Bears vs. Packers? Eh!

They say it wasn't, but was 'Chicaco' intentional?

All around me, I have seen the signs of excitement this past week as people get all worked up over the thought of the Chicago Bears playing the Green Bay Packers for the right to play  in the Super Bowl come Feb. 6.

Yet I have to make a confession – one that may cause the more rabid among us to suggest that I can’t be a true Chicagoan. I could care less.

I’M NOT GOING to be among the people anxiously parked in front of a television set on Sunday so that I can see the game that some people are trying to claim is the biggest event in the history of Chicago sports. I’m definitely not going to be among the people who will feel it to be a significant blow to the Chicago psyche if that dinky town in Wisconsin manages to play for this year’s NFL championship against the winner of Pittsburgh Steelers/New York Jets.

Now it’s not that I have some problem with the Chicago Bears. I realize they are a long-standing, tradition-rich professional football franchise. I also appreciate that this conference championship game involves two long-standing teams with a real rivalry, and the fact that the Packers are a holdover from the days when pro football had teams in places like Canton, Ohio, and Decatur, Ill.

In short, I get why some people want to think this is the biggest Chicago sports event ever, although I personally think it’s not even the biggest Chicago sports happening of the weekend. The White Sox declaring that Ozzie Guillen will return as manager in 2012, instead of leaving him twisting in uncertainty, is more significant.

My thing is that I personally have never thought much of the game of football (the fact that I consider “soccer” to be the REAL football is a separate issue). I have twice been to games at Soldier Field. Maybe it was because I had crummy seats, but I wasn’t awed by the experience. The constant start-stop of action during a game leaves me cold.

IN FACT MY lasting memory of my first Bears game (’79 preseason against the Jets) wasn’t the score. It was the sight of the Honey Bears on the sidelines, being very appealing to my then-14-year-old warped sensibilities (along with my modern-day, 45-year-old mind).

We don’t even have the Honey Bears in Chicago any longer. So I definitely can’t see the point of paying thousands of dollars per sear to see the game (don’t even bring up the winter weather conditions that spectators will have to cope with).



Even the Chicago Sun-Times felt the need all week to get itself into "Bears-mode."



Insofar as football on television is concerned, I have a hard time concentrating on any sports broadcast – even a game in which I have a legitimate interest. Constant commercial interruptions distract me too much (I really don't understand those people who say they watch the Super Bowl for the commercials), along with all the repetitive crowd shots and close-ups meant to show us the facial pores of every single athlete on the playing field.



So I’m not eager to spend an afternoon watching television. Even if I were, I’d want to watch something more interesting than a football game that could wind up being a badly-played one.

IN FACT, I’D have to say my biggest problem is the fact that all the hype is being put on this game. The idea that this is the biggest sports event ever for a Chicago team is nonsense. We won’t know how the game ranks (or if it even comes close to qualifying) until after the game is over.

Some people are too determined to hype Sunday’s happenings, which is why I fully expect someone to get their butt whomped and the game to turn out to be a complete disappointment (I’m not saying who will be disappointed).

In fact, if there was a sports event I would have liked to have seen this weekend, it would have been my alma mater’s basketball teams from Illinois Wesleyan University, who were in Chicago Saturday night to play North Park University, that school at Foster and Kedzie avenues that a couple of decades ago was among the elite of small college basketball (three straight national championships back in 1978-80, along with two more back in ’85 and ’87 when I was a student in Bloomington).

But freelance writing commitments (a.k.a., paying work) kept me from seeing the IWU 65-57 loss to the Vikings (although the women's team beat North Park 74-54), which in my mind is much more intriguing than any overhyped NFL television broadcast.

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One month remains ‘til Election Day

We’re exactly one month away from Election Day, and nine days away from the beginning of the time period in which people can start casting ballots for whom they want to be the Second City’s new mayor.

Yet we’re still going through the period in which we’re trying to determine whether or not Rahm Emanuel has a legitimate place on the ballot for the Feb. 22 municipal elections.

