Obama won't be anybody's V-P. Neither will Hillary

There is one good thing about the back-and-forth criticism taking place in recent days between Democratic presidential dreamers Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton – it puts to rest the dream held by some political observers that the ideal top of the Democratic Party ticket for the 2008 elections is a combination of the two.

That’s President Clinton the Second, with Obama as her running mate. Or would it be President Obama, with the former first lady assuming a subservient position at Barack’s side?

Talk of a Clinton/Obama pairing is wishful thinking at best. The only people who seriously think it will happen are those who really don’t understand the way the American electoral system works. When one thinks about it rationally, the idea is too ridiculous to contemplate.

Now I’m not saying that a president and vice president need to be best of buddies. History has seen pairings of people who could barely tolerate each other. It’s not like anyone in the Kennedy clan initially thought much of the long-time senator from Texas when John F. Kennedy tabbed Lyndon Johnson as his running mate in the 1960 elections.

There also was George Bush the elder’s choice of Dan Quayle as his running mate in 1988, which some political observers claim was motivated by Bush’s desire to have a second-in-command who would not outclass him. It was not because of any serious closeness on the part of the two men.

But JFK and LBJ ultimately developed a mutual respect, and Johnson made pursuit of Kennedy’s goals (including passage of the Civil Rights Act) a priority of his own presidency.

Presidents generally pick a running mate who has some characteristic that differs significantly from him self. The idea is that it allows the pair to appeal directly to a larger number of people.

For youthful Kennedy of Massachusetts, having a Texan like Johnson added a sense of geographic diversity as well as experience, since Johnson already had a historically-significant political career as the Senate’s majority leader.

The old-money, Ivy League Bush the elder gained a Midwesterner who also had family ties to Arizona (Quayle’s extended family owned daily newspapers in Indianapolis and Phoenix).

Even Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, gained from having Al Gore as his running mate in 1992. Although both on the surface were southern white men, Gore was a long-time senator from Tennessee whose father also served in Congress. The family had long-running ties to the Washington political establishment, which Clinton – a long-time Arkansas governor – was seriously lacking.

My point in rehashing this history is to show how a Clinton-Obama/Obama-Clinton ticket wouldn’t work. The two are so similar that the presence of the other adds nothing to the political diversity of the Democrats’ leadership.

What do they have in common?

Both have Chicago ties and are urban in nature. Hillary was raised in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., but now considers herself a New Yorker, while Obama is a Honolulu-raised kid who settled in Chicago after finishing his education. He has lived the bulk of his adult life in the Second City.

Both try to claim rural roots, although it doesn’t seem very legitimate. Obama’s grandparents on his mother’s side of the family were originally from Kansas, although they left that region decades ago and his surviving grandmother is settled in Hawaii. Hillary’s rural ties exist only because she fell so in love with fellow law school student Bill Clinton back in the early 1970s that she followed him to Arkansas, where attention was focused for many years on his political career.

Both of them left home to go east when it came time for college, and both turned to the Ivy League when it came time for law school Following a stint at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama finished a bachelor’s degree at Columbia University in New York and later went to Harvard Law School. Clinton did her undergraduate work at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, then studied at Yale Law School.

To Harvard and Yale alumni, there’s a serious difference between the two. But many of the rest of us see the schools as remarkably similar. For some of us Chicagoans, the names “Harvard,” “Yale” and “Columbia” bring to mind first and foremost a set of streets on the South Side, rather than the names of Ivy League colleges.

The bottom line is that both Obama and Clinton are products of “blue” America, the urban part that rural America remains suspicious of, even though Obama in his now-legendary speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention said he preferred to think, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America, there’s the United States of America.”

Barack and Hillary are just too similar. On paper, they ought to be best friends. But the fact that they are both members of the U.S. Senate from large cities (Chicago vs. New York) who appeal directly to the same kind of Democrat – liberal, urban and overly educated – means they are destined to be rivals.

On some level, Hillary Clinton probably hates the symbolic image that Barack Obama has become – even though she’ll never admit it.

She is the woman who is running the first credible campaign for U.S. president (no, I don’t take Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 bid that seriously). If she were to win, it would be a major advance in equality for women. She is the one woman in a field of men. Yet who gets all the attention?

It’s Barack, who is running the first credible presidential campaign by an African-American person (I take Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids just a bit more seriously than I take Chisholm’s). He has become the liberal darling in the eyes of the public whose campaign is seen as a major advance forward in terms of equality for racial minorities.

Hillary Clinton, who many social conservatives think of as the Queen of all Liberals, is turned into the candidate of the Democratic establishment. She’s the Ivy League lawyer who is forced to appeal to the working class, blue collar elements of the party’s membership because Barack has so clearly usurped her natural liberal constituency.

