If Obama isn’t the luckiest politician in history, would you please name another?
via John Kass: Superstorm Sandy saves Obama from Benghazi
I don’t know…I guess I’d say George Bush in 2000 losing the popular vote but winning the electoral vote thanks to a Supreme Court 5-4 decision giving him the win in Florida?
But that’s just off the top of my head and incredibly obvious to anyone who’s familiar with the last 15 years of politics so I’m sure someone smarter could come up with a better answer.
UPDATE: Chicagomag.com’s Carol Felsenthal offers a complete rundown on the entire Chicago Ideas Week mayoral discussion.
Tonight I attended one of the first 2011 Chicago Ideas Week events. It was a roundtable Q&A moderated by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman with mayors from a few of America’s great cities: Mayor Rahm Emanuel from Chicago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg from New York and Mayor Kasim Reed from Atlanta. The following Storify post contains tweets from myself and others who tweeted during the event using the #CIWMayor hashtag. Some of the tweets are slightly out of chronological order to better serve the narrative but I’ve attempted to retain the spirit and meaning of the discussion. Between-tweets commentary is mine.
Overall, I enjoyed the discussion and thought it concluded just as the participants settled into a comfortable groove. Reed came off the best as he was plain-spoken and funny. Bloomberg was his usual sacred-cow slayer. Rahm was in his usual politician mode. I feel like he’s so careful not to play into the HULK RAHM SMASH! storyline that he holds back too much.
Quick postscript: When you sign up for a Chicago Ideas Week session, you’re asked to list three topics that someone can ask you about. On your badge it says “Ask me about…” and then shows your three topics. I was in a hurry to fill out the registration form and just wrote “journalism, comics and scotch.” When I picked up my badge tonight “comics” was changed to “education” and “scotch” was changed to “civic engagement.” Heh.
Bits and pieces…
Comics: DC relaunched and renumbered its entire line last week. I’ve read Justice League and Action Comics so far. Justice League didn’t reveal where it was headed while Action suggests the new Superman is a mix of Spider-Man, Batman and…a 1930s-era Superman (with nods to that era’s mob and wife abuser villains). So both are wait and see. This post from AV Club explains why that’s a good idea when it comes to comics arcs (starting with the third graf of the Justice League review).
Politics: Elizabeth Warren is gunning for Scott Brown’s seat. I think she got hosed by the Obama administration and I wish her all the luck in the world but unless I’m missing something, he’s not exactly vulnerable. Kerry’s caucusing with the dude, for crying out loud.
Internet: Pat Bruno was fired from the Sun-Times and wants to start his own food blog. The Atlantic Wire discusses why this might be harder than he thinks. Why do professional writers – particularly print writers – wait until they are fired to develop an online presence? It’s much easier to do this when you’re employed at a publication that will help you build your audience and, fair or not, it lends your efforts a credence it might not otherwise have that you can leverage into a larger online buildout or a new job.
Media: Spent the better part of 36 hours recovering from what your grandma would call a stomach bug. Upside: I got caught up with a bunch of Quantum Leap episodes I missed when they first aired. Downside: I only missed episodes of the fifth season when the show jumped the shark so…blergh.
Music: An e-mail with the subject line Here is your FREE ukulele lesson book brightened my day.
From my Tumblr: A couple 9/11-related posts, skepticism about Playboy going retro and I’m going to miss Alex Kotlowitz’s writing at chicagomag.com because of posts like this.
Jeff Tweedy recites “My Humps” from Jasmine D on Vimeo.
A totally subjective list but…
5. The Chief Technology Officer of the city of Chicago, John Tolva (@Immerito), DJ’ed the party last night which is probably the best commentary on how this whole project brought the Chicago tech and arts scenes together in one crazy mashup.
4. The Young Chicago Authors kids from Louder Than A Bomb who turned in one of the best live poetry performances I’ve ever seen. In particular, were two girls around 16-17 whose piece on sexuality, body image and adolescent relationships was wisdom so far beyond their years I felt as if they knew more about life than I do, twenty years their senior.
3.The actual Mayor Emanuel showing up, shaking hands and doing an Entourage-like walk through the club before signing @MayorEmanuel author Dan Sinker’s book with “You are an asshole. Mayor Emanuel.” *
2. Jeff Tweedy singing “I Gotta Feeling” and reciting the lyrics to “My Humps” (above via). Just go watch those videos now and be in a good mood the rest of the day.
