It almost sounds like a writer’s dream – living off past rounds of copy

A part of me wonders if Mike Royko, the late columnist for just about every newspaper that existed in Chicago, has the ultimate fantasy assignment.

He hasn’t had the pressure of meeting a deadline in just over two decades – yet the two remaining metro papers in this city seem eager to dredge up his old columns (some 30-plus years worth of copy) and use them to fill the space they’re so desperately eager to create around the declining number of advertisements.

IT KIND OF threw me off for a second when I saw the editorial pages of the Chicago Tribune on Sunday included a Royko column amongst their choice commentary.

They dredged up a column from the 1980s (back in the days when George Bush, the elder was president) where Royko used his aging Slats Grobnik persona to mock Republicans for trying to be holier than thou and make it appear as though God himself is the ultimate member of the Grand Old Party.

I’d say they were trying to make Jesus out to be the ultimate Republican. But in today’s day, there are many Jesuses of a Latino ethnic persuasion whom the hard core of the Republican Party are looking for excuses to deport.

Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times continued its trend of the past couple of months and published an old Royko column on Monday – but only online.

PEOPLE READING SUNTIMES.com could see an even older column from the 1960s where Royko told the tale of how big, corporate-minded businesses were squeezing the little guy out of work.

Specifically, he told of a one-time neighborhood cleaners where the woman who owned and operated it all by herself had to work extra-long hours, but eagerly did so to meet the desires of her customers.

Which, Royko claimed, was something that the new, modern cleaners in the neighborhood would never bother to do.

But they were able to justify charging a slightly cheaper price (you save perhaps a nickel) for their services, gambling that people would be so eager to save any money that they’d accept the lesser personal service and lack of a personal touch.

MUCH HAS BEEN made by the Sun-Times of how they’re dredging through their archives for Royko copy (both from when he wrote for the Sun-Times proper and also when he was a focal point of the old Chicago Daily News) out of the concept that what he said about issues way back when has an eerie relevance to modern times.

I’m sure the Tribune thinks the same thing. Although I also noticed that the Royko column published in the Sunday paper included a tag at the end informing the reader how the Tribune’s book publishing wing is coming out with a new book soon – one that compiles several of the Royko columns he wrote during the 17 years he was with the Chicago Tribune.

That book will be available for purchase come mid-August, and I’m sure somebody thinks (or at least desperately hopes) that somebody reading the column in the paper will choose to buy the book.

Personally, I don’t know that I feel the need to rush right out and buy a copy – largely because I actually own all six of the compilations of newspaper columns that Royko had published when he was actually alive.

I ALSO HAVE a hard-cover first edition of “Boss,” the biography he wrote of Richard J. Daley back when “Hizzoner” himself was still alive.

That book is one I have quoted from on occasion in this very weblog when trying to tell the history of Chicago politics. It may be the best piece of writing ever about our city’s political scene (although Milton J. Rakove’s “We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent” has the best title ever).

You’ve got to admit, for a guy who hasn’t written a word since 1997 (he died a month after writing his final column for the Tribune), it’s impressive the staying power that the man’s copy has. Although I’m sure there are some snot-nosed brats out there reading this who are going to be taking a sense of pride in saying, “Royko? Never heard of him!”

All I know is that I seriously doubt anybody will be dredging up anything I (or 99 percent of the rest of the populace that tries to claim themselves to be writers for a living) ever wrote some two decades after my own eventual demise.

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Emanuel the political bully who wants more muscle to beat on opponents

There’s something people should know about the kind of individuals who get involved in campaigns and electoral politics – they’re really not interested in having a ‘good fight’ with the best man prevailing on Election Day.

They want the blowout. They want the massive victory. They think in terms of punishment for any candidate who has the nerve to take them on by putting their own names on the ballot.

POLITICAL PEOPLE ALL too often identify with the schoolyard bully who gets a couple of equally thuggish friends to back him up as they terrorize the other kids!

I don’t care what kind of high-minded rhetoric they spew or what ideological stands they take. Deep down, they resent the idea that they have to spend time and effort trying to appeal to the masses so as to get just enough votes to win themselves re-election.

To me, that concept was reinforced in my mind this week with what seems to be a pair of endorsements that Mayor Rahm Emanuel will claim to have as he runs down the clock toward the Feb. 24 municipal elections.

Former Mayor Richard M. Daley had his law firm issue a letter this week where he made it clear he supports Emanuel’s bid for re-election to another four-year term. While the Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday that the Feb. 19 presidential announcement of a national park being developed at the Pullman factory site is timed so that Obama himself can make it clear he, too, supports his one-time chief of staff to continue as mayor.

THE VARIOUS POLLS show that none of the individual candidates running for mayor this year come close to having the amount of voter support that Emanuel has.

It is conceivable that enough of the still-undecided voters  will wind up siding with Emanuel on Election Day that he will take that “50 percent, plus 1” of votes so as to win the mayoral election outright.

None of that namby-pamby talk of a run-off election come April 7 for the mayor’s office.

I suspect at this point it is a matter of political ego that Emanuel wants to win the election outright as soon as possible. Hence, he digs out the “big guns” of the Chicago political scene to help sway as much support to himself as possible.

