Is the presence of Democratic Socialists in City Council really much change?

The concession by Deb Mell of her defeat for re-election to her City Council seat (the one held previously by her father since 1975) has some speculating about the significant change our aldermen will undergo.

RAMIREZ-ROSA: Head of new 'caucus?'

Particularly with the fact that this means there will now be six (out of 50) of the city’s aldermen choosing to use the political label of “Democratic Socialists” to identify themselves – rather than straightforward Democrats.

YET I CAN’T really see significant change in the ways of the City Council. Other than that there may be a few more loudmouths willing to refuse to speak in lock-step with the desires of the mayor.

Then again, with this new mayor who will take over May 20, these not-quite Democrats may well wind up being Lori Lightfoot’s biggest allies. Unless they decide they just want to be outspoken opponents of anybody who happens to be mayor.

Much of my own feeling about the idea of Democratic Socialists in the City Council is based on the fact that most of these so-called radicals (five of the six) are going to be members of the Latino caucus.

Jeannette Taylor, the new alderman of the city’s 20^th Ward on the South Side, is an African-American woman. She’s the lone exception.

OTHERWISE, THIS DEMOCRATIC Socialist movement appears to be something that is a part of the Latino segment of Chicago. It could mean that paying attention to the Latino caucus will be the thing to do for individuals who want to see government officials who can’t get along.

GARCIA: If they challenge Chuy, that's radical

Yet that isn’t a radical idea.

If anything, the idea that Latino politicos aren’t a single, unified voice is nothing new at all. It is the reason why Latino political power and influence isn’t anywhere near as strong in Chicago as it should be.

The city’s Latino political people have always been something to be split into two groups – known informally as the Daley-type aldermen and the activist-type aldermen.

BASICALLY, THERE WERE those people of Latino ethnic origins who made the effort to become a part of the city’s government establishment – figuring that to become part of the system would ensure that the Spanish-speaking enclaves those officials represent would get their fair share of the municipal pie.

MELL: No more!

They were the ones who would ally themselves with the former Mayors Daley and be supportive – figuring that they weren’t a strong-enough entity on their own to be able to resist.

Then there were the activist types – the ones who figured that being too close to the Daley or their backers would merely prevent them from trying to advance their own goals for their communities.

If anything, watching the Latino caucus throughout the years has always been an adventure in political infighting, and seeing how the two groups would try to undermine each other’s efforts. Come Elections Day, they’d each be endorsing opponents to the other side – with hopes they could knock off some incumbents and shift the balance to their side.

NOW, IT WOULD seem that some people who would have been outspoken proponents of this latter-type group are giving themselves the formal label of Democratic Socialists – which, simply put, believes in the social freedoms of Democracy while thinking that the business principles of capitalism undermines any effort to achieve a Democratic society

Although there are times I wonder if the people who spew such rhetoric have merely spent too much time in their youths wearing those t-shirts with pictures of Che Guevara on them – without truly comprehending who Che was or what he meant.

I also think that those people who focus too intently on the “socialist” part of the label are missing the point – as I suspect the real Communists of the world would view the Democratic Socialists as the ultimate hostile enemy.

So is Socialism spreading to City Hall? Most likely, not really!

IT’S MORE LIKE the outspoken portion of the Latino caucus has given itself a new label, and has one ally amongst the council’s Black caucus. As far as the partisan split of the technically non-partisan aldermen, it is one Republican (Anthony Napolitano) along with the six (incumbent Carlos Ramirez Rosa, 35^th Ward, Daniel La Spata, 1^st Ward, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25^th Ward, 33^rd Ward, who beat Mell, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez, Andre Vasquez, 40^th Ward, and Taylor) Democratic Socialists.

Still likely to be the same nonsense at City Hall

Which means that 43 of the aldermen still identify themselves as standard-issue Democrats. Most of whom can’t “play nice” with each other – meaning the City Council still has potential for political chaos, just like usual.

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EXTRA: Rauner, forever bitter?