1. Dan reading the fermented baby food in the crawlspace bit where @MayorEmanuel meets Sweetness, hugs Studs Terkel’s heart and talks with Curtis Mayfield. If anyone still thinks this whole project was just a bunch of vulgar tweets, the literary passion Dan poured into that reading – and this whole event – put the lie to that notion.
I was so proud to be a Chicagoan last night.
* A couple other folks I know got the actual mayor** to sign their books and he signed all of them “Mayor Emanuel” as if to say “No, motherfucker, I’M THE MAYOR. It takes more to get this shit than starting a fucking Twitter account.” @AnnaTarkov told me she asked the mayor if he was a fan of the book and he said no. That answer may have been more persona than anything else (another friend of mine said the mayor exchanged good-natured f-bombs with Hideout co-owner Tim Tuten) but it’s also worth noting how he goes out of his way to show he’s a good sport about the whole thing.
** I love how I keep having to say “the actual mayor” to avoid confusion.
I was back at The Paper Machete yesterday to discuss Chicago’s mayoral race.
Every time I attend The Paper Machete, I’m stunned at the level of talent on display. I’ve been to four shows – three of which I performed at – and if there is a show which consistently showcases such an incredibly talented group of writers and musicians of greater intelligence and humor, I haven’t seen it. Christopher Piatt and Allison Weiss put this on weekly, people. WEEKLY! And it’s free. FREE! You’re missing out if you don’t give it a chance. Check out the Facebook page or their podcasts.
A couple notes on this piece: Thanks to some smart feedback from Piatt, I wrote this specifically to be read as a speech rather than as a true essay that would be read. So I’m not sure how well it works just as plain text. If it makes it into the Machete podcast, I’ll link and you’ll see what I mean. UPDATE: The recording of this piece is posted here.
Also, after I performed it I thought it came off too pro-Rahm, which wasn’t my intention (and certainly isn’t reflected in the previous Machete piece I wrote). Chicago’s neighborhoods have many needs and I don’t think a pro-business mayor is what we need right now. But that doesn’t excuse the played-out games our city’s black leaders are engaged in this year. They need to get their collective act together for 2015.
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My friends, can I take you into my confidence for a moment? I have a confession to make.
I’ve lived in the Chicago area my whole life and in the city proper for 13 years now. I’m politically aware to the point of being able to tell you roughly how much some of the candidates had in their campaign coffers at the start of this campaign and I’m old enough to not only have been alive when there wasn’t a mayor named Daley but to have actual memories of a few of them.
But for a couple minutes last night while I was working on this piece, I had to look up how a contested Chicago mayoral election works. Isn’t that embarrassing? I’m like one of those people who don’t know there used to be a Meigs Field. Or that Lake Shore used to go around the east side of Soldier Field. Or…something else with a field.
Anyway, I don’t feel too bad for not remembering how mayoral elections work in the post-Daley era since the recent actions of Chicago’s black political leaders showed they don’t seem to remember either what with all their efforts to rally around a consensus candidate.
So just in case you too have a lack of field-related Chicago knowledge, elections in Chicago used to work pretty much how most other elections go: There was a Democratic primary and a Republican primary and the winners of each of those primaries would run against each other in the general election…and the person who was the Democrat won.
But in 1995, the Illinois General Assembly changed the law to do away with primaries in the mayoral election. To understand why they did this involves me explaining the last 35 years of Chicago mayoral political history. You’d think that with 21 of those years involving Daley in the mayor’s office that it would be pretty easy but the 13 years prior to that are a mess of Democratic white guys being so mad at black guys that they were willing to elect a lady and even a white Republican if it meant keeping a black Democrat out of the mayor’s chair. Also, there’s a really bad snowstorm involved. It’s actually really interesting but in an effort to not have us here all day, just trust me when I say the big takeaway is this: Most people think the election of Harold Washington – by the way, he was the black guy – means that in non-Daley years all the black political leaders in Chicago need to do is decide on one black candidate to run for mayor and he or she will win.
Since the four leading four candidates for mayor are Rahm Emanuel, Carol Moseley Braun, Miguel Del Valle, and Gery Chico – or to put it terms of jokes you might hear involving rowboats: a white guy, a black lady and two Hispanic guys – things should be easy-peasy, right? No. They’re uh…hardy-tardy.
See, there’s never been a mayoral election under the non-primary system when Daley wasn’t running. So there’s no real evidence to support the idea that a black candidate could win against a white challenger. Also, the racial makeup of this city isn’t what it used to be.
According to an article in the Chicago News Cooperative, the most recent census estimates available say that “whites and blacks each represent almost one-third of the city’s population, while Hispanics have held steady at about 27 percent and Asians rose slightly to comprise a little more than 5 percent of Chicagoans.”