I’M SURE MOST people who are following this election cycle have already written it into their mindsets that this particular fight is over. Emanuel won. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners said so. A Cook County judge has upheld that ruling.

When that decision came up for review before an Illinois appeals court panel earlier this week, the amount of attention it received was miniscule. I expect many people are figuring it’s just a matter of time before that panel upholds the circuit court ruling made earlier this month.

That’s why they’d rather talk about the fact that Carol Moseley-Braun’s fundraising skills stink (so bad that by some measures, Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins is better than the former senator), or the law enforcement endorsements picked up by Gery Chico.

Yet I can’t help but wonder if we’re going to get a jolt at some point with some legal panel tossing a grenade into the mix and making the Emanuel campaign (which took on a further air of invincibility with a new Chicago Tribune-commissioned poll showing it with such a large lead, and trends indicating it may do well enough on Feb. 22 that there won’t be a need for an April 5 runoff election) have to squirm.

I FULLY EXPECT that Burt Odelson, the election law attorney who has taken on the actual legal work of this crusade of trying to get Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral aspirations kicked off the ballot for this election cycle, doesn’t mind in the least that the clock seems to be running down.

Because some people are treating the fact that the early voting centers will open on Jan. 31 (just nine days away) as evidence that the appeals process will have to wrap up – as though there isn’t any time to continue with them.

Actually, the appeals could drag out all the way until Election Day – with the possibility that people who cast their ballots at an early voting center for Emanuel will be casting their vote for an ineligible candidate.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Emanuel literally did get booted from the ballot at the last possible moment, yet somehow still managed to get more votes than any other candidate?

THE REASON THAT someone like Odelson wouldn’t mind the delay is that he probably would like it if the ruling that removes Rahm came at the last possible moment – so that Emanuel and the campaign would have minimal time to respond and try to find someone to overturn it.

In my time as a reporter-type person, I have covered electoral appeals that bounced back and forth, with a candidate continually being removed from, and restored to, the ballot, not knowing until the days just before the election itself whether the votes cast for that candidate would be valid.

I wonder if, in Odelson’s mind, his perfect scenario would be for the appellate court panel that spent about 45 minutes this week grilling attorneys for Rahm about residency requirements to ultimately come back some time this coming week and uphold the circuit court ruling.

Then, he would want the Illinois Supreme Court to spend some more time hearing his arguments, before also deciding to rule in Emanuel’s favor.

AT THAT POINT, the court of last chance would be the Supreme Court of the United States. There would have to be some sort of emergency motion granted for the nation’s high court to even bother with the case. Odelson would have to show somehow that federal laws are being violated by the court system in Illinois by not removing Rahm.

You and I may think it is a far stretch to claim such federal issues exist. Then again, I suspect the fact that it is “Rahm Emanuel” at stake means the court will find an excuse to claim federal issues, and will justify hearing the case.

My point being that it could be some time in mid-February before we reach some sort of ruling. What happens if Emanuel gets the boot at that point? Particularly if the ruling winds up being along politically partisan lines?

A large part of the reason why I personally have developed some respect for the idea of Rahm Emanuel as mayor of Chicago is because I sense just how politically partisan the effort to remove him from the ballot has become.

EMANUEL GETTING ELECTED as mayor would screw up the partisan fantasies of those people who want to think that Rahm’s connections to Bill Clinton (senior adviser) and Barack Obama (chief of staff) should mean he should never hold any kind of public policy position again.

I see that the people who are most concerned about this issue have little interest in Chicago municipal government, or the city’s future.

Now I’m not necessarily saying that the U.S. Supreme Court, if given the chance to get involved in this matter, will rule against Rahm. Perhaps sense will prevail in the courtroom.

All I know is that I see this legal fight as a political front that should not be ignored. It’s not over. Anybody who gets all excited about the fact Emanuel has a huge poll lead just one month from Election Day should keep in mind the possible scenario in which it wouldn’t matter.

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EXTRA: Progress in our mindset, why not theirs, when it comes to Burge, Sasha?