“I am very scared for the people of Illinois. I believe that the folks who put Illinois into a financial quagmire are now back in complete control of the government. The policies that have created the financial mess for the state of Illinois are now the policies that will be dominating completely without any resistance whatsoever.”
--Bruce Rauner, Illinois governor, 2015-19

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RAUNER: Still peeved about electoral loss

Bruce Rauner let it be known this week that he’s not about to take the high road politically with regards to his Election Day loss earlier this month.

While Rauner wasn’t ready (still) to say much of anything about how President Donald Trump and his presence impacted the soon-to-be-former governor politically, he’s going to forever go about trashing the Democrats whom he seems to want to believe have a whole lot of nerve for challenging him in the first place.

PERSONALLY, I’M INCLINED to view the issue as one where a whole lot of Illinois people voted the way they did to replace Rauner because they saw all his politically partisan actions as the reason why our state’s financial problems got exacerbated into a calamity of historic proportions. They were “very scared” of “four more years” of partisan-motivated nothingness within our government.

Not that the actions of Rauner should have been shocking. This was a man who campaigned back in 2014 on the idea that he wanted to undermine the influence of organized labor in our government, and that IT was to blame for not kowtowing to the self interests of business and corporate America.

Of course, considering the fact that we in Illinois have a state Legislature with leadership who are protective of working people and their interests, the activity of the past few years shouldn’t have been at all surprising.

The only real shock, if you think about it, is that Rauner (who had never before held political office) ever got elected in the first place. Although that’s most likely due to apathy felt about then-Gov. Pat Quinn, and a not-so-realistic thought that ANYBODY who replaced him would be better.

NOW, WE KNOW that we were deluded in our political apathy, and took the first chance we could get to remove Rauner – regardless of what we truly think of Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker.

I don’t doubt that Republican partisans are peeved about the Election Day results in Illinois, although I suspect what really bothers them is the fact that back in 1994 when the GOP managed to take control of all the state constitutional offices and General Assembly, the Republican period of domination only lasted two years.

ROGERS: Not organized, just Democrats

By comparison, this modern-day Democrat domination of Illinois government lasted 12 years, became one of Democrat control for four years, and now has been restored to Democrat domination. It sounds more like political jealousy to me!

And to those people I know who have fantasies of Ronald Reagan-like resuscitation in Illinois, I say to keep in mind the words of Will Rogers, who once said, “the difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal they have to live off each other. While the Republicans, why they live off the Democrats." Perhaps a majority of us were tired of Rauner trying to enrich himself and his business colleagues at the expense of the rest of us.

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What difference does party label make when describing political candidate?

The other day, I was in a place with several government-minded people, most of whom still haven’t gotten over the election of Donald Trump as president.

TRUMP: Does the "D" or "R" really matter?

Although one of them (an elected official herself) tried ending the conversation by remembering that Trump was once registered to vote as a Democrat and, in fact, has offered financial help to Dem candidates in the past.

“LET’S HOPE HE reverts back to his Democratic ideals,” she said.

I must confess, I had to restrain a laugh at the very thought. I have always believed there is a reality about the way in which people identify with political parties that makes their use as political shorthand to describe one’s beliefs a potentially-distorting factor.

People who get involved with government usually identify with the political party that is predominant in their community.

I have no doubt there are many Chicago residents who could easily consider themselves Republicans IF NOT for the fact that the Chicago Republican Party is such a weak, non-existent entity that there’s no practical point to identifying with them.

ONE WOULD GAIN nothing in the way of having allied government officials on their side to get things done. Perhaps it is true that the government task people most care about is something as simple as being issued a new trash can when the old one wears out.

All the rest is politically partisan nonsense.

Keep in mind that I’m not saying there’s anything unique about Chicago. I suspect many of those people who live across the rest of Illinois could easily side with the Democrats IF ONLY there was anything resembling a credible Democratic Party organization in their communities.

PFANNKUCHE: A 'real' Republican?

We vote for candidates we think can do something for us in our daily lives. Only the hard-core ideologues amongst us get into the notion of voting for someone – just think of how irrelevant Jill  Stein of the Green Party turned out to be in the recently-completed presidential election cycle.

IN FACT, IN some cases people wind up getting forced into taking the dominant political party all seriously, largely because the primary elections wind up becoming the ones that determine who actually wind up winning.

