EXTRA: No Opening Day for Trump? How little Taft, W. Bush, other presidents must think of The Donald

I can’t help but think that somewhere, George W. Bush is sneering at President Donald J. Trump for taking a pass on what may be one of the biggest public perks of being president of the United States.

Trump falling short of century-old baseball tradition

Being the guy who gets to kick off the entire baseball season by throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of the game

NOW THAT LITERALLY didn’t happen, as Trump wasn’t present in St. Louis for the Cardinals’ season opener Sunday against the Chicago Cubs. But he was invited to be at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., on Monday, when the Washington Nationals start the 2017 season against the Florida Marlins.

Yet Trump turned down the “first pitch” duties. He claimed to be too busy to take to the pitcher's mound and toss a ball 60-feet, six inches without bouncing it.

Too busy?!?

There has been a part of me that always suspected that for Bush, the younger, being able to be the president and do first pitch duties was his favorite part of being president.

CONSIDERING THAT ONE of the few times Bush got unilateral respect as president was when he did threw the ceremonial first pitch at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series – which came just weeks following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City – it’s no wonder he’d feel that way.

Does anyone seriously think Trump will get ...

First pitch duties are a presidential task going back to the days of William Howard Taft, who way back during his presidency in the days when the Chicago Cubs were worthy of being taken seriously was a regular site at Griffith Stadium for Washington Senators games.

In fact, the most memorable baseball artifact I remember seeing when the Baseball Hall of Fame had a traveling exhibit across the country a few years ago was the extra-large seat that accommodated Taft’s 300-pound-plus frame when he watched ballgames.

Even Barack Obama carried out first pitch duties – despite the criticism it created of his weak left-handed tosses that clearly revealed his top game personally was basketball.

... a baseball card like either Bush or Obama?

YET TRUMP, WHO played prep school baseball and has tried claiming he was a possible prospect for the Philadelphia Phillies, couldn’t be bothered. It’s putting him in the same category as Jimmy Carter – who famously (among baseball fans) only attended one ballgame as president.

The final game of the 1979 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and Baltimore Orioles, where players gave him grief for taking long enough (he had already been president for three years) to get out to a game.

Is that destined to be Trump’s sporting fate? Is he so afraid of being boo’ed by fans (Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos said he had no interest in seeing Trump doing duties at his Camden Yards ballpark) that he’ll just skip baseball altogether.

Meaning he won’t get his place on a baseball bubblegum card (which as Lucy from the Peanuts comic strips once said was the mark of what is truly important in life).

 

Making Taft look slim

WE WON’T GET to see for ourselves whether there are traces of him ever having played ball (W. Bush showed he probably really was once a pitcher for Yale, while his father, H.W. Bush, played first base for the Bulldogs a couple of generations earlier). Or the idea that Trump really follows a team the way Obama did as the "first fan" of the White Sox.

And it means that Trump had better get used to more magazine covers like the one that the New Yorker recently created – a cartoon image of a very unflattering side of Trump trying to play golf on the White House lawn but looking more like a Japanese sumo wrestler.

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Illinois no longer a bellwether state; Chicago too dominant for that to be true

The Washington Post let it be known Wednesday that when it comes to the Great Lakes states, they’re going to be paying attention to Ohio. The Land of Lincoln and its likely Election Day results just won’t be of enough intrigue.

Illinois would have had "President Hughes' in '16

Which is interesting in its own right, because it wasn’t all that long ago that Illinois was considered to be a state totally in line with the mood of the nation.

AS IN ONE could get a good sense of how a national election (actually, a collection of 50 state elections for national office) would turn out by paying attention to Illinois.

Just as political observers now say that a Republican can’t win if he can’t take the state of Ohio, it used to be that a presidential candidate can’t win if he can’t take Illinois.

Literally during the 20^th Century, Illinois and its Electoral College representatives were almost always aligned with the person who actually won the presidential election.