Perhaps I am paying too much attention these days to the conservative ideologues. Because I noticed a pair of stories in the news on Friday that gave me a smile, but in my mind I can already hear the irate rants that will come from the “right” that will see them as further evidence of our society being flushed down the drain.

One of those stories, of course, was the fact that one-time Pullman Area police Commander Jon Burge finally had to stand before a judge on Friday and hear his fate – 4 ½ years in prison.

THAT’S 54 MONTHS, significantly higher than the 21- to 27-month range that legal experts had said Burge could get for his convictions last year on charges that he did not testify truthfully in civil lawsuits filed against the police for his professional behavior some two decades ago.

That will please the people to whom Burge has become the poster boy for all that is wrong with law enforcement. I’m also sure that at age 63, time spent incarcerated in a federal correctional center will not be a pleasant experience – even if he winds up serving his time in a minimum-security work camp of sorts.

But you just know we’re going to hear the rants of the right; those people who thus far have reacted to the criminal case by saying that the people who suffered torture tactics while in police custody must have done something to deserve it.

That kind of attitude can be all too prevalent when it comes to people who are part of the criminal justice system, including those who regularly spend their time hanging around courthouses.

WHICH IS WHY I found it bold that U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow admitted while imposing sentencing that she took into account letters she received from the people who suffered from Burge and the police officers under his supervision.

As Lefkow put it, this case shows, “at the very least, a severe lack of respect for the due process of law and (Burge’s) refusal to acknowledge the truth in the face of all this evidence.”

For yes, even as of Friday, Burge says he did nothing wrong, although he said before being sentenced that he wished he had not brought “disrepute’ upon the Chicago Police Department. Which means he wishes he hadn’t got caught.

In my mind, that makes Burge as unrepentant as the lowest of criminals whom the conservative ideologues usually would be quick to denounce.

THE OTHER STORY that I’m sure will tick the ideologues off involves a cutesy report from the welcoming ceremony held Wednesday at the White House to honor China President Hu Jintao’s visit to the United States.

It seems that the younger of the two first daughters, Sasha Obama, is studying Chinese languages in school, and used her brief moment with Hu to speak with him in his own language. I also noticed in a wire service report that Sasha at one point was seen waving a miniature Chinese flag.



How long until Rush Limbaugh or some other conservative commentator tries to turn this moment into something unseemly? Photograph provided by the White House.



Personally, my mind comes up with a joke about Sasha Obama, all of 9, somehow managing to rewrite U.S. foreign policy toward China with her brief moment of speech with Hu.

You just know, however, that it will be only a matter of time (if it hasn’t happened already) before someone takes that photo of Sasha with a Chinese flag and puts it into a grotesque context. We may even hear some nonsense rhetoric about how U.S. children shouldn’t be dignifying other languages, and that this is an example of what is wrong with our nation.

YES, IT’S RIDICULOUS. Anybody who would seriously get that worked up over this is absurd. About as absurd as those people who continue to want to see Burge as an example of what our law enforcement ought to be.

Anybody who can’t see Burge for the flawed cop that he is also probably really thinks Sasha Obama is about to undermine our society. The rest of us, in fact the majority of us, ought to ignore that trite trash.

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Is it really big. Big, big, big, big. Big?

DALEY: More excited than usual these days

Chicago is an internationally-known city that has throughout the decades attracted its share of world leaders.

I still remember the presence of Lech Walesa within our city limits, and there is a certain generation that recalls it as a significant moment when Queen Elizabeth herself visited the city on the shores of Lake Michigan back in ’58.

SO WHY IS it that Richard M. Daley earlier this week got himself so excited that Hu Jintao, the president of China, is visiting Chicago that a part of me wonders if he wet his pants with glee at the very thought,.

The visit that Daley proclaimed to be Big times Six has arrived. Following time in Washington with President Barack Obama earlier this week, the Chinese president arrived in Chicago Thursday night and is getting the civic tour of the city on Friday.

My understanding is that the president will be taken to Walter Payton College Preparatory School, which has a Chinese cultural education center (known as the Confucius Institute) among its programs.