The primary winners ultimately wind up running unopposed come general election time, or against fringe candidates who are nothing more than ballot-filler (think of Cook County state’s attorney-elect Kim Foxx’ victory over Republican challenger Christopher E.K. Pfannkuche).

In the case of Donald Trump, it’s no surprise that he wound up having to identify with Democratic government officials regardless of his actual ideological beliefs. He was a Noo Yawker, and one with business interests that required him to make his peace with government officials he may have found personally to be repulsive human beings.

If anything, I always felt his shift to the Republican Party for purposes of this election cycle was a matter of accepting who he really was.

HE RAN A campaign based on attracting the vote of people who were run out of the Democratic Party generations ago. If he had tried to run as a Democrat on the grounds he was going to restore them to the place they once had, they would have laughed themselves silly before winding up voting for someone goofy like Ted Cruz.

So the idea that Donald Trump ever had “Democratic ideals” he could now turn back to? I don’t think so.

If anything, I suspect the real Donald Trump is that wealthy businessman whose financial interests were being restrained by government officials of all persuasions. A part of me wonders if his real interests for ever getting into the election process is that he wanted those officials off his back.

Although I’m sure he’d probably try to phrase it more gently by talking about the need for business-friendly people serving in government (which really means those more than willing to mess with organized labor and working people to bolster some corporate entity’s financial bottom line).

AS FOR WHETHER Trump is really the scary ideologue he portrayed during his campaign, he may not be. Although the fact is that he so eagerly sought out those types of people for political support that he’s now going to have to wear that political label.

Will Trump miss his personalized jet?

Particularly since if he tries to deviate too far from the political trash talk he spewed during the campaign, he’ll find out just how quickly the “far right” will turn on him and make his four-year presidential term an agonizing experience – and not just because he’ll have to live in Washington and fly around on Air Force One rather than a private jet with his own name painted on its fuselage.

One last thought – Trump strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn’t want to be president, but wants to be the guy with money who gets to tell the president what he ought to be doing. The “D” or the “R” after his name doesn’t mean a thing!

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Positioning selves for political ‘pep rallies.’ Or, how can we Dump Trump?

I’ve only been to one presidential nominating convention – the one held in 1996 by the Democrats in Chicago. Based on that experience, I don’t feel compelled to attend another.

 

Will Dem convention be a Hillary-fest?

The problem is that the events are so heavily staged by the presumptive nominees that there is no “drama,” no “suspense.” They really are nothing more than pep rallies – one step up from those high school-staged events to get everybody all revved up for “the big game!”

EXCEPT IN THIS case, the goal is to get political operatives excited enough to go back home and turn out the vote en masse for their preferred political candidate.

Which would make this year’s presidential nominating conventions to be held in Philadelphia and Cleveland all the more important – since this is the year of “Who Do I Hate The Most?!?”

People who bother to cast ballots will be voting against the person whose presence absolutely disturbs them the most. And I don’t doubt that for every person who is absolutely bothered by the existence of Donald Trump in the political realm, there is someone else who feels equally perturbed about the Clintons – and likely has been waiting for years for the chance to vote against the idea of Hillary for president.

Which is why I’m intrigued by the nitpicking that is taking place these days in anticipation of the nominating conventions. People are trying to make sure that there’s something for people to get excited about.

OTHERWISE THE REPUBLICAN gathering in Cleveland, followed by da Dems in Philly, will be deadly dull proceedings filled with neurotic people filled with so much hate for someone else that they probably will scare people away from being interested.

 

Will Bernie Sanders play nice in Philly?

For the Democrats, there has been much speculation about the party platform – which is a formal list of ideals that Democrats claim to stand for, but then wind up ignoring whichever points they happen to disagree with.

For as Will Rogers once said, “Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.”

Democratic political operatives who used their influence to ensure that the Bernie Sanders for president campaign could never go anywhere are now all eager to put together a platform filled with ideals that are “Berned” into the brains of the Vermont senator’s minds – a $15 per hour minimum wage, no death penalty, and prioritizing renewable energy.

 

Is Will Rogers the ultimate political philosopher?

