Rauner's story on school clout keeps changing

Where one of BRUCE RAUNER’s children went to high school is not inherently important to the future of the state of Illinois. But it says something that his story about it keeps changing.

I’ve written about this before because things he told me seemed different than what he told some TV stations in Chicago.

And now there’s a new, disturbing chapter.

The question has been if Rauner used clout — through a call to U.S. Education Secretary ARNE DUNCAN, who was then CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, to help his daughter get into the prestigious Walter Payton College Prep in 2008.

I never wrote about the issue until after the Chicago Sun-Times ran a front-page story on Jan. 13, noting that a year and a half after his daughter was admitted, Rauner donated $250,000 to the school.

The headline on that story, “Rauner’s $250,000 thank you,” wasn’t exactly good publicity, so he proceeded to do a series of media interviews. Three TV stations reported that he had called Duncan but asked for no special favors. But while Rauner talked about how he would “do it again and again” for his child, and a couple of reporters told me Rauner made it clear he made the call, there were no direct quotes from him that I heard about the actual call.

It had been back on Sept. 3, when I spoke with Rauner by phone, that I asked about this controversy. He told me then what a good student his daughter was, and how only illness had caused her to be denied regular admission. But, he said, there was at the time a special “principal’s list” then available in such cases, and she was admitted through that process.

And when I asked in September, he said “I did not” talk to Duncan about it.

After his round of TV interviews in January, I asked Rauner spokesman MIKE SCHRIMPF about the discrepancy. Schrimpf told me Rauner and his wife, DIANA, both spoke often with Duncan, and one of them had asked about the process.

That’s what I wrote in a column, and it’s pretty much what Rauner said Tuesday at a Citizens Club of Springfield debate at the Hoogland Center in Springfield. I was on the panel asking questions, and brought up the issue.

“Frankly, my wife and I, we have some disagreement about who talked to who when,” Rauner said. “I don’t really recall. I talked to Arne all the time. I don’t really recall talking to him about this much. The reality is, neither my wife or I asked for special favors, and our daughter was very excited and honored to go to that school.”

Later in the debate, Rauner even took time to apologize to me “for being incorrect.”

“Frankly, my memory is not clear, and I honestly thought that I had never talked to Arne,” he said, calling his daughter’s application process a “minor issue” that he “wasn’t involved in.”

“My wife corrected me,” he said. “I said, ‘I thought you talked to him.’ OK, I don’t remember. The fact is it was a minor issue because we didn’t ask for any special favors. We just got her name on the list.”

The apology seemed nice enough, and it was his 58th birthday.

But then I switched on Chicago’s WLS-AM in the car Wednesday, and heard this Rauner quote from Jan. 14.

“So I called Arne and I said, ‘Hey Arne, she’d really like to go to Walter Payton, but I saw the criteria, she may or may not get in,’” Rauner said. “’What do you think, should she even apply?’ And he said, ‘Bruce, if she’s as good academically as you say and it was pneumonia, she’s a great candidate because we have something called the principal’s discretionary pool.”

If his memory was “not clear” Tuesday, how could he provide those details of a conversation in a radio interview five weeks earlier? As I said, this is troubling.

FDR on unions

Also in the debate, I referred to comments that Rauner made while at the Brandt agricultural services firm in Springfield back in June, when he had an opportunity to meet employees.

“One of the most strong pro-union, strongest Democratic presidents in American history, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s, he said — and he’s the most pro-union president I think in American history,” Rauner said, “he said, ‘Government unions are wrong, they’re a conflict of interest with the voters and the taxpayers. They shouldn’t exist. They’re immoral.’”

(Play the video attached to this column to hear Rauner's comments at Brandt.)

Only when doing some research leading to a debate question about the future of public unions in Illinois did I delve into what Roosevelt really said. And it was not quite so clear cut.

A special page on the website of the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., deals with the issue.

Part of the record is a 1937 letter that Roosevelt wrote to LUTHER C. STEWARD, then president of the National Federation of Federal Employees. It does say, in part, “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.”

Roosevelt had also said that “Organizations of Government employees have a logical place in Government affairs.” And he emphasized that a strike by the employees would be “unthinkable and intolerable.”

The library’s page also noted that the letter dealt with federal workers only.

“No statement as to FDR’s views on collective bargaining for state and municipal workers were found among his papers” as governor of New York or as president, the site states. It also quotes an FDR speech from 1935 in San Diego, about his belief in unions in general.

“It is now beyond partisan controversy that it is a fundamental individual right of a worker to associate himself with other workers and to bargain collectively with his employer,” Roosevelt said then.

After the failure of recall advocates who wanted to remove GOP Gov. SCOTT WALKER of Wisconsin in 2012, WILLIAM R. DOUGAN, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, wrote in the Federal Times that FDR’s letter also said, “The desire of Government employees for fair and adequate pay, reasonable hours of work, safe and suitable working conditions … is basically no different from that of employees in private industry.” And, Dougan argued, the real intent of the FDR letter was to keep from federal workers the right to strike, as a national security issue. He said that in the 1930s, bargaining without the right to strike “simply did not exist in America.” He said if Roosevelt were around today, “he would lead the charge for workers’ rights to unionize — public and private.

At Tuesday’s debate, Rauner said, “I’m not against the existence of government unions, but workers should be free to choose whether to be in a union or not.”

There were no follow-up questions to Rauner. Unlike his three opponents in the GOP race, he left after the debate without facing reporters covering the event.

Contact political columnist Bernard Schoenburg: 788-1540, bernard.schoenburg@sj-r.com, twitter.com/bschoenburg.