Which to me seems like we in Chicago are all eager to show that we’re not a batch of bumpkins like the people in our surrounding Midwestern states. We have the capacity to comprehend other cultures – which may well be the biggest difference between us in Illinois and those people in Indiana who in recent days have taken to trying to bash us on account of tax rates (that really aren’t as favorable to them as they’d like to dream).

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN us and them is that Chicago gives our state the ability to attract certain business opportunities within the global community that those other states can only dream about.

HU: What will he remember of Chicago?

I can’t envision any international leader getting all that interested in visiting Indianapolis (unless he has some real desire to see auto racing). In fact, I can’t help but think if Hu Jintao tried to visit one of the surrounding states of the Midwest, he’d probably encounter so much hostility as to make him deem such a visit pointless.

Not that he didn’t get such hostility in Chicago.

The protesters whose disgust for China’s apathy toward including human rights with economic freedoms makes them want to cut off the mainland altogether were grouped outside the Chicago Hilton & Towers, the downtown hotel where the president stood during his Midwestern U.S. visit and where Daley and first lady Maggie held a formal dinner that city officials were quick to point out was paid for through private donations.

IN SHORT, THE business interests that want to have ties to China paid to arrange for the leader of a Communist nation to have a nice meal while in our city limits.

After bopping about the Internet, I have read enough conspiracy theories telling me the “real” reason why Hu Jintao included a Chicago stop on his U.S. tour. After all, if he really wanted to see people of Chinese-American descent, he could have just as easily gone to San Francisco or New York.

I think my favorite of these goofy theories are the ones that imply Chinese leaders visited Obama’s adopted hometown because they’re secretly planning to fund Obama’s re-election bid. Therefore, what we have is a gathering between Chinese communists and “the Machine” – that dreaded cast of Chicago political characters who are imposing their autocratic ways on the federal government.

Daley’s brother, William, after all, is the new chief of staff. Now we know whom Daley takes his marching orders from. At least that’s what they’d like us to believe.

ONLY THE KIND of people who are determined to believe that Obama wasn’t really born in the United States and there has to be some way to think of him as a “foreigner” unfit for the presidency would believe this kind of nonsense.

Although I wouldn’t be surprised if the fact that Obama is president did somehow subtly play into the fact that Hu Jintao and his aides included a Chicago visit on their trip to the United States.

This is a city whose public profile has elevated significantly on the international level because of the fact that Obama still owns a home here, and still thinks of himself as such a native that he says he’s traveling to Dallas on Feb. 6 for the Super Bowl – IF the Chicago Bears manage to qualify by beating Green Bay on Sunday.

While I have my own qualms about the Chinese government (not Chinese people themselves), I also realize that we exist in the world with them, and we will have to engage in some business dealings. Any attempt to use the Cuba treatment to isolate them from the world would make us look so ridiculous – moreso than the Cuba trade embargo does these days.

I REALIZE THAT our economic future is going to be advanced through cooperation, not isolation. Besides, I can’t help but wonder if China eventually is going to feel the pressure to give in on the human rights issues – lest they become too cut off from the rest of the world (like the Soviet Union of old)  upon which they want to be a part of.

I just have one hesitation about this trip.

I only hope that Hu Jintao doesn’t catch too long a glimpse of our Chinatown neighborhood. I’d hate to think he’d go back to Beijing with his head filled with examples of Chinese/American gaudiness.

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He’ll be home for Christmas

Ed Vrdolyak, the man who was once the face and the voice of the vocal opposition to Harold Washington, went to prison this week.

His "time" has arrived



“Fast Eddie” reported Wednesday to Bureau of Prisons officials in Terre Haute, Ind., the site of the maximum-security prison that has a minimum-security work camp where Vrdolyak will serve his 10-month sentence.

WE’RE GOING TO hear a lot of wisecracks in coming months based on the fact that Vrdolyak will now be at the same prison facility as former Gov. George Ryan. Cellmates? Who gets to do something funky to whom? Or will prison officials just build a new special wing in Terre Haute for corrupt Chicago politicos?