Instead of being the historic trailblazer, Clinton and Obama are at the center of a brawl these days between female and black Democrats as to which “First” (woman or African-American) is more important.

And if Hillary Clinton actually manages to win both the Democratic nomination for president and the November general election, the LAST thing she wants is to have the image of Obama hanging around.

With Obama present, there will be a faction of Democrats who will remain convinced that the wrong person won. They will merely count down the days until a Clinton presidency ended and Obama could rise to the top post. That totally undermines her authority, making it next to impossible for Clinton to accomplish anything of substance.

Likewise, Hillary Clinton as a running mate doesn’t work either. There’s no way she could ever remain in the “second-banana” position of vice president, a job that some say has only one real duty – to have a pulse on the off-chance that the president ceases to have one.

So lets put to rest the notion of an Obama/Clinton ticket to vote for on Nov. 4. It makes more sense to focus our attention on the brawl that will now take place state-by-state as the two fight using “Chicago rules” about who gets to take on the Republicans for president, and which one gets to return next year to the U.S. Senate.

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Is City Hall's political "culture" to blame for CTA funding delay?

A political operative allied with then-Illinois Senate President James “Pate” Philip, a Wood Dale Republican, once tried explaining to me why it is ridiculously naïve for people to ever expect politicians of Republican and Democratic persuasions to put aside partisan differences and work together for the good of the people.

His theory put blame on the political culture that absorbs Chicago city government and everything it comes into contact with. After watching the General Assembly try to provide adequate funding for Chicago’s mass transit programs, I’m starting to believe his GOP spin.

The problem, he said, lies at City Hall, where Democrats have dominated ever since the election of Anton Cermak as mayor in 1931 (a political trivia note; Chicago Democrats are possessors of the longest winning streak for a specific elective office in a country where legitimate Democratic elections are held.)

There may be Democrats running every single agency of Chicago city government, with Mayor Daley being all-powerful. But that doesn’t mean everybody gets along. Since the division of Democrats vs. Republicans is a non-issue (the city council these days is split 49-1, Dems-GOP), cliques are based on other factors.

For many years, they were based on race. Anybody who watched the City Council in the 1980s under then-Mayor Harold Washington remembers the significance of the numbers 29 and 21 (white aldermen vs. black, for those whose memories are short).

But they can also be based on neighborhoods (South Side vs. North), socio-economic class issues and petty power struggles run amok. My GOP operative said those rivalries were the problem.

Anytime a Republican legislator negotiated some sort of deal or compromise with a Democrat, he automatically picked up all of the Democrat’s enemies.

In the world of Chicago politics, enemies don’t just vote against you. They go out of their way to round up others to vote against you. Then, they try to make you suffer for your arrogance in trying to get something past them in the first place.

“It’s never a problem with the actual issue at hand, it’s always a personal slight with those guys,” the Republican said. “Somebody did something to insult someone or steal a girl away back when the two of them were working their way through law school at night, so they’re enemies for life.

“It’s just so much easier, less of a hassle, to not bother with the other side and try to do it ourselves,” he told me.

That conversation came to my mind when watching the General Assembly this past year. The Democrat-dominated state Legislature and Democratic governor from Chicago oversaw a process in 2007 that still has not yet come to an end.

The General Assembly this week is expected to return to the Statehouse in Springfield to consider a plan to raise money for Chicago mass transit programs by increasing the sales tax by 0.25 percent in the six counties that comprise the Chicago area. It also would create a new tax on real estate deals in Chicago proper.

They already have approved the plan once, but Gov. Rod Blagojevich made a legal maneuver that means he will only approve the bill into law if a provision is added to give free bus and elevated train rides to senior citizens.

Should the Illinois Legislature go along with the Blagojevich change, Chicago’s buses and trains will continue to operate without the draconian service cuts that were threatened by city officials if a plan was not approved by Jan. 20.

It also would bring the General Assembly’s business for the 2007 spring session to an end. So it only took until the third week of 2008 to finish business that was supposed to be complete by May 31, 2007.

I’m not sure how long the spring 2007 legislative session will be recorded as lasting, but it obliterated all previous records.

The record was 1991, when the Legislature did not finish its business until the early minutes of July 19. They were scheduled to end June 30 that year.

Later, in 1993 and 1994, the General Assembly did not get around to approving state budgets and finishing business until July 13 and July 12, respectively.

In all those years, the culprit was partisan politics. House Speaker Michael Madigan, a Chicago Democrat, was interested in seeing how far he could push then-Gov. Jim Edgar, a Charleston Republican, before having to compromise.

But now, it is the fact that the Chicago Democrat trio of Madigan, Blagojevich and Senate President Emil Jones let their private hostilities for each other get in the way of state business that caused this issue to languish so long.

It means that the City Hall way of doing things (petty feuds prevailing over public policy) has spread its tentacles down south to Springfield, now that the Chicago Dems are firmly in control of state government with no serious prospects of a Republican electoral takeover anytime soon.