DALEY TO APPEAL to the remnants of the white working class ethnic parts of the city who have no real objection to “machine” politics (because it’s just the whiners and wimps who don’t get their share), while Obama to make just enough of the African-American segment of the electorate not take either Jesus “Chuy” Garcia or Willie Wilson seriously.

In short, to let Chicago know who the local “top dog” truly is – which may also be a reason that Obama may never establish a physical presence back in Chicago once his presidency ends in 2017.

Because all we’d get is the sight of a former president having to get in line and wait his turn for the local political establishment to let him have anything he might desire in the future.

But for now, he and Daley can be the thuggish presence watching over the schoolyard playground that is Chicago, giving a glance to all the kids to remind them of how bad things can happen to those who have the nerve not to back Rahm.

EMANUEL WILL PULL out all the political stops, because he wants as overwhelming an electoral victory as possible – and not just because it will make him out to be an even bigger player on the national political scene.

The all-dominant Rahm who resembles “Boss Jr.” (because the real boss, regardless of what Kelsey Grammer’s one-time television series about Chicago politics may say, is Richard J. Daley).

What kind of real boss manages to win by a slim margin of victory?


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Taking the lead on firearms? Or being impatient? Emanuel needs to relax

After learning that Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants the City Council to approve an ordinance banning firearms as a way of prodding the Illinois General Assembly to take action, I couldn’t help but wonder if Hizzoner wishes he could do this with every issue.

The state Legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn can’t get its act together and agree on a new law that would permit a Chicago casino? Cut out the middle-man (a.k.a., the state) and have the council approve that desired lakefront palace of gambling that could take in the losings of its patrons.

WITH THE CITY taking a significant share of the gross receipts as its cut!

Of course, that can’t happen. The precedent is all there that the state is the lead government entity on that issue.

Which, on a side note, is one of the inaccuracies of the now-cancelled television program “Boss” – where actor Kelsey Grammer’s “Mayor Kane” character unilaterally came up with a casino idea to bail the city out of a financial crisis caused by aldermen who were anxious to make Kane look weak and ridiculous.

But back to reality, which is always more bizarre than anything any of us could dream up in our minds.

ANYBODY WHO SERIOUSLY thinks the rhetoric we’re likely to get hit with on Monday (the date that Emanuel says he will offer us some specifics about what he is considering) is dreaming.

It will be nothing but partisan rhetoric. We’re going to have to wait for the Legislature to decide what will happen. This issue will have to play out at the Statehouse – rather than at City Hall.

Or even at the Thompson Center state government building, where in recent days it has been suggested that all those basement fast-food joints and cheap stores on the first floor be converted into a casino – with the state agency offices remaining in place on the upper floors.

That idea may be the only one more ridiculous than the idea that Chicago can concoct its own firearms-related ordinance.

EMANUEL WENT AROUND this week saying, “waiting is not my strong suit” as justification for his attempt to force the issue to be addressed. Which makes me wonder in what political world he has been living?

For the whole concept of electoral politics is about “hurry up and wait.” I wonder at times whether government or the military is more inefficient when it comes to this inability to live by a clock.

Things happen at their own political rate, which usually is dictated by the fear many elected officials will have of doing something that is necessary – but not necessarily popular.

Such as Quinn, who is going to take his hits for pension funding reform if it doesn’t happen (he’s inept) or even if it does (he’s hurting retirees).

ON GUN CONTROL, the issue is even worse because everybody is convinced that the momentum favors them. It’s not quite as bad as those German soldiers of the Second World War with their “Gott Mit Uns” (translated as “God is with us”) belt buckles.

But there are those who are convinced that the federal appeals court ruling that requires Illinois to reconsider its opposition to “concealed carry” means that all firearms restrictions are on the way out.

They will counter those who believe that incidents such as the two dozen-plus people killed in a Newtown, Conn., public school and the Bakersfield, Calif., incident on Thursday in which a student with a shotgun managed to wound a fellow student create an environment in which people want more firearms restrictions.

This is going to be a cultural clash at the political level, and I’m not about to predict how it will turn out – other than to say that Emanuel’s going to find himself having severe headaches if he thinks he can singlehandedly change the political tide.

THE MAN NEEDS to relax! I’d suggest following baseball, except that he being the North Side-type creature that he is, he’d turn to the Chicago Cubs.

That’s a more nerve-wracking experience than anyone should have to voluntarily endure.

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EXTRA: News broadcasters finding employment (still) in entertainment

Watching the Friday night episode of “Boss,” I couldn’t help but get a kick out of the sight of Nancy Pender playing the part of a television reporter.

She was, after all, a 13-year veteran of WFLD-TV until she was let go in a cost-cutting measure a couple of years ago.

NOT LIKE PENDER playing a reporter asking questions of Kelsey Grammer’s “Mayor Tom Kane” character is anything unique.

It reminded me of that Harrison Ford film from a couple of decades ago based on “The Fugitive” television series, where real-life television reporters played the part of reporters in the film.