Yet I can’t help but look at the two political people together and appreciate all the more what a sweet deal Vrdolyak managed to get for himself in U.S. District Court. He had an even better one at one point that would not have required any prison time for himself.

But not even Fast Eddie had the connections to make that deal stick.

Seriously. Ten months?

VRDOLYAK WILL BE back at his East Side neighborhood home for the Christmas holiday season. Depending on how one calculates the math (and just how well behaved Edward R. remains while serving his sentence), Vrdolyak may even be free just in the nick of time for Thanksgiving.

While Fast Eddie (the nickname dates way back before Harold Washington) won’t be able to spend Independence Day with his family this year, somehow I think he’ll get over it – unlike Ryan, who has a serious chance of having his wife die in coming weeks without being able to see her again, and gets to think of Independence Day as the date he will finally be set free.

Just over two years from now, that is!

What also amazed me about Vrdolyak’s fate is that it came long after his active career as an elected official was over. While he was still an adviser of sorts to certain political people, it’s not like Vrdolyak has to give up a political post.

HE DIDN’T EVEN have to give up his career as an attorney specializing in personal injury law, and running a law firm named for himself.

Vrdolyak had already retired from practicing law. So he may have been disbarred. But he wasn’t handling any more cases anyway.

His legacy was already set, and nobody is going to think any less of Vrdolyak because his biography will include a prison term.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that Vrdolyak’s eventual obituary will not lead with the fact that he went to prison. The fact that he was willing to lead the City Council in revolt against the desires of Chicago’s first African-American mayor is more intriguing than the fact that federal prosecutors were able to get a conviction against him for a real estate transaction along the Gold Coast neighborhood.

ALTHOUGH THE VERY fact that Vrdolyak rose from a Croatian/eastern European enclave at the far southeast corner of Chicago to being able to do real estate deals along the city’s Gold Coast is probably a legacy in and of itself, and a story that should be told in the context of Chicago’s many ethnic groups.

Not that the Washington allies will want to tell it. Many of the same people who are disappointed these days that the mayoral aspirations of Carol Moseley-Braun aren’t resulting in a stronger campaign (although it may be strong enough to qualify for the runoff election to be held April 5) are probably feeling a sense of glee. “Fast Eddie” in Terre Haute.

Of course, if I wanted to be nasty, I’d point out that Washington also had a tax-related conviction for which he served his own jail term, doing his time at the Cook County Jail. Washington-backers shouldn’t get too cocky about this.

The smart-aleck in me wonders if this now creates the potential for a future conversation in the hereafter between Washington and Vrdolyak similar to that moment in “The Blues Brothers” when the cabbage rolls served to inmates at Terre Haute was compared to the oatmeal served at the Cook County “slam.”

THE MORE SERIOUS political observer in me actually is relieved that Vrdolyak won’t be available to comment on Feb. 22 (or April 5, for that matter).

Those are the Election Days to be held for Chicago city government, and with the potential for racial disharmony that could crop up depending the election results, you just know somebody would have felt the need to dig up Council Wars and try to get Fast Eddie to speak about how the current situation compares to the past.

I don’t know what Vrdolyak would have said, although I do know there are some people who continue to this day to defend the Vrdolyak name on the grounds that his actions helped keep Washington from accomplishing more as mayor.

Take that attitude for what it’s worth. You may want to think it is one buried deep in our city’s past.

I SAY WE’RE going to learn on Election Day just how relevant Vrdolyak is to the way some people in this city still think, and that he’s not as “gone” as some of us wish he was.

Just think Bing Crosby, singing, “I’ll  be home for Christmas. You can count on me, …”

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Whole lot of nuthin’ is what ‘moment of silence’ in the public schools amounts to

As a reporter-type person, I have had many occasions to set foot in high schools – including the ones I attended – during the 28 years since I graduated and went away to college.

Yet I don’t look at these teenagers and long for those days of innocence when my biggest concern was a chemistry final and my biggest wish was that the cute blond girl who sat next to me in English class would actually give me the time of day, let alone speak to me.