THEY’LL LOOK NICE when written out on paper, but will be largely ignored by Democratic government officials when it comes time to act and create public policy.

It will be a lot of wasted ink being used to write up documents taking stances that no one will make much of an effort to impose – all out of the hopes that the Sanders supporters might actually consider flopping on board with the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Rather than just sitting out this presidential election cycle and fulfilling Trump’s most intense fantasies – which is that his overly-vocal band of followers would actually be enough people to win a national election!

But Trump has his own problems what with all the establishment Republican operatives claiming they’re not going to even bother with the convention.

IT SEEMS THE people who originally fantasized that they could ignore the will of all those primaries held in recent months and pick somebody else to be the GOP nominee for president are still conspiring.

It seems they want to be able to tell Trump who his vice presidential running mate will be. Which might be possible, since so many political people interested in having an electoral future are refusing to be considered. We could seriously wind up with a Republican ticket of Trump and Newt Gingrich – the one-time House speaker who managed in his own way to tick off the ideological nitwits of the world.

 

A tainted taco bowl?

The problem is that most people don’t bother to take the vice president into account, unless they’re using it as a reason to vote against the ticket. Which makes me wonder if the GOP establishment types are engaging in their own conspiracy to Dump Trump – and have a running mate of their preference in place to become “Da Prez!”

Does this mean what Trump needs more than anything else these days is an official food taster to make sure his so-called allies don’t try to taint his taco bowls?

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Kirk gains nothing from the Grand Ol’ Party – at least not this election cycle

Call it the quirkiness of electoral politics. Sometimes it just isn’t one party’s turn, and sometimes the party label that made one attractive one year is a total detriment the next time around.

KIRK: Downplaying his political party

Take Illinois’ Mark Kirk, the junior senator who back in 2010 won largely because he was a Republican. It didn’t matter that his ideological positions weren’t completely in line with the right-wing leadership that has taken over the one-time Party of Lincoln.

IT WAS SUPPOSEDLY a Republican year (Pat Quinn won for governor, regardless), and Kirk won a six-year term in the U.S. Senate.

That term is now approaching its end, and Kirk has the disadvantage of seeking re-election in a year expected to be favorable to Democrats. There’s political speculation that says all Democratic challenger Tammy Duckworth has to do is remind everybody she’s running against a Republican – and a majority will vote for her.

Kirk, who served several terms in the House of Representatives from the North Shore suburbs prior to winning a Senate seat (beating Alexi Giannoulias, remember him?), is downplaying who his political allies are.

Most recently, he let it be known this week he won’t be attending the Republican National Convention to be held this summer in Cleveland. Not that I blame him for thinking there are better places to be than the shores of the Cuyahoga River.

USUALLY A SENATOR would be expected to be among the leaders of his state’s delegation to the convention. It would be the place for him to show off in front of the party leaders who will then go back home and stir up their local voters to get off their duffs come November and vote for Kirk and other Republicans.

But this is going to be the nominating convention that turns into the Donald Trump circus. Or the Ted Cruz affair. Or the evil, twisted plot (if you listen to either Trump or Cruz) by the Republican Party establishment to deprive those men of the political prize for which they have busted their behinds for the past year or so.

It probably makes some sense for Kirk to not bother going. Because all he can do is get dragged into the morass that is the Trump/Cruz show. Nobody would bother to pay attention to anything Kirk said or did in Cleveland. There’s nothing to gain.

 

DUCKWORTH: Not a shoo-in for '22

But it is a sad affair that what should be his primary chance to gain some attention for his campaign and have a chance to become something other than a one-term senator is getting flushed away.

PERHAPS THE IDEOLOGUES amongst the Republicans won’t mind much – after all, they only reluctantly backed Kirk in 2010 because it was the chance to take the Senate seat previously held by Barack Obama himself. Maybe they’ll envision that come 2022, they can find someone more of their own ideological leaning to run for office.

Which may be the key for Duckworth to understand come her own future. She may well win this election cycle. But there’s always the chance (a very good chance, actually) that she’d have to seek re-election in a year where her party label is a hindrance.

