Speaking of Chicago
Progressives scored another victory by forcing Rahm Emmanuel into a run-off with Cook County commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Emmanuel received a mere 45 percent of the vote and Garcia received 35.
Dave Weigel thinks that Rahm ran into trouble for his pure neo-liberalism and belief in privatization.
Rick Perlstein goes further and calls Emmanuel corrupt and only looking to govern for his cronies and himself. I would say that if even half the accusations are true, Perlstein is spot on. This bit stood out to me:
“Indeed, the mayor faced a drumbeat of outstanding journalistic exposés all throughout the campaign. The Chicago Sun-Times reported on Deborah Quazzo, an Emanuel school board appointee who runs an investment fund for companies that privatize school functions. They discovered that five companies in which she had an ownership stake have more than tripled their business with the Chicago Public Schools since she joined the board, many of them for contracts drawn up in the suspicious amount of $24,999—one dollar below the amount that required central office approval. (Chicago is the only municipality in Illinois whose school board is appointed by a mayor. But activists succeeded—in an arduous accomplishment against the obstruction attempts of Emanuel backers on the city council—to get an advisory referendum on the ballot in a majority of the city’s wards calling for an elected representative school board. Approximately 90 percent of the voters who could vote for the measure did.)”
I don’t think the spells trouble for Clinton on a national scale in 2016 but it does show that the new urbanization of Democratic Politics can be troubling for Clintonian Third-Way Neo-liberalism in the future. Christine Quinn lost out to De Blasio in the NYC primary for refusing to even give the smallest approvals for worker protections and paid maternity leave until it was too late and she was out flanked on her left.
Looking for lessons for Clinton in this particular election is absurd. Chicago’s internal politics operate as a closed system, and this election was about what’s going on in Chicago, which the rest of the country has been remarkably apathetic about until just recently. The reason Rahm is in a runoff is not because he’s a neoliberal, but because Chicago has real problems and he’s done shit to deal with them, choosing instead to spend his time helping out out his buddies. He’ll still win, though, and the reason he will is what he does have in common with Hillary: he’s got so much more money behind him than his opposition that, in the end, it’d take a miracle for him to lose.Report
Apathy wins, miracles lose.
But to make apathy into a miracle — that takes talent.Report
This is either really deep or nonsensical. I can’t tell which.Report
Ordinary Times
This is either really deep or nonsensical. I can’t tell which.Report
Chicago-style Pizza:
This is either really deep or nonsensical. I can’t tell which.Report
If almond milk doesn’t break us up, the epic battles R. and I have over “Chicago-style” pizza surely will.Report
If someone could pin that expression on Rahm – you know, the “overheard at Uno’s Thursday night when the pizza arrived” sorta thing – it’d hurt his re-election chances more than all the corruption accusations. I mean, we’re talking Chicago here. Corruption is a staple, but deep-dish pizza is sacred.Report
Hey, did we get another layer of embedding?Report
Glyph,
I agree with you that’s quite clever as a tag-line.
And CK’s working on the site right now….
Strange coincidence. Fortuitous, almost.Report
Chris,
oh, not that deep.
http://triblive.com/news/adminpage/4057577-74/election-mayor-pittsburgh#axzz3Ss3Ie9X7
Turnout tanked everywhere Wagner had supporters (People simply said “why bother”?)
18% turnout to elect the next mayor of pittsburgh.
(note: Wander went to Russia in the middle of the not-primary campaign (and stayed out of the country for over a month, prompting his PR team to quit). Wander was not a serious candidate, I think.)Report
“I do not believe that the mayor loves the Cubbies.”Report
Ah, Chicago politics. Looks like Emmanuel is finishing off what Daley Jr. started–selling off the city’s assets to the highest bidder in the name of “privatization.” Sad that one of the greatest cities in the world is plagued by so much corruption.Report
Corruption has been a Chicago political tradition since it was founded.Report
apropos of nothing, that’s a terrible analogy, Weigel.Report
Also as a mostly irrelevant aside, from the Perlstein piece:
Red light cameras and school boards independent of the political process are quite often, and maybe, even most of the time, things progressives are in favor of. At least the ones that write for GreaterGreaterWashington and other urbanist blogs.Report
@Kolohe
I think there is a difference between being independent of the political process and being packed with cronies by the mayor who use the school board for private gain.
