Emanuel Downplays "Retired" Fire Chief Who Appeared In Campaign Ad Who Is Actually Collecting Disability

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jul 18, 2012 4:40PM

© 2011 City of Chicago, photo by Brooke Collins.

Mayor Emanuel's office has stayed on message this week in response to the Sun-Times series on police officers and firefighters on disability pay, but Emanuel expressed some displeasure that Tuesday's report connected him to a firefighter who is currently collecting disability.

The Emanuel administration hasn't steered from its statement that the system that allows some firefighters and policemen to collect disability payments for years, sometimes decades, without ever having to return to work needs to be reformed. But he took some time to express his displeasure with the Sun-Times for pointing out Chicago Fire Department District chief Pat Kehoe—currently collecting $91,000 tax free in disability pay—appeared in a commercial for his mayoral campaign last year a "cheap trick."

"Cheap trick. Hook." "Potato. Po-tah-to."

Emanuel said he didn't know the details of Kehoe's injuries and disability claim and that it wasn't clean pool to point it out because he was White House chief of staff at the time of Kehoe's disability claim.

“I met Pat Kehoe in a fire station in 2001,” Emanuel said Tuesday. “In July of 2009, when he went in front of the pension board, I was the chief of staff to the president of the United States . . . I don’t know the case. I wasn’t here. I was in Washington, working for President Obama.

“We have a systemic issue on police and fire disability that needs to be addressed [and doesn’t] need to be played cheap tricks on. What happened to the disability is a serious issue, needs to be dealt [with] seriously and not made [a] frivolous issue….We have a systemic issue, not a one-off case.”

See? We can't tie Emanuel to Kehoe or the systemic abuses because he was in the Beltway. Nor can we note that Kehoe served on the public-safety committee of the Emanuel transition team.

But what makes it newsworthy is the degree of separation between Emanuel and Kehoe. For a master politician like Emanuel to not know Kehoe was drawing disability pay when he was describing himself as a "retired Chicago fireman" makes one wonder what else Emanuel doesn't know.