So first of all: bad news for racist white people: You’re more of a minority than ever but still not eligible to get in on all those fat city contracts for minority-owned businesses. Also, bad news for black political leaders still partying like it’s 1989: the black population has shrunk considerably to the point where it’s no longer feasible to decide on a black consensus candidate and think he or she will be elected mayor.
Ah but not so fast, you say! Just because the city’s population splits evenly down white and black lines doesn’t mean the voter rolls do, you retort in a manner most self-satisfied! Moreover, you say, 2008 voter turnout showed only 37 percent of white people vs. 40 percent of black people and 12.86 percent of Hispanics. And finally, black turnout has always been very strong and so you say good day sir I’ll have no more of your empty punditry.
To which I say, not so fast you jackanapes! We are not just talking about any white person. We are talking about Rahm Emanuel. This is a guy who has a power base of business interests, a ton of money and a mythical persona that’s something like Jewish George Clooney-meets-Ben Kingsley’s character in “Sexy Beast.”
And if we’re just going to look at this purely in racial terms, Emanuel’s been polling well for months among blacks and Hispanics. A recent poll – taken after Braun became the consensus candidate – shows he not only has a 3:1 lead among white voters, but a 16-point lead among Hispanics, too. And here’s the kicker: Braun’s only pulling 43 percent of the black. Emanuel’s pulling 32. So he’s working all sides of the census form.
Things would be different if the black consensus candidate had more universal appeal. Or, let’s face it, was not Carol Moseley Braun. As much as I’d like to see a strong black candidate, were I to enumerate all of the mistakes Carol Moseley Braun has made since she started campaigning – or hell, even just this week – we would be here until the runoff. So I think I’ll just quote Braun’s spokeswoman – a woman who is paid to say nice things about her candidate – who this week said “Am I a little nervous when she starts to talk to people? Yes, I am.”
According to that same recent poll, Braun’s foot in mouth disease has now translated into a 41 percent unfavorable rating. Unfortunately, she also has a 91% name recognition which – according to the pollsters – means she is “a candidate with little ability to grow her vote share.”
Which is why that poll shows Emanuel leading with 42 percent of the vote, Braun with 26, Chico with 10 and Del Valle with 7.
At this point, Rahm Emanuel could change his campaign slogan to “Rahm Emanuel: Lick My Balls” and he’d still probably win.
Here’s the thing most people forget about Harold Washington: he won his first election for mayor – the most racially-charged election in the city’s history – with 20 percent of the white vote. I’ve got concerns with Rahm Emanuel as mayor when we need less of a downtown mayor and more of a neighborhood mayor. But demographically, you could argue that he – not Braun – is the candidate with broad support from all over Chicago. And that’s what it’s going to take to win from now on: not a consensus candidate, but a census candidate.
Been a busy and difficult month and I’m going to make an effort to get back to documenting the pregnancy as there’s been a lot to discuss. But here’s a reading I did yesterday at The Paper Machete, a live weekly magazine show (or a salon in a saloon). If you’re in Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood any given Saturday at 3pm, stop by Ricochet’s for the show. It’s really a great example of Chicago’s living artistic bar culture.
This reading – about the Chicago mayoral race – ended up very much like a blog post due to the way my brain is wired to write about current events like this. So it felt right to post it here, with links. Reading it again, it reads pretty rough on Fioretti and Emanuel but that’s mainly because this is the most important mayoral race in two decades and there’s been little from either of them on issues of crime, poverty, the city budget, etc. so far. As voters, we should demand more.
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Immediately after Mayor Daley’s September 7th announcement that he would not seek re-election, everything we thought we knew about Chicago politics seemed wrong. Early on, the city seemed destined to become a Rubik’s Cube of shifting coalitions, alliances and power structures: a campaign that wouldn’t be so much a horse race as a rodeo. Typifying this anything-goes mentality was an announcement on September 20th from Alderman Sandi Jackson that both she and her husband Jesse Jackson Jr were each considering a run for mayor…until the Sun-Times ran a story the next day that clotheslined them both with some untoward allegations.
Now, when I say “early on” consider that this happened less than a month ago but seems like such ancient history that if you ask most people what Jackson Jr. was accused of, all they’ll be able to come up with is something akin to a Google search: “Uh…Blagojevich, senate seat, blond in a bikini.”