Is Blagojevich upset because Madigan may have once snubbed him back in the days when Rod was subservient to the House speaker – he was merely the local politico who represented the Ravenswood and Lincoln Square neighborhoods in the Illinois House from 1993-96?

I still remember the outcry when Madigan, during Blagojevich’s 2002 run for governor, hinted that there were skeletons in Blagojevich’s political life from when he was a legislator, but then refused to elaborate as to what he was talking about. Is Blagojevich still upset that Madigan set up a piece of innuendo against him?

For his part, is Madigan miffed because Blagojevich’s election means he’s no longer the undisputed most powerful Democrat in Illinois state government?

In the mindset of Chicago “machine” politics, Madigan’s purpose for the past three decades was to keep the activities of the General Assembly and state government in line with the desires of Chicago and City Hall. Now, that’s a task for Blagojevich.

Is that why Madigan does nothing to discourage political chit-chat touting his daughter, Lisa (the current Illinois attorney general who actually is highly qualified for public office) as a future challenger of Rod for the gubernatorial post – thereby undermining Blagojevich’s authority now?

And what about Jones?

He has been leader of the Illinois Senate’s Democrats since 1991, but was merely a minority leader until four years ago. Is he still bitter about the way he was treated back in the days when he was the lightweight end of the Democratic leadership in Springfield?

I still recall the jokes that used to fly around the capitol during the 1990s about Jones’ incompetence. I once had a legislative aide privately tell me that Jones’ presence in a private leadership meeting about budgetary negotiations was little more than, “a waste of oxygen.”

This petty bickering wouldn’t matter, except that now it is impacting issues of significance to the general public. As an Illinois resident, I was embarrassed watching the way in which the Chicago Transit Authority was hit with countless “drop-dead” dates and had to have several short-term fixes in order to avoid massive service cuts all throughout last year.

So the big question in political circles these days is to wonder, “Which issue will be dragged out endlessly in 2008 because of the Democrats’ politically feuding ways?”

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Are Sun-Times copies good for nothing these days besides journalism collectibles?

While bouncing around the Internet from web site to web site on Thursday, I stumbled across a place maintained by a Virginia-based company offering old stock certificates and other financial documents as potential collectibles.

There, at Scripophily.net, was a certificate good for 100 shares of stock in the Chicago Daily News, and it was up for sale.

Illustration provided by Scripophily.net

Of course, the Daily News (the Chicago newspaper that may really have been the World’s Greatest at one time) is defunct. It has been 36 years since the Daily News won its last Pulitzer Prize (to columnist Mike Royko for commentary) and nearly 30 years since the paper published its last issue – dated March 4, 1978.

The shares are worthless as a financial document.

Yet the web site was offering to sell it as a collectible for people interested in journalism and the newspaper industry. The going price for it was $595 (with the site claiming that price was a 14 percent discount from their normal price of $695).

Seeing that stock share from 1935 made me wonder if I should start hoarding any and all merchandise I can come across with the Chicago Sun-Times logo on it, since there are signs that “The Bright One” could be the next casualty in the long-running Chicago newspaper wars.

For starters, I still have my copy of the Sun-Times from Jan. 4, 2008 – the one with the word “HISTORY” in large type stretching the width of the page, atop a color photograph of Barack Obama celebrating his realization that he won the Iowa caucus.

Think of it. That paper has potential as a piece of political memorabilia, should Obama ultimately succeed in getting the Democratic nomination and winning the November presidential election.

Maybe a year or two from now, some person with endless attic space for storage of other peoples’ junk will go to eBay and be willing to give me a few bucks.

But to me, it would be worth more as a piece of Chicago memorabilia, a picture of all that was going on in the Second City on the day that we realized our very own junior senator from the Hyde Park neighborhood has a serious chance to become the Leader of the Free World.

It may also turn out to be the last significant news story covered by the Chicago Sun-Times, which on Thursday began singling people out for layoffs as part of a plan to remove $50 million from the company’s operating expenses for the upcoming fiscal year.

Thursdays’ cuts were of mid-level editors and editorial writers who were not covered by the Chicago Newspaper Guild contract. They have no way of appealing the decision to eliminate their jobs, unlike the union-member reporters, of whom about two dozen will lose jobs in coming weeks.

Union officials are trying to negotiate some sort of alternative to extensive layoffs. But even they admit that pay cuts for all reporters will not be enough to save jobs from being lost.

The Sun-Times has always tried to make it a bragging point that it is a smaller, scrappier alternative to the bloat of the Chicago Tribune, which despite all its resources always manages to fall just a bit short of being one of the world’s elite newspapers.

