denying that they transformed much of the city, and most of the communities they transformed were healthier when Daley left office.

It is only fair to point out that superior political intelligence can go too far, and Claypool takes pains to document some of the excesses and failures generated by Daley’s overconfidence. When he wanted to build a park on the site of a small private downtown airport, he had the airport demolished in the middle of the night, without any real legal authority. When an embarrassing scandal broke out in the public truck leasing system, he hesitated to do anything. When the city’s budget deficit became unmanageable during his final term, Daley negotiated the sale of the city’s parking meters to a private company, which ended up costing Chicago hundreds of millions of dollars.

These are important lessons. No matter how politically intelligent a leader is, sometimes he or she forgets the need for balance and assumes that it is possible to get away with almost anything. Rich Daley succumbed to this. But if we look at the city he inherited in 1989 and the one he left in 2011, I think we have to conclude that Chicago was in a better place thanks to his six terms in office. That’s what Claypool believes. “Daley’s errors and misjudgments,” he wrote, “should not diminish what was a transformative moment in town hall, one that not only reversed the fortunes of a great city, but also provided a model for future urban leaders. » That seems a fair assessment.