The sole exceptions were in 1916 when Illinoisans preferred the idea of Republican Charles Hughes over that of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. And then again in 1976 when Illinois voters would just as soon have legitimized the idea of “President Gerald Ford” by giving him his own full term, rather than letting Democrat Jimmy Carter in office.

IN SHORT, ILLINOIS used to have a legitimate Republican Party. While Chicago was controlled by Democratic Party politicians, the rest of the state was significant enough to put up an Election Day fight!

And in cases where Chicago Democrats just couldn’t get all that enthused, the rest of the state could deliver Illinois to the Republican candidate.

Or in cases such as 1972 when Democrat George McGovern was just so incapable of capturing the nation’s mood that even Cook County went Republican and Richard Nixon won re-election with 59 percent of Illinois’ vote.

 

... and would never have had 'President Carter' in '76

None of this is capable of happening any longer, and it is a large part of why Election Days just don’t have the same thrill from a local perspective in this state.

THE FACT IS that Chicago metro (as opposed to the city proper) now dominates about two-thirds of the state’s population. Meaning the rural parts are just too small a segment for the Republican candidate to get anything from Illinois.

Democratic partisans may boast and say the reason Donald Trump’s presidential bid hasn’t spent more time in this state is because he’s scared – after all, he tried coming to Chicago back in May only to have his loud, obnoxious followers shouted down by the real majority.

The reality is we’re not seeing Trump because it’s not worth his time and effort to campaign much here. This state will give its 20 Electoral College votes to Hillary Clinton come the date in December when they formalize the results of the Nov. 8 elections.

Which also means that no one talks anymore about how Illinois is symbolic of the national mood when it comes to political concerns. Now, all we’ll hear about is speculation about Ohio, and how a Trump victory there means he may well be just strong enough to actually win the general election.

IF ANYTHING, WE’RE the one Great Lakes state that is a shoo-in (unless you regard Indiana as a GOP lock, although Democrats in the Hoosier State have their delusions of winning come November).

The rest of the country will not care much about watching us here. There’s no political suspense.

Unless, by chance there was a Trump victory in Illinois, which would mean possibly that the Aztecs were off by four years when they predicted the End of the World come Dec. 21, 2012.

Or maybe the world really did end, and the fact that we’re now taking people like Trump with his boorish behavior seriously is evidence of that fact!

  -30-

Is Pat Quinn destined to become the “Jimmy Carter” of Illinois governors?

Admittedly, the hard-core conservative ideologues refuse to accept the premise that Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential public service was of great significance. Yet the bulk of us do see that, and the label of “best retired president” is often used to describe him.

QUINN: Post-gov success?

Why do I wonder if former Gov. Pat Quinn has the potential to achieve a similar status within the Illinois political world?

THE SPECULATION WAS provoked last week when Quinn made some public appearances, including one at the University of Illinois’ Urbana campus – where amongst other things he said he has no intention of running for office again.

But he does want to continue to work on “consumer issues.”

There are those who are convinced that of course Quinn will run again. Whether it be another attempt to become governor come the 2018 election cycle, or perhaps a bid for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois – should Richard Durbin decide to step down (itself not likely).

I have to admit that anything is possible. The fact is that between serving a term as Illinois comptroller and becoming governor upon the impeachment of Rod Blagojevich, there was a 14-year period in which Quinn was a perennial candidate.

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR AND U.S. Senate, on several occasions. He never had money to run a serious campaign, and certainly never had the backing of the political party (which would have wished he would just wither away into insignificance).

But Quinn always felt his populist views gave him something to say to the public; even if they always pissed off the politicos to the point where I’m sure many older Democrats were pleased to see him lose his re-election bid last year as payback for all the times he trashed their viewpoints on various issues throughout the years.

RAUNER: Could Quinn top him, long-term?

So the fact that he’s now in his early 60s without a significant campaign fund to fall back on and many Democrats pleased that Quinn is now part of the past isn’t going be enough to discourage him if he does get the whim to run for office in the future.

Some are already joking about whether Quinn can fall farther down the political reputation path than has Roland Burris – who went from being a credible gubernatorial candidate in 1994 to being the guy whose interim appointment to the U.S. Senate became the butt of Saturday Night Live sketches.