But lately, the newspaper is just getting downright scrawnier and sickly. It seems to be running about 60 tabloid-format pages per day, with classified and automotive ad pullout sections adding about another 24 pages per day. That compares to the 100-120 page newspapers the Sun-Times was publishing during weekdays as recently as last year.

The end result of these cutbacks is a news product (and no, I don’t have some news purist abhorrence to thinking of the news as a product – some of us produce a quality news product and others don’t) that is barely worth the 50 cents per day that I plunk down at the newsstand.

If the Sun-Times’ strategy for the future is to deteriorate into a tacky product whose readers would just as soon beg for it to be put out of its misery, then Sun-Times management is succeeding.

What makes this so sad is that it would leave the Tribune as the major newsgathering organization for Chicago. That thought is nauseating.

Although the Tribune has moderated many of its old conservative vices (I remember when its nameplate proclaimed it to be the “World’s Greatest Newspaper” and also once called itself “An American Paper for Americans”), it still has a touch of arrogance in its view of the Chicago area, particularly the way in which it ignores the inner city to the benefit of the outermost suburban areas.

The Tribune’s shortcomings can only be fulfilled for Chicagoans by having a news product produced by a competing news organization – one like the Sun-Times. Of course, the reverse is true. I wouldn’t trust the Sun-Times alone to provide news of the Chicago area. We need both papers, in addition to the suburban dailies that each zero in on a portion of the Chicago area and give readers a third (or in some places, a fourth) choice.

For those who believe web sites or web logs are an improvement over newsprint and can fill the information vacuum that will open with the decline of the Sun-Times, I respectfully disagree.

I have never seen an Internet operation that could handle newsgathering in the way a newspaper can. Most web sites consider themselves a way of distributing content that was generated for some other entity. Even sites like Salon.com or Slate.com, which try to write their own exclusive stories, generate little compared to what a respectable newspaper can do.

Many so-called news oriented web sites would instantly go out of business if they had to start paying the actual cost of generating news and content for themselves. The Internet business model is predicated on being able to leech content off of someone else.

Even this site is little more than a few news headlines from the Chicago newspapers, offered up alongside my “stellar” analysis and commentary. It merely supplements the newspapers, and would be pointless if not for the news people whose work is no longer adequately compensated by newspaper revenues.

So I wonder at times what would happen if the Internet fan’s wildest fantasy were to come true, and newspapers actually died off. Would web sites also die off because they can’t generate the kind of revenues from those annoying ads we all try to ignore to cover the cost of filling their news hole every day? Would the Internet literally become good for nothing besides cheap porn in the privacy of your own basement?

Is journalism destined to become the province of groups that assume the financial losses of publishing a newspaper or website in order to spread their perspective on the issues? It’s possible.

Newspapers such as the Washington Times and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review have never come close to breaking even financially. They continue to exist only because they are owned by business entities more interested in promoting conservative causes than in trying to intelligently cover news.

While that may please the vocal minority who these days are filling up Chicago newspaper website comment sections with cheap shots that the Sun-Times is dying a deserved death because it is too liberal, it would not be for the benefit of the masses.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Here are specifics about the latest in the continuing decline of the Chicago Sun-Times. http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=27709 I know some of the journalists who received layoff notices Thursday. They are all very talented news people.

For those interested in buying shares of the Chicago Daily News, click here. http://www.scripophily.net/chdaneinil.html

He talked tough with Saddam, but Richardson couldn't pick between Yankees/Red Sox

As a political junkie, I began thinking about the 2008 presidential election just a few moments before John Kerry formally conceded defeat to President Bush back in ’04.

Before Obama-mania and back in the days when Hillary R. Clinton was just as inexperienced a U.S. senator as she now claims Barack Obama to be, I was wondering just who the Democrats would come up with to try to succeed W.

My first instincts were to look toward New Mexico. I came into this election cycle seriously inclined to back the presidential dreams of Bill Richardson.

So when the Richardson campaign acknowledged that he had done poorly enough in Iowa and New Hampshire to bring the presidential charade to an end (a formal announcement is expected Thursday), I felt a touch of sadness. I am compelled to have a moment of silence for the now-deceased Richardson campaign.

…….. Shhhhhh! ……… Okay, the moment is over.

Just where did it go wrong for Richardson, the Irish/Mexican-American who was raised as a child in the U.S. expatriate community that exists in Mexico City and went on to be a member of Congress and a key advisor to former President Bill Clinton as Energy Secretary, before returning to his adopted home state and winning two terms as governor?

I can already hear the Richardson camp followers saying the only thing that went wrong with Bill’s campaign was poor timing. He had to go up against the dueling “historic nature” campaigns that have defined this year’s Democratic presidential primary.

Will 2008 be the year the United States gets its first woman as president, or will it be the year that an African-American person assumes the role of Leader of the Free World. (For those who hate having to acknowledge racial angles – even when completely relevant – think of Obama as the first Hawaiian to run for president).