She’d better realize that getting elected because of a party label is about as uncertain a political ground as one can stand upon.

Because in the natural order of things, candidates come and go and political parties shift around – particularly at the national level.

BEFORE YOU START complaining about the process, keep in mind that it’s a good thing things shift back and forth. It prevents either political party from becoming too entrenched in power.

Which is totally different from the local political scene, where Chicago has been perpetually Democratic since the days of Anton Cermak and back when Hack Wilson was the big sports star of Chicago.

And where other parts of Illinois have such entrenched Republican structures that there are locals who claim they’ve never met a Democrat.

Perhaps we’d be better off locally if there were a little shakeup periodically.

 

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How Dem are we?

We Ask America is coming out with more polls, trying to document how the electorate may have shifted in recent weeks leading up to Election Day.


If those polls are at all reliable (the only real poll that matters is Election Day proper), it would seem that Illinois is coming back to its roots.


AFTER HAVING SPENT a summer engaged in a fling with Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner, it would seem that we're returning to Mr. Democrat instead. The trend across several races seems to be that Democratic candidates for state and federal offices in Illinois are taking leads, or getting dangerously close to the GOPers who were counting on many Dem voters breaking away from our usual leanings.


Perhaps they think the electorate is the equivalent of a hussy engaging in an affair. But all affairs come to an end, and it seems that Mr. Democrat will be forgiving of his electorate spouse for flirting, so to speak, with the enemy.


That We Ask America poll for the governor's election shows Pat Quinn with a 4-percentage point lead over Rauner -- which is about as big a lead as anyone has had Quinn with (unless you believed that 11-point lead the Chicago Tribune poll gave Quinn a few weeks ago).


Their poll for the U.S. Senate race showed Richard Durbin with a 13-point lead over Republican James Oberweis -- even though the ice cream millionaire seems content to live off the memory of that one poll over a month ago that had him lingering only 6 points behind Durbin.


THERE ALSO WAS the poll for Illinois treasurer, which shows Republican Tom Cross only 1 percent ahead of Democrat Michael Frehrichs -- a state legislator from Champaign and one of the few Dems from outside of Chicago metro to get any attention this election cycle.


One percent for a Chicago no-name is bad. It's within the margin of error. Theoretically, Frehrichs may be leading in reality, but it's too close to show up in the polls. Or maybe he's not.


For Frehrichs to defeat a former leader in the Illinois House of Representatives would truly be sad. This ought to be one of the races in which Republicans actually hold on to what they have (let's not forget the current Treasurer is Dan Rutherford).


But it could be that the large Democratic victory margins of voters coming out of Chicago, along with slightly smaller margins from suburban Cook County (which account for about 45 percent of the state's population) could wind up overcoming all the notions that political operatives have tried to put into our heads that everybody is anxious to try the Republican brand this year, and that Democrats ought to be quaking in their pants.


I'M NOT SURE what we should think of what will happen when the polls close the evening of Nov. 4. It's going to be several close races -- including the fight for governor where Rauner has kicked in tens of millions of dollars of his own money into an effort to buy the political post.


It makes me wonder how irrelevant his campaign would be if he were not so wealthy that he could afford to spend his own money, and actually had to raise it from political supporters like other candidates do.


This is going to remain a Democrat-leaning government for Illinois, regardless of what happens in the top political post (even though technically the top spot on the ballot is the U.S. Senate race).


In fact, it makes me wonder if the person who ought to be concerned is state Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, who could get caught up in the mess of people going out of their way to vote straight Democrat. Sheila Simon's campaign could wind up getting voter support from people who could care less about her personally.


THEN AGAIN, JUDY was always the "crazy aunt" of Republican politics in that she got along with Democrats too, and lived in suburban Riverside. Which makes her yet another Cook Connty resident.


It always made certain Republicans a little queasy about dealing with her, as if they thought she wasn't truly one of them.


But it also makes her one of the few Republicans that Cook County residents are comfortable voting for. That, and the way Simon dissed Quinn for not wanting to continue as his lieutenant governor running mate, probably will be the reason Judy survives the Illinois political scene, even though for many of us she's the "wrong" political party.


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