As a liberal, one of my big concerns is the private-public revolving door where people go back and forth between public sector work and lucrative private sector work. There is a lot of research that shows that this is where the real corruption comes in:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-dovi-officials-lobbyists-20150217-story.html
The School Board story in the Perlstein piece is rank corruption in my mind.Report
When I read that, what I hear is, I want a large and robust government bureaucracy with the power to enforce a large and robust set of rules and regulations on the private sector, but I also don’t want anyone working in that bureaucracy to have any experience working in the private sector.
What could go wrong?Report
jr,
both some of our most cost-effective programs, and some of our worst run programs, have come out of people who weren’t private sector beforehand.
There’s nothing saying we can’t hire private sector folks… for other industries. (note: there may be specific industries where you don’t have comparable other industries.).Report
I would have said the same, that regulators need to have experience in the private sector.
But doing something and overseeing something are two different skill sets.
Certainly, the regulator needs to be conversant and knowledgeable about the industry, but is isn’t necessary for them to have the same skills; they have different objectives and metrics.
I see this in my industry, where an architect sometimes has to tell a tradesman, who has been doing something for 20 years, that he is doing it wrong. And likewise, a building inspector has to tell the architect the design doesn’t work, according to a set of metrics he never considered.
I can’t think of a single industry where there aren’t these sorts of overlapping and often contradictory goals- which is why we need all the stakeholders to be represented even- and especially- when they have different backgrounds and experiences.Report
I want a regulatory regime where the best career path is to join the private sector and consult about how to find loopholes in the regulations.Report
If private companies have non-compete clauses, why can’t government institutions?Report
@jr
I think the concern is the only way. Politician X passes Law Y that makes Practice Z for the Acme Corp. Six months later Politician X is hired to be CEO X of the Acme Corp that doubles down on Practice Z. That can be concerning.Report
@j-r
There is always going to be some revolving between private and public practice especially as parties go in and out of power and what not. There are still problems with corruption though.
What is wrong with telling the person “You can serve on board X but your company won’t be given any contracts” while you are serving on board X.
It is also concerning to see people line up for staffing and political positions as mainly a way of serving their own needs and interests instead of the public good.
The school story is just one of many things Rahm has apparently done ot enrich is campaign donors.Report
I would like to point out that Republicans do this too and I’d like to question why I am the first person to bring this up.
Why aren’t we talking about Bush?Report
Republicans in Chicago… heh… heheh… heheheh…. AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!Report
When did we start talking about Clinton?Report
I mentioned Zombie Clinton yesterday…Report
I meant that the entire article was quotes about Rahm and then suddenly we’re being told whether/how it will impact Clinton without any reason why.Report
The 2016 election is only 18 months away. Get used to it.Report
This morning I ate Honey Nut Cheerios instead of my usual banana and toast. How will this affect Hillary’s electoral math?Report
Well, if people start associating Hillary with the phrase “Honey Nut”, I don’t think it’ll help.Report
I started associating her and her husband with much worse terms after the health care debacle of ’93.Report
The 2016 election is only 18 months away. Get used to it.
[reaches under desk, pulls out bottle, takes a slug, stares off into space]Report
To be honest, I think it’s because Clinton represents all of the eggs currently in the Democrats’ basket.
(Imagine if Hillary had been elected in 2008 with Obama as VP. Imagine Obama running in 2016. Unstoppable, right? Well… as it is now… well… the democrats don’t seem to have much of a bench. Elizabeth Warren, maybe?)Report
Yeah, talking about Clinton a lot makes sense. Trying to draw lessons for her from Chicago’s local politics is sorta like trying to figure out when the Nile will flood by looking at the color of the water in the Snake River.Report
Well, I think it’s more that we could tell that there were going to be problems for the Republicans in 2008 by looking at what was going on with Republicans in deeply red areas and how even the True Believers were wobbly.
Chicago is, to some degree, a category unto itself. That said, there may be tea leaves talking about Establishment Democratic Players at the bottom of this here cup.Report
Is everyone forgetting that there are long standing professional and personal connections between Mayor Emanuel and the Clinton political empire?Report
Nah, not forgetting. Just don’t think it’s particularly relevant, their personal connection.
And in Chicago, Emmanuel is the Republican. It’d be nice if what happened in Chicago signaled a change in the direction of the Democratic Party. It doesn’t.Report
left wing discontent with the Greater Clinton Co-Prosperity Sphere is how we got the Bush restoration. You don’t think an early expression of that discontent matters?Report
left wing discontent with the Greater Clinton Co-Prosperity Sphere is how we got the Bush restoration.
Really? Discontent lefties escorted Bush into office? Why does that strike me as too simplistic? I mean, it does, but you know a whole lot more about this stuff than I do.