BUT WHAT IF Quinn really follows the consumer advocate route? Literally going back to his roots. If he had never become governor (winning a term in his own right back in 2010), he still would be remembered within political circles as the guy who created the Citizens Utility Board.

Quinn reduced this legislative chamber by one-third some 33 years ago

And also the guy who led the effort that resulted in the early 1980s reduction of the General Assembly from 236 to 177 members – which may have eliminated the concept of Chicago Republicans and central Illinois Democrats from the Legislature, but also gave us far fewer blowhards holding elective office (always a plus).

Could it be that Quinn winds up creating a new consumer group that winds up taking the lead of provoking change within our political people? At the very least, it would mean many more Sundays of Quinn press conferences to garner attention on the weekend television newscasts (and those Monday morning newspapers).

Quinn reverting to that gadfly role, being the pest who constantly points out the flaws of our politicos. It could be that the best thing Quinn does for Illinois is revert back to his natural role.

BECAUSE WE’RE FAR from a perfect place in Illinois – although anybody who seriously thinks Indiana, Wisconsin or any surrounding state is significantly better than ours is nothing but delusional.

CARTER: A Quinn role-model?

I found it interesting that Quinn advocated the need for term limits – an issue that Gov. Bruce Rauner also is pushing. Although I get the sense that Rauner’s efforts are meant to build a Legislature of lackeys who would follow his every whim.

Could Quinn become the guy who provides a legitimate measure to reduce the likelihood of individuals gaining too much political influence solely to seniority?

Now I don’t see Quinn winning anything the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for peace that Carter’s post-presidential service garnered. Although it could be a key to people someday seeing what a mistake their 2014 gubernatorial vote (or lack thereof) truly was!

  -30-

Out with the old on political scene, White and Carter keep busy into old age

Listening to a 90-year-old Jimmy Carter talk Thursday morning about the treatment he will start receiving for minuscule (but still deadly) cancerous spots on his brain couldn’t help but remind me of that election cycle nearly 40 years ago when the man from Plains (as in Georgia) became our president.

From 1976, when Mayor Daley gave Jimmy Carter a less-than-stellar election effort

To be honest, Carter prevailed because the stink of Watergate hovered over the nation – leaving a lot of people turned off to the political party of Richard Nixon.

ANYBODY WHO WON the Democratic primary was likely to win the general election in that Bicentennial year.

Amongst our own local political trivia, it ought to be noted that 1976 was one of the fluke years.

It was one of only two election cycles during the 20^th Century (1916 was the other) in which someone managed to win a presidential election WITHOUT taking Illinois.

In what was Cook County “Boss” Richard J. Daley’s last election cycle on the national stage (he died one month later), Illinois’ votes in the Electoral College went to then-incumbent President Gerald R. Ford.

MAKING THE LAND of Lincoln one of the few places that actually did vote to have Ford as our nation’s chief executive.

Carter took only 53 percent of the vote in Cook County, meaning all the rest of the state (outside of a few sparsely-populated Southern Illinois counties) was able to gang up on Chicago and put the state into the Republican column.

The reports back then indicated that Daley didn’t think much of the idea of a Southerner like Carter, and doubted he had much appeal to working-class Chicago. Which resulted in the lackluster effort by the political organization to turn out the vote.

There also were the reports about how Daley felt insulted at the Democratic National Convention that year when his big public moment was to attend a press conference with Miss Lillian – as in Jimmy Carter’s mother.

CONSIDERING SHE WAS the one with the sassy personality, it would have made the aging Daley come across like the grouchy ol’ man from Bridgeport – telling the kids to keep off his lawn.

Or perhaps to have the cops parked on the block to keep watch on his bungalow do it for him?

WHITE: Will he finally retire come '18?

But Carter went on to win his one term in office – one that still gives the conservative ideologues material for their rants and rages. So much that those who felt compelled to use Fox News Channel websites to read the story to make crude insults about the man!