Broadcasters such as WBBM-TV’S Pam Zekman and John Drummond. “The Bulldog” lives on in cinema – as does the sight of Roland Burris as a “Chicago politician” trying to look Irish in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

Or that firefighter film “Backdraft” that used one-time WLS-TV reporter/anchor Joan Esposito on a television set in the background. Or an episode of “The West Wing” that had WMAQ-TV’s Warner Saunders read copy on a television set in the background that was relevant to the political plotline of that episode.

BUT AS FOR “Boss,” tt intrigues me the way this program attempts to bear some resemblance to the real Chicago. Such as having Pender’s face and voice appear on camera. Even though some of its moments are so overly-hyped as to be ludicrous. Such as an alderman being arrested and incarcerated at a moment when her vote in the City Council was crucial. Or that same vote ending in a brawl ordered by "da Mare" himself on the City Council floor.

But I will be watching in coming weeks as the program works its way through a second season (I also am among those who purchased the DVD package of episodes for the first season).

To what devious extremes will Grammer’s character go to hide his rapidly-becoming-more obvious (and soon-to-be fatal) illness?

And just how many times will we get to see actress Kathleen Robertson (who plays a now-disgraced former mayoral aide) be nude this season. She kept her streak alive in Friday’s episode – albeit in about as unerotic a moment as possible for such a beautiful blonde woman.

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Getting spun by newsmakers something we watch out for, but it happens anyway

I must confess to squirming just a bit too much Friday night when I saw the latest episode of “Boss,” the new drama created by the Starz cable television network that stars actor Kelsey Grammer as a character who just happens to be the mayor of Chicago.

Television too real for comfort?



Now like any other television program (or cinematic effort, for that matter), liberties are taken with facts. Things happen in the Chicago political world of Grammer’s “Tom Kane” character that don’t happen in the world of Rahm Emanuel or the Daleys – no matter how craven you believe politics to be.

YET THERE WAS one moment in the most recent episode that made me downright uncomfortable – because the Chicago newsman in me (it will be 25 years in the business come May of 2012) knows it is too true.

The underlying storyline of the episode was that a “scandal” had come out involving the Kane character approving the dumping of chemicals more than two decades ago at a site without regard to what pollution resulted.

The end result is that the water supply of suburban Bensenville is now poisoned.

We get to see how Kane’s staffers plot a strategy to get them through the next three days of news coverage while shifting the focus of the story away from the mayor.

IN SHORT, THE story should be how Bensenville is coping with tainted water, rather than on who caused the water to be tainted in the first place.

At one point, a mayoral aide calls up a television reporter and throws out hints that Bensenville residents are panicking by looking to sell their homes. That night, one station does a story about the panicking.

Another station is given a “tip” by the mayoral aides that bottled water is in short supply at area stores. THAT becomes the focus of another station’s report.

We get the sight during the episode of a mayoral aide literally erasing the call letters of individual Chicago television stations (fictional versions, of course) on a giant board as stations, one-by-one, shift the focus of the story from “Chicago” to “Bensenville.”

IT MADE ME squirm because it struck me as being too real. Because all too often, reporter-type people wind up “playing along” with the way news gets “staged” for public consumption.

There are times when we wind up feeling that calling the political people on such staging would somehow be the equivalent of letting our own personal opinions intervene in coverage – which is THE Cardinal Sin of the news reporting business.

Yet it makes us all too capable at times of being little more than stenographers for the political people whose actions we’re supposed to be holding up to public scrutiny.

A part of me couldn’t help but note the Cook County Board, which on Friday did something for-real far less sordid than the fictional Kane staff did. But spin-worthy in its own effort, nonetheless.

THAT WAS THE day the county board  approved its budget for the upcoming fiscal year. They managed to reduce the number of people who will have to be laid off in order to cut expenses enough to stay within the $2.9 billion the county expects to have for Fiscal ’12.

At the end of the day (they spent seven hours going through every agency to find areas where cuts, transfers and other financial dickering could be accomplished), some 280 people were saved from unemployment. Their layoff notices will be rescinded.

County officials spent the end of the day patting themselves on the back (likely before heading for a tavern for a belt or two) for their actions. Even though several hundred people are still going to lose their jobs. Which means the cantankerous county Commissioner William Beavers, D-Chicago, may well have been the most honest person in the room when he repeatedly complained about the budget in saying that many people would still get laid off.

It wasn’t even just that one moment.

THERE HAVE BEEN many instances where people gave me information whose public disclosure served them well. The spin they tried to put on those factual tidbits made them look good (or, more often, made someone else look absolutely ridiculous).

It is the “golden” rule I keep in mind to take into consideration whether or not the information getting out actually has some significant purpose for the general public. Or is it truly nothing more than self-serving?

Because I will be the first to admit that having people get information to me serves a professional benefit to myself. There are times when I feel like I use these people as much as they are using me.

It all becomes a balancing act, and I only hope that I haven’t completely screwed up on occasion in letting the scale go out of whack.

WHICH IS WHY I find it ridiculous to hear conservative ideologues rant and rage about “liberal” bias. We get used way too often by the government establishment to truly be thought of as “the opposition.”

“Unwitting accomplice” may be more accurate a phrase – which was something “Boss” hit upon too close for my comfort.

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