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| RAUNER: Preparing for political warfare? |
For it seems Rauner is shaking up his own staff to be prepared for the upcoming election cycle – one in which he’s going to be willing to demonize everybody around him and claim that only his anti-union ways of doing things will resolve the state’s problems.
I
COULDN’T HELP but notice the reports by the Chicago Sun-Times about McCarthy,
who hasn’t had a real job since he was dismissed as police superintendent back
in 2015.
He’s
done a couple of consulting-type things and has been in the rumor mill for some
significant posts. Which lead to the current rumors being spread that he’s
contemplating running for mayor come 2019.
Apparently,
his distaste for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who let him go, remains to the point where
he’d want to challenge him and try to appeal to that segment of Chicago that
wants Anybody But Rahm. Or Chuy Garcia, or anybody else whose melanin content
level is too high for their taste.
In
short, somebody who’s going to claim that the current establishment has to go,
and that they’re the man who would bring radical change to the way things are
done. Although his vision of radical change would be perceived by some as
bringing back a conservative white vision of doing things.
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| RASMUSSEN: His general? |
WHICH IS WHY I wonder if there would be a place for McCarthy within a Rauner administration. I’m sure including him on the gubernatorial team in some role would appeal to those people who can’t stand Rahm Emanuel because he’s just so Chicago, just like that Mike Madigan character that Rauner has spent the past few years demonizing!
I’m
sure a McCarthy would be willing to come up with less-than-kind things to say
about the way things are done in Chicago. He could even claim outsider status,
being a former New York cop and former police chief in Newark, N.J., and might
even try to claim that the fact he was rejected in Chicago was just further evidence
as to our hostility to “reform.”
Which,
as defined by Rauner, isn’t really reform. But really just an ideological
agenda that he wanted to impose upon us, and is now shocked and appalled to
learn that the masses amongst us in Chicago have little interest in accepting.
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| McCARTHY: Could he have a role? |
Why am I so willing to believe that Rauner would make such a move whose sole purpose would be to irritate people and to try to benefit his own re-election chances?
IT’S
THAT I see the move he made for a new chief of staff. The announcements were
amongst my e-mail messages when I woke up Monday morning, where we learned that
chief of staff Richard Goldberg has decided to return to the world of foreign
policy and national security. Unless you think of Chicago as an alien land that
is a threat to the rest of us, he really didn’t fit in here.
He
was replaced by Kristina Rasmussen, who was head of the Illinois Policy
Institute, an ideologue think tank consisting of people who are very inclined
to think of Chicago as alien and threatening to Illinois.
Speculation
is that Rasmussen will be toughening up the Rauner staff and setting policy for
the remainder of this term so as to push the message that we need to re-elect
Bruce Rauner to four more years so as to keep the Madigans and Emanuels from
taking over everything we hold dear.
Because
that is exactly the kind of thinking we’re going to get – those who want to
view our governing process as a battlefield where somebody needs to be
conquered.
IT
WOULDN’T SURPRISE me to see that a place could be found for McCarthy in such a
mentality – and perhaps he could then run for mayor in ’19 with financial help
from Rauner; should he manage to get himself “four more years” as part of the Statehouse
Scene in Springfield.
The
problem, however, is that this kind of thinking merely means we’re going to
prolong the sense of stalemate that has come over our government – the mentality
that resulted in us going for just over two full fiscal years without a budget
and has some people thinking we’d be better off if the stalemate were still
ongoing.
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| Rauner fans probably think Charlie really kicked the ball |
I kid you not, there are those who are so upset about the solution (which is less than ideal, but keep in mind there is no good solution to our state’s financial mess) that they think we should now be on Day 740, and still counting, without a budget.
Which
means that the funny pages “philosopher” Charlie Brown may well have summed it up best with his immortal words, “Oh, Good
Grief!”
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