I LOOK AT what comes off as the excessive security measures we impose in the schools and all the other many requirements we have implemented on students, and my only reaction is to be thankful that I’m not a student these days. I don’t know how I’d handle all the stupid stuff that exists these days for students to cope with.

That is pretty much what I think of the latest new requirement that public high school teenagers are having to deal with – the moment of silence.

In theory, I like the idea. Everybody shut up for a few seconds! Pipe down, you’re all giving me a headache with your racket.

Of course, cutting down on the amount of aspirin a high school teacher consumes during the school day (unless, by chance, there is some sort of regulation against the teacher being able to take an aspirin or any other kind of medication while on school property) is NOT the reason that officials pushed for this moment of silence.

THIS WAS THE compromise devised years ago by the people who seriously believe that the day in public school – which is a mixture of all kinds of kids from families with religious beliefs ranging from pious to apathetic to non-existent – should start with a prayer.

These people are going to pretend that the quiet time is being used by these kids to pray to a god that he may give them the strength to get through another day of the bureaucratic mess that has become high school in the early 21^st Century.



Anybody who expects this scene to take place in a Chicago-area public school today is delusional.



I know better. Because I see that while the layers of nonsense we have added to the school day (it amazes me the number of checkpoints I encounter whenever I set foot in a modern high school, rather than just getting a pass from the principal’s office) have increased, the basic mentality of the people themselves hasn’t changed.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, if I were capable of reading minds, that the number of students who think prayer is stupid outnumbers the number of students who actually use the quiet time to pray.

I’M ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that those students combined would be significantly outnumbered by students whose thoughts ranged elsewhere.

I couldn’t help but notice a Chicago Tribune report by which a reporter (who probably got the third degree from school officials before being let anywhere near the entrance to the school buildings) actually asked teenagers what they thought about on the first day of quiet time – which in some schools was Tuesday.

Homework. Chores and errands. Some just sat and meditated quietly, although one kid got herself quoted in the Tribune by claiming to have remembered the people who died nearly 10 years ago in New York at the World Trade Center.

Not that you could accomplish much in the five to 10 seconds that most school districts seem to be setting aside to comply with this state law, which is new in enforcement but has actually been on the books for a few years.

THIS WAS OUR General Assembly at work, coming up with a measure in 2007 meant to appease people of a certain socially conservative ideological bent while not actually giving them what they want. If we had, class on Tuesday would have started with a lot of reciting of “Our father, who art in Heaven, …”

Which is why this worked its way through the court system, with an injunction in place to prevent the law from being enforced. Until a federal appeals court recently upheld the idea of a moment of silence, saying it doesn’t necessarily violate the idea of keeping organized religion separate from government (or public school) activity.

Yes, I think the idea of a ‘moment of silence’ is silly, in large part because it is too brief to accomplish anything. And I wouldn’t want to see it lengthened because I don’t trust the motivations of the people who push the most for this concept.

If there is any consolation to me and others who opposed this idea, it is that the mindset of the modern teenager (whose music and clothes are just as tacky as the junk we wore back in the early 1980s) hasn’t changed much.

THE PEOPLE WHO wanted this ‘moment of silence’ as a symbolic victory of sorts toward bringing back school prayer would be seriously upset to learn that at least one teenage boy is using his quiet time to ogle that girl sitting next to him.

Too bad the teacher can’t come along and whack him with a ruler for his “impure” thoughts. That is, unless a bill permitting such activity is the next goal of those state legislators who fought so hard to get this moment of silence.

“Thank God I’m no longer in high school.” That’s my thought for a moment of silence.

  -30-

Bill Clinton comes to Chicago to create cash, backing for Emanuel campaign

A month ago, it was a big political stink that William Jefferson Clinton would deign to set foot in our fair city on behalf of the mayoral aspirations of his one-time senior advisor, Rahm Emanuel.



Bill Clinton picked ...