Since then the field has narrowed considerably but there are still plenty of questions. EarlyandOften.org lists 55 candidates who, in the last month, were either circulating, considering, rumored to be considering or just wanted their name in the papers. MayoralScoreCard.com now has the field down to 12 candidates running and five circulating. Of the candidates who are running, five don’t have any cash on hand and the candidates who are circulating range from Rev. James Meeks and Sheriff Tom Dart – both of whom could cause some momentous shifts in the weeks ahead – to Carol Moseley Braun whose campaign started 262 thousand dollars in the hole so her efforts look less like running for office and more like a bake sale peddling stale Rice Krispie treats.
So with nominating petitions due in little less than a month and those early volcanic predictions far in the rearview, what on paper still seems like a potentially vibrant race is currently giving us two leading declared candidates: 2nd Ward Alderman Robert Fioretti and former Chief of Staff Rahm “Fucking” Emanuel. But even these gentlemens’ campaigns could charitably be described as “still getting their shit together.”
This week, Fioretti announced that he would be out of the game for two weeks because he needed to get his tonsils out. Yes, nothing says “Ready To Lead On Day One” like an image of Fioretti ringing the nurse for some ice cream. Depending on how ridiculous things get, we might end up reading some racially-coded item in Michael Sneed’s column about how Fioretti ordered Neapolitan flavored ice cream because he’s committed to being a mayor for all the people of Chicago be they white, black, brown or strawberry.
As for Rahm Emanuel, NBC’s The Ward Room reported yesterday that the candidate sent his supporters a letter soliciting volunteers to circulate nominating petitions this weekend. The letter began: “Dear First Name.”
The funny thing is, the most interesting things about the Rahm Emanuel campaign are happening online and most of it doesn’t involve the candidate at all. Sure, Rahm’s got 29,000 Likes on Facebook and got out there early with a fancy, but familiar-looking website done up in a style that, if it were a font, would be described as Obama Hope Extra Bold, but that’s somewhat overshadowed by what’s happening on Twitter where the campaign appears to have gone through three Twitter accounts in the last two weeks, losing whatever momentum he built up each time. The lack of a definitive presence in this space means that the fake @MayorEmanuel parody account has four times as many followers as the official @RahmEmanuel account and is beating him on matters of openness and transparency as well: The real Rahm had nothing to say on the “Dear First Name” problem while the fake Rahm said “Dear First Name, Plouffe assures me that we’re going to have an actual fucking communications team in place soon. The intern is a cocktard.”
There’s even a website called rahmfacts.com and even though A) there appear to be only ten facts in total and B) they’re all true they still read as if they’re about a mythical Chuck Norris-ian political figure:
RAHM EMANUEL TELLS PEOPLE TO FUCK OFF BY SHOWING THEM THE SPACE WHERE HIS RIGHT MIDDLE FINGER USED TO BE
WE WOULD ALL HAVE HEALTHCARE IF BILL CLINTON HAD LISTENED TO RAHM EMANUEL’S ADVICE
RAHM EMANUEL REGULARLY CALLS HIS CHILDREN “MESHUGANAS”
This is all Very Exciting…and yet it isn’t. People who are true fans of democracy and reform should be more excited by a rough Chicago election than fake Twitter accounts if change is going to be less of a noun and more of a verb. Before Mayor Daley announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, it looked as if we’d get exactly that. Four long-serving Daley allies in the City Council announced they would not seek re-election and a handful of reform-minded potential candidates including Fioretti, 1st Ward Alderman Manny Flores, 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waugespack, State Rep John Fritchey, Congressman Mike Quigley and City Inspector General David Hoffman all seemed poised to run.
While there are some hints that Rahm would be a reform candidate, specifically a meeting last month with Fritchey and an announcement that Rahm supports listing the city’s TIF slush funds in the actual budget and not in the traditional second set of cooked books, there’s been little to suggest he wouldn’t continue Daley’s pro-business, big-splash, downtown-based style of rule. Progressives from the SEIU Illinois State Council to Progress Illinois think Rahm would be, at best, a liberal moderate who supports business interests. Money equals power and the former Daley fundraiser and investment banker is toting around about $1.2 million of it right now.
All of which helps explain why Wags, Fritchey, Quigley and Hoffman all pulled a musical chairs and sat down before Fioretti even heard the music stop. This week Flores bowed out and threw his support to former Chicago S
chool Board president Gerry Chico while Congressman Luis Guiterrez declared he wasn’t running either. Ramsin Canon of Gapers Block points out Guiterrez’s announcement came on the heels of a meeting with Dart and there’s still the possibility of a black coalition forming to challenge Rahm. Some of these meetings and deals might amount to something but at this point I’ve seen more stable alliances during three-legged races at church picnics, which means we’ll have a slate of weak candidates and one very strong one. IIf recent history is any indication, Chicago will hold its nose and vote for the Daley-like Rahm because, damnit, Millennium Park is pretty even if it is for tourists and who wants snow on the streets in February?