Personally, I’d’ve thought that it was something positive about the Bush campaign – the promise of Rugged, Real-American, Texas-style Conservatism, now giddee-UP! – than the feelings of the disenfranchised left.Report
Oh, and the campaign promise of WAR. Lots of folks were giddy at the prospect of that.Report
If liberals feel like establishment Democrats have been as aloof and corrupt as Emmanuel, they’re fucked, but that’s the case regardless of what happened in Chicago.Report
Chris,
I don’t know whether they feel that way or not. But I do find it (personally) ironic that just a couple days ago I was talking about the ChrisCristie scandal and, after recounting some of the allegations in play, said something like “Democrat corruption isn’t as bad as GOP corruption. At least they throw the electorate a bone while doing so.”
Heh.
And here we are.
Well, we are talking about Chicago….
(But then there’s the Dem. governor of Oregon…)Report
And to follow up on that, criticisms of Rahm’s policies as Mayor extend back a ways – including charges of corruption – so it’s not like there hasn’t been a case against him for some while. But apparently articles like Perlstein’s, which collate the corruption into discrete, easily digestible packets, represent a tipping point.
I’ve never liked the guy all that much, so I hope he loses.
On the other hand, Garcia sounds like a decent guy, so I hope he wins.Report
Stillwater,
as far as I know, nothing’s as bad as football corruption.Report
Kim,
I agree. When that German player crossed from the sideline onto the foot of his team-mate right in front of the goal to win the worldcup over Argentina, I instantly thought: the fix is in.Report
Wrong football. what I was thinking of involved deliberate cutting of people (I presume for sexual enjoyment).Report
Actually, I apologize for the snark, Kimmie. I just have no idea what you mean. In what way do you think football is more corrupt than Emanuel’s mayorality?Report
Do you mean cutting them from the roster? That’s something agreed upon during the CB process. It’s why the really good players demand guaranteed money. So that doesn’t seem to me like evidence of corruption. I’m probably misunderstanding you, tho.Report
Oh, and the campaign promise of WAR. Lots of folks were giddy at the prospect of that.
I am probably misremembering but I misremember that Bush campaigned on limiting our adventurism and getting rid of nation building.
Remember the 2000 movie “The Contender”? Good times. The big closing scene of the movie had Joan Allen giving a fairly decent cri de coeur.
It contains the line “I stand for a strong and growing Armed Forces because we must stomp out genocide on this planet, and I believe that that is a cause worth dying for.”
This was *NOT* a right-wing movie. That line was one of the cudgels used to hit the isolationist Republican party.
But maybe I misremember.Report
I do recall Bush’s “no nation building” — the military was for winning wars and then going home.
0 for 2.Report
“Really? Discontent lefties escorted Bush into office? Why does that strike me as too simplistic?”
Bush ran a competent enough campaign (and not a pro-war* one), but the reason why the de facto incumbent didn’t crush the popular vote and electoral college to pre-empt any Florida & SCOTUS contretemps was that certain people voted for Nader, or more often, stayed home.
*heck, the Decider decided to channel his inner Elsa at the first foreign policy crisis of his administration – the EP-3 Hainan island incident – much to the chagrin of the Republican hawks.Report
Unfortunately for you, you’re talking about fiction while I’m talking about fact.
Unfortunately for me, I’m talking about facts but can’t seem to find any references to them!
Ima keep looking. I know this wasn’t a figment of my reimagination.Report
Mike,
No, it was during the campaign. Early in it, actually. He said he wanted to get involved in Iraq, militarily. Some sorta repayment to a slight against his dad. Something.
Still looking (but my Google-fu is weak!)Report
I know Bush advisers had done serious talk about invading Iraq before he even announced he was running, but I don’t remember him mentioning it during the campaign. That it was part of his overall plan was well known in Texas (so much so that on the morning of September 11, 2001, one of my first thoughts was, “They’ll use this as a reason to attack Iraq,” which…), but I recall him running on a relatively isolationist foreign policy platform publicly.Report
OK, I concede.
Can’t find a dang thing.
Sucks gettin old, tho. I can say that without any citations.Report
Chris,
Yeah, I think what you said is right, and I think I confused that fact (or awareness) with some stuff he said shortly after he was elected.
Still, I have this lingering sense….
No. NO. I concede. Full stop.Report
Woodward wrote in his first Bush book (which was written a year before the Iraq invasion kicked off) that the people in the high level meetings on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, were talking about Iraq (to which other people at the meeting said or thought, wtf dudes? and the subject was changed and no more mentions of Iraq were made in that book).