Back in those days when Carter and Daley were at the top of the pecking order, one of the lower-rungs was Jesse White, who had just finished serving his first term representing a piece of Chicago in the Illinois House of Representatives.

AN OFFICE HE held through 1993 – when he got himself elected to what locally was a higher post; Cook County recorder of deeds.

Then, in the 1998 elections, White won the post that was supposed to allow him to retire on top – he became Illinois secretary of state at age 64. A term there, and he could go out in style.

Except that White has managed to keep that post through five terms. Although he said Thursday he has no intention of running for term number six come the 2018 election cycle. Retirement for White would come at age 84.

Although I found it interesting to learn he intends to remain active by continuing to operate the Jesse White Tumblers, the gymnastics group that tries to give inner-city youth something to do.

JUST AS HOW Carter told reporter-types he wants to be able to think he can carry on with his charitable works even while receiving his medical treatments.

Some people just seem to want to keep busy. Which may be why they are remembered long after most of us are forgotten?

  -30-

For what it is worth, following is a commentary I wrote for United Press International from Springfield, Ill., at the end of Jesse White’s first week in January 1999 of what could wind up being his 20-year return to the Illinois Statehouse scene.

Around the Statehouse

White’s Statehouse ‘return’ well-received

By GREGORY TEJEDA

SPRINGFIELD, Ill., Jan. 18 (UPI) – When Jesse White gave up an Illinois House seat and a career in state government in 1992 to be a Cook County government official, he was following the Chicago rulebook about moving up in politics.

But the Cook County recorder of deeds return last week to the Statehouse scene made him one of Illinois’ most popular politicians these days.

“I’m glad to be home,” White, 64, says of his return to the state payroll when he was sworn in as Illinois secretary of state.

Democrats routinely gave him enthusiastic rounds of applause and cheers during his public appearances last week. Even Republicans are on the White bandwagon.

Part of the appeal is the bipartisan political rhetoric that flowed through Springfield last week. Once the General Assembly and state government has to start doing things for people, the blatant praise will pass.

White’s popularity from Democrats is due to the party’s lack of anyone holding a state constitutional office during the past four years.

Now, a Democrat controls the agency that has many jobs around Illinois and deals with licensing motorists – the function that brings most people into routine contact with state government.

“He’s looking mighty good up there,” state Rep. Art Turner, D-Chicago. Noted during legislative inauguration ceremonies where White presided. “It’s nice to have one of our own in a position of power.”

But White’s record of community service, including the nearly 40 years that he has headed the Jesse White Tumblers gymnastics team and other work he has done to benefit inner-city kids in Chicago, also is a factor.

It is hard for even the most cynical political observer to bad-mouth someone with White’s social work background. One Statehouse observer says White, “already was an American hero. Now, he’s an American hero with 1,000 patronage jobs.”

One should not doubt that White knows how to do politics. Already, he is arranging to put failed lieutenant governor nominee Mary Lou Kearns on his state payroll.

White also is playing the Chicago political game, trying to influence the choice of his successor as recorder of deeds.

White is backing Darlena Williams-Burnett, the wife of a Chicago alderman, even though Cook County Board President John Stroger and other officials prefer state Rep. Eugene Moore, D-Maywood.

White also became the first newly-elected pol to create a mini-scandal of sorts by offering a key financial post in the Illinois secretary of state’s office – and its $70,000 annual salary – to his daughter, Glenna.

But political observers are putting all that aside. Many are recalling White’s cooperation and willingness to support newly-elected colleagues during his 16 years in the Illinois House.

He’s close enough to them that state Rep. Joel Brunsvold, D-Milan, quips White can still be used by the Illinois House softball team, which has not been able to beat the state Senate team in years.

White played baseball in the Chicago Cubs minor league system in the 1960s, and remains athletic. But it is his Cubs connection that led to what was the closest to a hostile comment made about White all last week.

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan – speaking like the life-long Chicago Sout’ Sider that he is – says, “the only mistake (White) ever made in his life was to play with the Cubs, instead of the White Sox.”