There are many months left in this campaign but what started out as the most interesting Chicago mayoral race in twenty-three years now looks to be the least interesting race in the next five. That’s probably what Fritchey, Wags and the rest foresaw when they beat a strategic retreat. Most political strategists will tell you that having something to run against is as important as having something to run for. All the people who were rumored to be planning “reform” runs for mayor had something to run against when Daley was still in the race. Now they don’t. A few well-placed stump speeches about money for more cops on the street and the evils of TIFs and Rahm becomes the great white hope. Better for the reform crowd to bide their time now, not waste talent and treasure in a losing campaign, firm up the new coalitions, wait for Rahm to get blamed for most of Daley’s mess then swoop in after a few years and save the day.
But Canon – in the first of a series of posts titled “Modeling An Open Chicago” – argues the best way for Chicagoans to take their city back isn’t for us to wait on a new Harold Washington to lead the disenfranchised into a new coalition in 2015 but to strengthen the neighborhood-based structures that already exist and return economic development back to the neighborhoods.
Of course, this requires much more than voting. It requires attending CAPS meetings, joining local school councils or neighborhood planning associations and stepping foot inside our ward offices for more than just parking permits.
When that happens, a candidate on Twitter who sends out letters addressed to “Dear First Name” will be a leader without followers. And that’s just a guy taking a walk.
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One last note on this piece: I realized afterward that there were workers from both the Fioretti and Emanuel campaigns in the audience, which…yeah.
UPDATE: Is Rahm Clearing The Field?
“Even if privatizing the parking meters was the best alternative, the key issue would be whether the administration, starting with Mayor Daley, followed a process to ensure that the most qualified people available conducted the most sophisticated analysis possible to come up with the best agreement for taxpayers.
Mayor Daley has yet to tell his constituents that this happened. And it’s going to be hard for him to do so, because all evidence available suggests that it didn’t.”
– Mick Dumke “Mayor Daley is sorry that we don’t like the parking meter deal“, chicagoreader.com
What’s always struck me about the Mayor is that even people who don’t like his policies say they come away with positive feelings about him after they have a personal encounter with him. (I’m one of those people.) I think that’s why so many folks roll over for the guy, particularly reporters. Glad Dumke is more clear-eyed than the rest of us.
That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
Although I had some other choice words in my Twitter stream yesterday.
Erin and I were watching The West Wing when we saw a commercial for an Obama commemorative plate called “Historic Victory.” Watch the (criminally unembeddable) video here.
These are my favorite parts, as they occur:
The “Here’s to Obama” toast at the beginning.
The dude who gives the Guy Nod to the plate as it sits on his desk.
“His confident smile and kind eyes…“
The little white girl who waves at the plate.
The “celebration fireworks” on the plate even though there weren’t any in Grant Park during his acceptance speech.
The electoral vote on the back of the plate reads “Undetermined 27.” They wanted to get the plate out so quickly they didn’t even bother to wait until the – historic! – final vote total.
“Yes you can…own a piece of history!“
It doesn’t bother me that the Obama pre-administration is asking to see every piece of email, every diary entry or every random piece of effluvia that you’ve posted to your Facebook page, in an effort to save itself from potential future embarrassment. As a vetting process, it’s certainly…invasive, but I get it.
No, what bothers me is the application pool that will result from this level of vetting. I’m sure that if you were at one point a member of a Facebook group called “I Love Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!!!!!” then it would probably disqualify you from employment. Then again, if you posted a picture of yourself on the business end of a beer bong, it might not. It’s entirely possible they’re just doing due dilligence. It would be impossible to find someone who hasn’t expressed opinions, one way or the other, about the government or hasn’t doing something embarrassing or shameful in their past.
But for someone like me, going through all my electronic history is enough of an impediment to filling out the full application. (Chicago Reader’s web editor Whet Moser says the same.) That’s going to rule out exactly the kind of folks who were instrumental in putting Obama in the White House.
I’m not saying that because those people helped put him there that they deserve jobs. But there was a lot of commentary during and after the campaign about how Obama was the social media president. Yet this application process is unfriendly to social media applicants, who are traditionally more involved in and knowledgeable about local and national issues. Aren’t these the kind of folks we want in the government?