Compared to those standards, Richardson’s campaign was downright boring, even though we’re talking about a man whose childhood was spent in Mexico and who knows firsthand what it is like for a Mexican to have to suddenly adjust to life “en los Estados Unidos.” His family had some wealth, and he was sent to the U.S. for prep school and college.

This may sound juvenile, but Richardson’s ethnic ties were part of the reason I was initially attracted to his campaign.

In today’s political climate where some people obsess over illegal immigration and have downright un-American ideas about who should be forbidden to become a U.S. citizen, it would have irritated them so much to have a U.S. president who technically still could claim Mexican citizenship (Mexico allows dual citizenship under certain circumstances), even though he was born in Sacramento, Calif., and formally chose U.S. citizenship when he turned 18.

I would have found it amusing to hear people like conservative pundit Ann Coulter rant and rave about a “foreigner” being elected president. Think I’m kidding? I have heard her try to tag Obama as not really American because his father came from Kenya.

More important though, I am a person who is impressed by substantial government experience.

On paper, the Richardson campaign should have blown away all challengers. He should have been able to clobber Hillary, Barack, John Edwards and all others.

I was particularly impressed with the idea that Richardson is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He represented U.S. interests in negotiating international deals opposing international terrorist and the spread of biological weapons. He also supported measures meant to increase the status of women in Afghanistan and several African nations.

As a member of Congress, he was a part of U.S. delegations that won release of hostages and other prisoners in places such as North Korea, Iraq and Cuba.

Obama may be able to make an argument that his experience with international issues is not significantly less than Clinton. He cannot make that argument against Richardson. On international affairs, Bill leaves Barack and Hillary in the dust.

So what went wrong? It didn’t help that Richardson could be dreary and dull on the campaign trail, bringing little buzz among the public. When combined with the lack of serious fund-raising efforts on his behalf, it became all too easy for Richardson to drown in the political sea of Obama and Clinton.

He also tried at times to engage in double-talk, sinking himself deeper with his attempts to avoid making controversial statements. Take his appearance on the long-running NBC program “Meet the Press” back in May 2007, where he sounded indecisive on so many issues.

It may have been host Tim Russert’s attempt to end the show with a “softball” question about baseball that was the “knockdown” pitch for the Richardson campaign.

Richardson, who went to prep school and college in Massachusetts but rooted for New York Yankees center fielder Mickey Mantle as a kid, claimed to be a fan of both the Yankees AND the Boston Red Sox.

To non-baseball fans, Richardson came off as indecisive. To baseball fans, he became a prevaricator of the highest grade, since the hard-core fans of those two teams have developed a hatred of each other that often prevents rational though from taking place.

To this day, Richardson gets mocked on baseball-related Internet sites, particularly because he also exaggerated about having been a prep school baseball star on the verge of signing a contract to play ball for the old Kansas City Athletics.

That was when I quit paying serious attention to Richardson. While I still respect his resume, my attention is on trying to figure out Clinton, Edwards and Obama.

Some people think that whoever wins the Democratic nomination for president would do well to pick Richardson as a vice presidential running mate. Some conspiracy theorists, including a blog writer for the New Republic’s website, hint of some covert deal by which Richardson’s departure from the race was meant to boost Hillary’s chances of taking the Hispanic vote in upcoming primaries.

I don’t know if I buy that theory, although I think any Democrat would be bolstered by Richardson’s presence and experience.

At the very least, a Clinton/Richardson ticket would give baseball fans a field day for sarcastic criticism. Richardson is the Red Sox fan who tries to claim Yankees fan allegiance in the same way that Hillary is a life-long Chicago Cubs fan who says she really likes the Bronx Bombers as well.

That much sap about baseball is almost enough to make me think of voting Republican. At least with Rudy Giuliani, we know his Yankees fan status is legitimate.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Albuquerque Tribune would like to see their hometown politico become vice president (http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2008/jan/09/bill-richardson-would-make-good-vice-president-new/) in the same way the Chicago Argus wouldn’t object to Obama or Clinton winning a four-year residency or two in the White House.

Here’s a transcript of the “Meet the Press” appearance that sank the Richardson campaign. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18818527/page/6/



Photographs provided by New Mexico governor's office

Hillary needs Hispanic vote if she's to win

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is one of many Hispanic politicos who have jumped on the Clinton bandwagon -- photograph provided by Hillary Clinton for President

When Sen. Hillary R. Clinton, D-N.Y., thinks about being elected president later this year, her dreams include masses of brown people turning out to support her.

But if a new study of potential Hispanic voter support is any indication, she shouldn’t assume that she has that voter bloc locked up.

The theory put forth by Clinton camp followers is that getting significant support in places such as New York, California and Illinois (all of which have large Latino populations and primary elections on Feb. 5) will enable the one-time first lady to overcome her loss in a lily-white place like Iowa, or the fact that she barely won in equally-pale New Hampshire.