But now, one of the people who was all bothered by Clinton’s promised presence in Chicago isn’t even in the race anymore. As for Carol Moseley-Braun (who also was a part of the Clinton presidential administration as an ambassador to New Zealand), she can scream “outsider!” all she wants.

THE REALITY IS that I doubt many people care much what she thinks about this particular point. It comes off too much as sour grapes that Clinton picked him over her when it came to support someone for Chicago mayor.

So Clinton is coming to Chicago on Tuesday, appearing mid-day at a public rally (although tickets are being issued to control the size of the crowd) at the Chicago Cultural Center. Later in the day, he will be attending a fundraising event meant to bring in even more money to pay for those expensive television spots that will try to neutralize Emanuel’s reputation as a foul-mouthed, hard-headed politico and a partisan to the extreme.

The latter event is the one that really matters, because it will give the corporate types who have been more than satisfied with Richard M. Daley a chance to reinforce Rahm’s chances of winning, not only on Feb. 22 but also on April 5.

Not that the earlier event hurts. After all, Bill Clinton standing side by side with Emanuel. Maybe the presence of the former president will even get Daley himself to turn out for the event.

IT’S NOT EXACTLY a mayoral endorsement. But it would create an image of heavy-weight politicians in Clinton and Daley, with Emanuel being the one person running for mayor who deserves to be thought of in their league.

In short, the images could make the rest of the mayoral field look like a batch of local lightweights. So no matter how much Moseley-Braun screams “outsider endorsing an outsider,” keep in mind that not everybody will perceive it that way.

... his senior adviser ...



Personally, I thought it was stupid politically when the officials who complained about Clinton did so publicly. It’s not like they were going to change his mind into coming to Chicago. If anything, all they did was put up a bit of a barricade between themselves and the former president, whose help they may wind up asking for in some future campaign.

Also, I don’t think anyone’s opinion is changed seriously by this event.

THE KIND OF people who are inclined to look down on Emanuel and say they’re voting ABR are going to cast that ballot for anybody but Rahm BECAUSE of the fact that he has ties to Bill Clinton.

Back in 2002 when he first ran for that Northwest Side congressional seat, these people were disgusted with Clinton and were determined that anybody who had any ties to him should be forevermore finished in politics.

Emanuel’s victory was a stake through their vampiric hearts.

Now, many of these same people are disgusted because Emanuel also has ties to Barack Obama. They want to believe that is a kiss of political death – even though anyone looking at various polls in recent weeks can’t help but notice that Obama’s favorability ratings are slowly starting to go up.

THESE PEOPLE AREN’T so much about electing anyone as mayor as much as they are about dumping on Emanuel.

Which is why I can actually respect the Somos Republicanos group. Based out of Arizona, they exist to try to get Latinos to take the Republican Party seriously.

Their leaders are taking an interest in Chicago’s mayoral campaign, and they are honest enough to admit they just don’t want Rahm to win. They cite the failure of Obama to do anything with immigration reform during his first two years of office, which is an issue they could use to stir up Latino voters at large.

But they also admit they’re not pushing for any specific candidate. They’re not for Gery Chico or for Miguel del Valle. They don’t mind Carol Moseley-Braun (mostly because I suspect they already have their file folders out and ready to start using tidbits from the past to trash her rep, should she get elected mayor). They will take any of them.

... over his ambassador.



IT’S ALL ABOUT Emanuel, whose failure they would try to spin into a sign that even Chicago rejects Clinton/Obama.

I must confess. All of this is why I can’t quite write off Rahm in my own mind. A part of me keeps in mind that people whose best interests aren’t with Chicago at all are the ones who most want us to be outraged by Emanuel, or by the fact that Clinton will make his first visit to our city since just before the November elections – back then, he was just trying to convince Democrats in Chicago to turn out to vote.

Which they did! There was a respectable vote in Chicago proper, which was the reason why we still have a Democrat as governor and in most of the state constitutional offices, and Democrats running the Illinois General Assembly.

If the Clinton influence continues, maybe we will get “Mayor Emanuel” – no matter how much some people want to engage in ridiculous rhetoric.

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