  -0-

Copyright 1999 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

What should we think of Haiti?

I realize it is the way of political people to try to make themselves appear to be on top of every possible issue.

Yet I got my chuckle the other night when in my e-mail turned up an announcement from Cook County Board President Todd Stroger, informing me and everybody else he felt the need to notify about the county’s relief efforts intended for the people of Haiti.

THAT CARIBBEAN ISLAND nation suffered a severe earthquake earlier this week that you have to be a virtual shut-in to have avoided hearing anything about. Of course, some people are complaining about the degree to which they are hearing things, wishing they could shut themselves off from the suffering taking place there.

But seeing the big bold red typeface telling me Stroger to kick off Cook County Haitian relief effort made me wonder how desperate is Todd for votes if he’s trying to put himself at the head of the pack – since he was the first Chicago-area politico (to my knowledge) to take a public stand on Haiti.

Then again, I’m surprised it took our local political people until Wednesday night before they started issuing statements trying to make themselves appear to be aligned with the needs of Haiti – a nation that many of them usually try to ignore. Life won't be anywhere near this idylic in Port-au-Prince for a long time. Photograph provided by Library of Congress collection.

Now I shouldn’t complain.

IT IS NICE that Cook County government is cooperating with activists and other people in Chicago’s population of Haitian ethnic descent to put together some sort of relief effort to help people who are trying to dig through the rubble for survivors – while also helping those people above-ground to rebuild their lives.

They probably had very little to begin with, and now have managed to lose even that. It is a shame that eventually, another news story will come along to sweep Haiti out of the public eye because it likely will take years for the island nation to rebuild itself.

But locally at this point, I would guess that Stroger is looking for every possible vote source he can find in hopes of putting together the magical “30 percent” level of support that would theoretically enable him to win a four-way primary for county president.

So trying to be on top of the Haitian situation could help in terms of gaining votes from those Haitian people now living here (about 40,000 estimated out of the 2.9-something million population of Chicago as a whole).

IF IT READS like I’m being crass or cynical, perhaps it is just the mood of the candidates these days that is rubbing off on me. Anybody who believes that political people always behave altruistically is being naïve. And I’m not trying to imply that it is just Stroger who can have political motives.

Even President Barack Obama is on top of the Haiti situation now – saying Thursday that their situation ought to be a “top priority” for federal government agencies. Our nation is pledging at least $100 million in aid, with more likely to follow up in the near future.

Former President Bill Clinton, who would like to someday displace Jimmy Carter in the informal title of “Greatest Ex-President ever,” got his name in the news by saying people should make cash donations to relief agencies if they truly want to help. Which is why I took notice of a CNN Headline News report that gave a “voice” to people who were angry about so much attention being paid to Haiti.

It seems like the economic struggles of our nation for the past year have so many people feeling like they have too many problems of their own in order to afford to make any kind of donation.

COULD IT BE that these appeals for aid from political people will wind up causing some resentment that will cost them votes on future Election Days? I can appreciate that some people don’t like to be made to feel guilty about their inability to give.

Or will they just take it out on the so-called “liberal news media” for exaggerating the significance of the situation in Haiti – although I’d argue it is difficult to “exaggerate” the destruction caused by a 7.0 Richter Scale earthquake that may have killed at least 100,000 people.

Unless someone is truly callous enough to think that a crisis in Haiti isn’t worth our attention because it’s only Haiti. I’d like to give our society more credit and that the complaining isn’t due to that kind of reasoning.

But then again, maybe that’s just me being naïve.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: You can find just about every ethnicity in Chicago, although the Haitian community isn’t (http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF2002/Valbrun/Valbrun.html) exactly a dominant part of the (http://cbs2chicago.com/local/haiti.earthquake.chicago.2.1422309.html) Second City’s culture.

People can make a $10 donation to the Red Cross through their cellphones (http://www.state.gov/p/wha/ci/ha/earthquake/index.htm), although more significant donations can be made (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2007/impact/) through various groups.