It’s closing in on midnight, the candidate’s been up since dawn, and his staffers want him to go home. But Pete Dagher can’t stop talking.
As appealing as this may sound, his tactics seem destined to fail. Unlike Emanuel or Kaszak, Dagher has no money for TV ads, slick brochures, or massive mailings. He has no major endorsements and rarely gets covered by the mainstream press. He spent most of the 90s working as an aide to President Clinton, but the former president wound up endorsing Emanuel, another former aide.
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Like Nader, Dagher is lousy at all the things that seem to matter most in modern politics. He’s not smooth, he’s not focused, he wanders off track. He’s always a little late–probably because he talks so much. He never shows the slightest inclination to network with powerful players. Most of his friends are people he met years ago–“Just a bunch of gearheads, like me.” He has an almost pathological unwillingness to ask for money or endorsements, which may be why he didn’t get Clinton’s: “I never told him I was running.”
The best thing he has going for him, says Dagher, is his affinity for middle- and working-class voters. “I understand them,” he says, “and they can understand me.” His father was French Lebanese, his mother Assyrian. They came to Chicago in 1957, and Dagher was born eight years later. For nine years they lived in Albany Park, then they moved to a bungalow in Skokie. “We were like hundreds of other immigrants,” he says. “You start in Albany Park, and you move to Skokie. We thought we had found the American dream.”
In 1983 he graduated from Niles North High School and enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Five years later he graduated with a degree in political science and history. He took a construction job building bathrooms and kitchens. “I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I knew that it wasn’t going to be about making money,” he says. “That was never a factor in my life–or my brother’s life. He went into the air force. For us, it was all about public service. I figured I’d go into politics one way or another. I was always a Democrat. To me, the Republicans–and I’m generalizing here–were the party of ‘I’ve got mine, now I’m locking the gate.’ The Democrats were more the party of hope and inclusion and using government as a tool for people like me and my mother and my brother who are trying to get ahead.”
He took a few months off. “I just rode around the country a bit, taking the back roads on my Harley. I had time to think over things–what went wrong, what we could have done different. I decided I wanted to keep up the fight.”
“At least you try, damn it!” he says, pounding the table. “You work, you work, you work–then you work a little harder. That’s the secret to life. You don’t believe I can do it? You say the other guy’s got more money and endorsements? Fine. I won’t hold it against you when I win. You can come to my victory party and dance all night. Then get up early and fly with me to Washington!”