Clinton thinks she can win those states with their significant numbers of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in part because she expects to take the Hispanic vote, which in Chicago alone can potentially account for just over 200,000 of the city’s nearly 1.3 million registered voters – with another 150,000 Latino voters across the rest of Illinois.

But the National Hispanic Institute released a study Tuesday indicating Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is now the favored one. Clinton may very well have to scrap with Obama for the votes of people with ethnic roots from Spanish-speaking countries.

Four of every five people surveyed said they plan to take a Democratic ballot come Election Day (79 percent, to be exact). Of those, 39 percent support Obama, compared to 34 percent for Clinton.

Ethnicity does not help Bill Richardson among the institute’s voters. The Irish/Mexican-American who is governor of New Mexico only got 9 percent support among Hispanic people, which ranks him down there with Southerner John Edwards’ 10 percent backing.

For Clinton, the new survey is a radical drop from a Pew Hispanic Center study released in December that showed Clinton leading Obama 59 percent to 15 percent among Latino people.

Even worse for Obama in that survey was the fact that in California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas (the five states with the largest Hispanic populations), he only got 6 percent of the prospective Latino vote.

Basically, Clinton once had hopes that a large Hispanic mass of voters could help her overcome early losses in places where the percentage of Latino people is so low (about 2 percent) as to be irrelevant. Now, she doesn’t.

Personally, I am not convinced that a seismic shift has occurred in the Hispanic political landscape.

I never detected any great love for Clinton in Chicago’s Little Village or Humboldt Park neighborhoods, or in suburban places like Chicago Heights or Cicero. I doubt there is any different feeling in places such as Olvera Street in Los Angeles, Calle Ocho in Miami or anywhere in San Antonio.

But there was the feeling among some people that Clinton’s election was inevitable, and that one might as well get on board so they could draw from the political well of favors if she manages to win the big election in November.

Now, Obama is looking like he might have a chance of dousing Clinton’s political dreams with a bucket of water and watch them melt (insert your favorite joke about the “Wizard of Oz” here), although the better cinematic allusion for the 2008 Democratic presidential primary might be to Rocky I or II, where the two fighters went the full 15 rounds without a knockdown and left the ring two battered, bloodied pulps.

When Obama suddenly appeared to be a front-runner following the Iowa caucuses, many Hispanic people were suddenly willing to shift their support. Who knows? Maybe they will shift back to Clinton after New Hampshire’s primary?

Does this mean that Latinos are basically fair-weather fans in this election cycle? Probably. It’s almost like we’re Democrats by default; not because of any love for any one candidate.

“Richardson’s showing in particular, both in this survey and in the early state primaries and caucuses, indicates that the so-called Latino sleeping giant in the electorate may remain in slumber well past this coming November,” said Ernesto Nieto, president of the institute.

Basically, Hispanic people want to be sure that whoever does become president is someone willing to acknowledge Latino existence and is not openly hostile to our concerns on various issues.

The latter is the reason why the Republicans are failing to keep the large amount of Hispanic support (as much as 44 percent of the electorate, according to some pundits) that existed for President Bush during his two election campaigns.

The institute’s survey indicated that only 16 percent of Latinos had any intention of taking a GOP ballot. Among those voters, so-called liberal candidates Rudy Giuliani and John McCain were split pretty evenly, with none of the conservative candidates who have talked tough about illegal immigration garnering anything more than single-digit support.

To ask Democratic political operatives who support Clinton why Obama ever registered so low in polls among Hispanic people, they will tell you that Latinos were still angry that Obama dove for political cover in 2006 and voted “yes” on a bill approving construction of a wall along the nearly 2,000-mile border separating the United States from Mexico.

The ironic part is that Clinton also voted “yes” on that bill.

But she has included several Hispanic people in prominent positions in her campaign, including campaign manager Patty Solis Doyle, the brother of a Chicago alderman.

Plus, Hispanic people are not blind.

We saw the hostility that social conservative Republicans (the same people who want to believe that all Hispanics ought to be illegal) showed toward her husband when he was president – and still show toward her in their unguarded moments. It’s almost like we are willing to give Hillary a break because of that old saying, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The real test of Hispanic support for Clinton is going to come Jan. 19 when voters in Nevada (with its 23.5 percent Hispanic population) hold their presidential caucuses.

To that end, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring a “black-brown issues” debate, scheduled for Tuesday in Las Vegas. The Nevada caucuses will give the first real test of whether Clinton understands the concerns of Hispanic voters, which aren’t that different from others. The institute’s study found the Iraq War was concern number 1, with immigration, education and the economy following.

A solid performance in Nevada could be the move that sets the stage for a mass of Latinos across the United States pushing Clinton ahead of Obama in Democratic primaries.

