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Should Cook County Board President Todd Stroger have told us he had prostate cancer before we had to read it first on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times?
Yes.
And I don't say that to be harsh or unsympathetic. On the contrary, I feel badly for him or anyone who has to reckon with illness. No matter how old you are or how prepared you think you might be, it is a gut punch to hear your doctor give you the news. And for Todd Stroger, a husband and father of two small children, who was just 43 last summer when diagnosed, it couldn't have been easy coming, as it did, on the heels of his own father's massive stroke just months earlier.
If Stroger had been just a private citizen, this would be none of our business.
But there's the rub.
In March of 2006, just a week before the primary for Cook County Board president, the incumbent John Stroger collapsed and was hospitalized. He still won the Democratic nomination, though at the time the public was given no clear or honest idea what condition he was in. We weren't told the truth by his doctors, by his family or by the ward bosses of Cook County for many months as they schemed over how to install then-Ald. Todd Stroger as a replacement candidate for his gravely ill dad.
Against that backdrop, apparently sometime right before or right after it was finally revealed that John Stroger was too ill to carry on, Todd Stroger learned of his own medical problem but kept it a secret from voters the same way his father's condition had been kept secret.
Now, prostate cancer is a vastly different thing than a massive stroke, no question about it. Caught early, it can be effectively treated and cured. It doesn't affect a person's ability to think or talk or manage their lives. And, let's be realistic, if Todd Stroger had shared his illness with voters, it probably would have brought him more votes, not fewer.
But the political calculus at the county is as flawed as it's ever been. And claims of transparency by the new President Stroger are still just that, unsupported claims.
What a missed opportunity this has been.
It's a shame that Cook County employees, including the 17 elected commissioners on the County Board, had to learn that their CEO was hospitalized for prostate surgery this week, not from him, but from Chicago Sun-Times reporters Steve Patterson and Fran Spielman in a front-page story. And that citizens of Cook County were informed the same way, not from their elected leader, not even from his cadre of highly paid press people, but from reporters who had to pound the truth out of a fortress-like bureaucracy.
We are assured, now that the secret is out, that President Stroger will be able to work from home for the next few weeks, keeping in regular contact with his chief of staff, Lance Tyson, who will handle day-to-day operations while County Commissioner Joseph Mario Moreno presides as president pro tempore at County Board meetings. We are asked to accept the sparse amount of information we're being given as true and asked to respect Todd Stroger's privacy.
Even now, after all the shenanigans at the county, I'm inclined to do that.
But then I remember the last time we were asked to respect the president's privacy. John Stroger, we were told, was working from his hospital bed, fully briefed on what was going on in his $3 billion government. But all the while, his minions were padding the payroll with thousands of people and handing out hundreds of contracts as he lay completely incapacitated.
It was a scandalous breach of whatever trust was left in Cook County.
So Todd Stroger's burden, in addition to battling this challenge to his health, is to be different.
It is terribly important for him and for his family that he get better.
But it is just as important for the people he serves that he be better.