So while several of Bush’s foreign policy advisers were for going into Iraq from the get go, none of these people were particularly publicized on the campaign trail and really didn’t have the sway they did in the administration until 9/11 actually happened.Report
I thought I was talking about “culture” but, sure. How about the “trifecta” kerfuffle?
Whether or not he “really” meant it, Republicans had spent the last few years complaining about Clinton getting all adventurous and Bush attempted to capitalize on that anti-adventurism.
9/11 gave Bush all of the excuses he needed in order to claim that everything had changed and his old promises no longer applied and, for that, sure. Excoriate him for that (call it “enhanced interrogation”!) but, seriously, he didn’t promise WAR (which, of course, is not the same as saying that he promised PEACE… it’s just pointing out that WAR wasn’t his big theme and my bringing up “fiction” is to show an elided version of the differences between the two ideologies loosely associated with the two parties as they existed in a post-Clinton but pre-Bush world).Report
(Whoops, sorry. Didn’t mean to pile on.)Report
Kolohe,
So while several of Bush’s foreign policy advisers were for going into Iraq from the get go, none of these people were particularly publicized on the campaign trail and really didn’t have the sway they did in the administration until 9/11 actually happened.
Well, the PNAC letter advocating military intervention was signed by
Elliott Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
William J. Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner
John Bolton
Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama
Robert Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld
William Schneider, Jr.
Vin Weber
Paul Wolfowitz
quite a few of which held a lot of sway in the Bush Admin.
But … I’m not gonna push the point any further since what I said was wrong.
Jaybird,
Don’t think you’re piling on. You’re not. You’re correcting what I said. Significant difference there.Report
Stillwater,
“Do you mean cutting them from the roster? That’s something agreed upon during the CB process. It’s why the really good players demand guaranteed money. So that doesn’t seem to me like evidence of corruption. I’m probably misunderstanding you, tho.”
… no, I mean cutting people to watch them bleed. Not being the best football fan in the world (no tv), the alternative meaning didn’t even occur to me.
PennState isn’t the only school that people know about abuses going on at. It’s just the only school that got publicized. Some of the other stuff is worse, and I doubt we’ll hear about it in our lifetimes. If you’re a good enough coach, and you teach at some of these places, you can get away with a lot of nasty stuff.Report
this gives the party lion on Iraq in the 2000 presidential campaign
So, yes, you can kinda sorta see the seeds of war in that exchange. On the other hand, in context, it’s the same multilateral international diplomacy and wish list that Gore (and Clinton, and any other mainstream Democratic internationalist) would want.
That is, translating to the present day, it’s stated policy of the Obama administration to prevent Iran from getting nukes, by the use of international diplomacy, multilateral sanctions, and also ‘keeping all options on the table’. The administration isn’t going to say it, but they would also be more than happy for the mullahs to be deposed – or sidelined into a constitutional theocracy role the way Juan Carlos moved Spain after Franco. It’s the implied endstate of modern Democratic internationalism for each nation to be governed by some sort of democracy with political plurality. Now the difference is that the Republicans will say outright ‘the mullahs have to go’. But lack the political viability to make such a statement be more than aspirational bluster absent a large galvanizing event like 9/11 was.Report
Coda:
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Thanks for that K.
I appreciate the research into the issue, which – unfortunately – indicates that Gore is the more likely candidate to engage in warfare. But for the record, that isn’t the comment from George that lives in my mind as revealing his war-like intentions. I don’t think that comment exists anymore. It’s been wiped from the pages of history!
Nah. I was just confused.
In my defense, once I saw the Team he constructed during the primary (I think) I was already primed for the worst. And when Cheney was tasked with finding him the best possible VP candidate, and after months of rigorous vetting Cheney chose … Cheney! … my priminations were moreorless confirmed.
Those were dark times for me, I admit.Report
I don’t think it suggests Gore was more likely to engage in a ground war. He is endorsing the sanctions regime, under which I’m sure he includes punative bombing and arming the Kurds and maybe Shiite militias (though they hated us because Bush the First abandoned them to slaughter). And he implies that Bush the Second might abandon the sanctions regime to accomplish what they both want: the removal from power of Saddam Hussein.Report
Yup, it’s Bush who’s expressing impatience and saying that something more should have been done,Report
Ah the joys of one party machine rule.Report
Either way it looks like Chicago is in trouble. I supose the answer will be to raise taxes as usual.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-chicago-rating-downgrade-could-end-swaps-deals-174532024–finance.htmlReport
Yes, because that ALWAYS fixes things….Report