Without a solid grasp of the Hispanic vote, Clinton would have to settle for a Latino priest to conduct a mass, of sorts, for the death of her presidential dream.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: A summary of the National Hispanic Institute’s study can be found here. http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/1/prweb603941.htm

With the way he speaks, Bush could have a future in Chicago politics

Photograph provided by the White House

President Bush tried Monday to make himself out to be just an ordinary guy, taking a swipe at himself and the bumbling way in which he speaks.

He used an appearance before the Union League Club to compare his speaking style to the eloquence of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“When people think of Churchill, of course they marvel at what he managed to do with the English language,” Bush said. “When people think of me, never mind.”

If ever there was a place where Bush could get away with mocking his bumbling syntax, it is Chicago. The Second City is one of the few places where we don’t hold his speech too harshly against him, largely because our own politicos often can’t speak a coherent sentence.

Take our current mayor.

Richard M. Daley’s “Chicagoese” can slip into “dems” and “dose,” when he’s not careful. He also has a tendency to speak in a blunt, almost earthy, manner.

This is the man who once said “if there was a rat in your sandwich you’d want to know,” when talking about a city crackdown on unsanitary restaurants, and “I’m pro-Death. Let’s get on with it,” when talking about the need to proceed with the 1990 execution of convicted killer Charles Walker.

Chicago is also the place where Daley’s father, the immortal Richard J. Daley, held sway for 21 years with so many verbal gaffes that his long-time press secretary, Earl Bush, came up with his own immortal quotable line.

“Don’t write what (Daley) says, write what he means,” Earl Bush used to plead with reporter-types who worked at City Hall.

Daley the first also was the man who came up with a defense, of sorts, of the Chicago Police Department in the wake of their conduct in trying to subdue protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, conduct that was later labeled by the Walker Commission as, “a police riot.”

“Gentlemen, get the thing straight once and for all,” Daley urged. “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

One year later, Daley the elder’s words were collected into a book entitled, “Quotations from Mayor Daley,” which was a little green book put together as a parody of the “Little Red Book” that contained the sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong and used to be cited as gospel by the Chinese Communists.

By comparison, the Ivy League-educated Bush is downright eloquent, even when he’s making up new words such as “strategery,” and during moments such as in 2005 in Brussels when he’s engaging in such babble as, “this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.”

Whenever I wonder just how people across the United States can take Bush’s babbling seriously, all I have to do is think of the Daleys.

The elder Daley is Chicago’s longest-running mayor, although his son could surpass him if he manages to survive another two years on the job without having a political meltdown. While both men have their detractors, a majority of Chicagoans think fondly of the Daleys and secretly hope there’s a third-generation Daley who can run for mayor sometime about the year 2023.

Mike Royko, the late famed Chicago newspaper columnist, said the elder Daley’s malaprops were part of his appeal. In a column published in the now-defunct Chicago Daily News on the day after “hizzoner’s” death in 1976, Royko wrote, “maybe it’s because so many of us aren’t that far removed from parents and grandparents who knew only bits and pieces of the language.

“So when Daley slid sideways into a sentence, or didn’t exit from the same paragraph he entered, it amused us. But it didn’t sound that different from the way most of us talk,” Royko wrote. “He found a way. We understood it. What more can one ask of the language?”

Times change. Chicago’s residents are not as blue collar as we’d like to think we are.

The decades have seen many of our one-time working class families move up the economic ladder. My grandfathers worked in steel mills on the South Side. No one in my family comes close to doing anything that physically intense for a living, and my family is far from unique.

But that doesn’t stop Chicagoans from pretending that we still are working class people, particularly when we are watching the Chicago Bears play football and we still bring out former Coach Mike Ditka’s assertion that Bears fans are a bunch of people named “Grabowski,” compared to other teams who are cheered for by people named “Smith.”

Being willing to put up with a verbal gaffe or two is part of that illusion.

So Bush can get away with his malaprops when visiting the Second City, particularly when he’s addressing a business group such as the Union League, which consists of business executives and other types who are among the roughly one-third of the American people who still view Bush favorably.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we’d actually vote for Bush come Election Day.

This is still Chicago, which solidly backed Al Gore and John Kerry when they challenged Bush for president and provided so many Democrat votes that Illinois solidly in the Democratic Party column, even though much of the rest of Illinois prefers Republicans.

Even if those of us upwardly mobile Chicagoans considered voting Republican, we might very well get outvoted by the ghosts of our blue collar grandparents.

To listen to Chicago conspiracy theorists, our grandparents are probably still on the voter rolls – casting ballots for the Democratic “Machine” from beyond the grave.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: An account of George W. Bush’s attempt at a self-deprecating crack about his awkward speaking style can be found here. http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Quirks/2008/01/07/bush_pokes_fun_at_his_use_of_english/8766/

A recollection of some of Bush’s past verbal gaffes can be found here. http://www.slate.com/id/76886/

Register to Vote, or Stifle Yourself!

