EXTRA: Whose side will people take with regards to Daley’s debate absence?

B. DALEY: Took union endorsement over debate

It will be interesting to see whether Bill Daley’s mayoral campaign takes a hit, or receives a boost, from the fact he blew off a televised debate Thursday night that would have given him some serious exposure in the upcoming election.

Daley, one of 14 candidates with dreams of becoming Chicago’s next mayor, let officials with WFLD-TV know Thursday afternoon that he wouldn’t be participating in the program that Channel 32 had planned for Thursday night.

MENDOZA: Daley a sissy?

DALEY INSISTS HE found out last-minute that local 130 of the Chicago Journeyman Plumbers and Technical Engineers union wanted to do an evening event by which they’d endorse his mayoral campaign.

Saying he saw it as a choice of being with political people or “normal people,” he chose to take the endorsement. By an old-school way of viewing things, I could see how this works – if he can successfully spin this as a chance to spend time with the kind of people who might actually vote for him.

But others think the fact that the Chicago Tribune published a story Thursday morning implying that he only passed a licensing test some four-plus decades ago to sell insurance because someone tampered with it.

BLAGOJEVICH: Pol of  testicular virility

It surely would have been an issue that he would have been questioned on during any debate. Was Daley merely hiding from some serious questions about an old issue?

MAYORAL OPPONENT Susana Mendoza thinks so. “There’s one bad story about him and he wilts like a little flower,” she said, adding that this may well be evidence he’s not fit to be mayor of the metropolis of Chicago. Is she calling him a political sissy?

She might as well have accused Daley of lacking the “testicular virility” that one-time Gov. Rod Blagojevich once claimed was his biggest strength as a government official.

R. DALEY: Man of the people?

Of course, that line is now recalled as one of Blagojevich’s most buffoonish moments as governor. Will this absence from the debate – which already was considered controversial because Daley was among the five candidates invited to participate while nine other candidates were excluded – really be seen as evidence that the Son of Hizzoner himself is too weak to hold office?

Or is it Daley deciding to hang out with the so-called “normal people” his way of trying to play politics the way his father would have – as it was “Old Man” Daley who once said, “No poll can equal the day-to-day visits of the men and women of the Democratic Party.”

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