Has it really been 18 years since pop singer Madonna wrapped herself in the U.S. flag and threatened to give us a “spankie” if we didn’t get off our duffs and vote on Election Day?

It’s a good thing that Madonna is now a British resident and not still making ads for the “Rock the Vote” campaign, because otherwise, she’d be beating a lot of people senseless in upcoming weeks.

Yes, election days are cropping up across the United States. In Illinois, ours is set for Feb. 5. Yet if past elections are any indicator, a lot of people are going to sit out the primary election.

In Chicago, city elections officials say there are 1,277,591 residents who are registered to vote. Based on past elections involving presidents, about half of those people will actually go to the polls.

That percentage may go a little higher this time because Chicago’s adopted political son, Barack Obama, is seriously in the running to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Let us be generous and say maybe two-thirds of all registered voters in Chicago will show up at polls or go through the process of submitting an absentee ballot.

That could mean the city of Chicago could provide about 800,000 votes toward the Illinois primary. That’s out of a city of nearly 3 million people.

Now I realize that not all of Chicago’s 2.896 million residents are eligible to vote. Roughly 28 percent of the city’s population is underage, while the fact that Chicago has the fifth largest foreign-born population of any U.S. city means there are people who cannot yet legally register.

Yet even so, the fact that Chicago is not likely to crack the 1 million mark in terms of votes generated is sad. I have never understood why more people don’t bother to register to vote. It is so simple.

In my case, I changed my registration when I moved from Springfield to my current Chicago-area address when I updated my driver’s license. An Illinois secretary of state worker was able to take my information for both the license and the voter registration form in one shot.

Voter registration doesn’t incur some arcane process. Trust me when I say that if it were truly complex, then I wouldn’t be able to register myself. I have seen people working voter registration efforts in so many places, including booths set up in libraries and supermarkets.

Just imagine. You could have registered to vote just moments after buying a bunch of bananas at 39 cents a pound, or five 12-pack cases of Coca-Cola for $10.

Yet so many people allow themselves to be intimidated out of the right that their forefathers died for on the battlefield or were beaten for in places like Selma or Birmingham, Ala.

Either that, or they’re just lazy.

The latter is the reason I have always been skeptical of the notion that Chicago’s favorite talk show hostess, Oprah Winfrey, would have any significant impact on the 2008 election.

Oprah likes Barack Obama for president. She may very well get many women across the United States who normally think politics is boring or irrelevant to their lives to take notice of the Democratic presidential primary.

She may even get them to like Barack.

But how many of these people are properly registered to vote. I haven’t heard any significant instruction come from the Oprah camp about informing people of the paperwork they need to submit in order to be able to legally cast a ballot.

How many people turned on to Obama by Oprah will show up at the polling places, only to find out they can’t cast ballots because they have never been registered to vote or because their registration was so old it had lapsed due to neglect.

It reminds me of an episode of the old television sitcom “All in the Family” where Archie Bunker was unable to vote for Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election. Archie was turned away by polling place worker Louise Jefferson because the last time he had bothered to vote was so many years earlier against “that Catholic guy” John Kennedy.

I can easily see voter registration apathy squashing Oprah’s “Vote Obama” campaign.

The reason I’m getting all worked up about voter registration now is because the deadline is approaching. It’s Tuesday.

I’m registered. I’ll be casting a ballot in the Democratic Party’s primary in Illinois, although I’m not yet sure which candidate will get my backing.

As for the rest of you, take some time today or Tuesday and make sure you’re registered to vote. Then, take the time to actually cast a ballot next month.

There’s even a grace period of sorts, by which people can physically show up at the Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners offices in downtown Chicago through Jan. 22 – provided they are willing to cast their ballot instantly upon registering instead of waiting to vote Feb. 5.

You may think it is a waste of time, particularly if your favored candidate does not win. But I always motivate myself to vote by reminding myself that I lose my moral right to complain about my elected officials if I don’t bother to take the time to have a say in their selection.

I may not think much of President Bush at times. I complain about him as much as anyone else who identifies with the Democratic Party.

But if I hadn’t bothered to cast a ballot back in 2000 and 2004, then the Bush camp followers would be totally justified in taking the lead from Archie Bunker in calling me a “dingbat” and telling me to “stifle yourself.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s a printable copy of the voter registration form. http://www.elections.il.gov/Downloads/VotingInformation/PDF/R-19.pdf

For those in need of the registration form in Spanish, Polish, Chinese or Korean, click here. http://www.chicagoelections.com/voter_registration_form.htm

Here’s a county-by-county listing across Illinois of where to send the completed registration form. http://www.elections.state.il.us/ElectionAuthorities/ElecAuthorityList.aspx