ELECTION DAZE: Who's the establishment guy?

I wish the candidates for president would make up their mind about which of them is the establishment choice and which one is the choice of a new generation (Oh wait, that’s Pepsi).

How else to explain the diatribe delivered by politically interested Chicago millionaire J.B. Pritzker (whose older sister, Penny, is Barack Obama’s finance chairwoman).

J.B. told WBBM-TV that, of course, his preferred candidate for president, Hillary R. Clinton, was going to lose in Illinois. Obama, Pritzker said, is “the Machine candidate,” whereas Hillary, “ran against the Machine.” The Clinton campaign, by pushing forward, is “taking on the Machine and what it stands for.”

With that many “Chicago machine” phrases tossed out there, you’d have thought he was a Republican.

Now it is true that the Cook County Democratic organization (in fact, the entire Illinois Democratic Party) slated Obama for U.S. president. What can one say? They chose to back the guy who lives in Chicago, rather than the lady who may be a Chicago native, but prefers to think of herself for political purposes as a Noo Yawker.

Besides, I thought the whole theme of the Hillary Clinton campaign was that she was the candidate of the Democratic Party establishment, whereas Obama was some snotty punk kid who was trying to cut in line ahead of her. Now her people are trying to make him out to be the establishment candidate?

All this really proves is that if talk is cheap, than political talk belongs in the bargain basement bin.

What other observations (serious analysis will have to wait until later this week, anybody who says they can give you something legitimate tonight is fibbing) can I offer on this Election Night?

GAFFES: Obama showed up at his polling place in the Hyde Park neighborhood, looking forward to using a touch-screen voter machine to officially record his vote for himself to be president. There was just one problem.

Elections officials didn’t have the proper equipment to allow Obama to use a touch screen. He had to settle for using a paper ballot to vote for himself. Obama took the disappointment better than Carol Moseley-Braun reacted two decades ago.

I was a reporter for the old City News Bureau of Chicago during the 1988 primary elections, and I remember being camped outside of the polling place in the South Shore neighborhood where Moseley-Braun (who at the time was running for Cook County recorder of deeds) said she was planning to vote at 7 a.m.

She didn’t show up until closer to 8 a.m., but it really didn’t matter. Someone screwed up, and no elections equipment was sent to the polling place. Nobody was able to vote. When Moseley-Braun found out she couldn’t vote right there and then, she got on a telephone and started yelling at elections officials downtown. “I can’t even vote for myself,” she snapped at an elections official.

“INVISIBLE INK?”: About 20 people who made a point of showing up early to their polling place in the far North Side’s 49th Ward wound up having to go back and re-cast their ballots.

Why?

It turns out the election judges who worked their polling places suffered from momentary brain cramp. All of the voters in question tried to use the device meant for someone using a touch-screen voting machine to mark their paper ballots.

Of course, using the wrong device meant that no votes were recorded on the ballot – a fact that was noted when election tally machines rejected the ballots? The problem is that election judges told voters that their ballots were marked up “in invisible ink.”

Chicago elections chief Langdon Neal told WTTW-TV that officials had managed to track down all the voters inconvenienced, and that he knew at least eight of them managed to return to the polls to cast their votes properly.

WASHINGTON-ESQUE: The figures still astound me – 95 to 4.

Those are the percentages that Obama and Clinton respectively took of the African-American vote in Illinois, according to exit polls used by WBBM-TV.

The last time I heard of any candidate in Chicago taking such an overwhelming share of the black vote literally was when Harold Washington won the mayoral elections of 1983 and 1987.

It’s rather ironic that when Obama first moved to Chicago in the mid-1980s, he picked this city because he had dreams of getting a job at City Hall as part of the Washington administration.

It didn’t happen, but now he has the potential to become an icon on the level of Washington. Who has the best name chant, “Har-old” or “Oh-bah-mah?”

I also heard the echoes of Harold in Obama's Election Night speech. His line "our time has come" reminded me a lot of Washington's "it's our turn" line.

DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR: Somewhere out there in Illinois are just over 1,000 people who cast their primary election ballots for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to be the Democratic party’s presidential nominee.

Are they just overly loyal, seriously delusional, or as clueless as those people in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2000 who say they didn’t realize they were supporting Pat Buchanan for president when they miss-marked their ballots?

CELEBRITY SLOP: Even “Entertainment Tonight” felt the political touch Tuesday, giving stories of Britney Spears’ alleged mental instability a rest for the day. The pop celebrity fluff program let us know that Obama has the support of actors Robert DeNiro and George Clooney, but Jack Nicholson is for Hillary.

Considering that Nicholson was the Joker in a superior version of “Batman” than the sequel Clooney starred in might put Hillary on top. But I can’t help but think that DeNiro’s characterization of a youthful Vito Corleone beats both.

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After much consideration, it's Obama

When I visit my neighborhood Lutheran church Tuesday to cast a ballot, there will be nine names in particular I will be looking for.

From former Illinois Comptroller and Attorney General Roland Burris to current Aldermen Toni Preckwinkle and Freddrenna Lyle, one-time member of Congress and U.S. Court of Appeals judge Abner Mikva to Carolyn Rush (the wife of Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill.), along with Lula Mae Ford, Alan King and Kwame Raoul, and Greta Ivers as a potential alternate – all are among the most important votes I will cast.

What they all have in common is that they live in Illinois’ first congressional district (as do I), and they want to spend a week in August in Denver attending the Democratic National Convention as delegates representing the interests of the presidential aspirations of Barack Obama.

OH, BY THE way, I’m also going to make a mark beside Obama’s name.

The Chicago Argus (which in reality is nothing more than me, myself and I) is supporting the presidential ambitions of the U.S. senator from Illinois over those of his colleague from New York – Hillary R. Clinton, who really is a suburban Chicago native. Barack Obama posing with Superman in Metropolis (the one in Southern Illinois) is the silliest image encountered by the Chicago Argus during this primary election season. Despite that, he still gets my vote. Photograph provided by Obama for America.

This is a tough election cycle for Democrats to figure out which candidate is worthy of consideration for president. I have long been a supporter of Hillary Clinton (preferring her in some ways to potential First Gentleman Bill Clinton), and it would not stink if she were to become president some day.

But Obama’s strengths overcome those of Clinton.

AN OBAMA PRESIDENCY would contain a symbolism of a United States that is moving forward rather than back, and is abandoning yet another of the old racial stigmas that provide this country with its moments of shame. His election would be a moral victory for the nation as a whole.

While some people hate the notion of symbolism because it is too squishy-feely for them – one also senses that the reason they always wind up coming out on the losing side of such arguments is because they want to live in the past, rather than the 21st Century.

Obama may have too much of an intellect for some people to be comfortable, but it is what makes him capable of coming up with innovative ideas to resolving our nation’s problems. While some intellectuals have a hard time putting their “ideas” into action (the late Alderman Vito Marzullo used to dismiss such people by saying, “They couldn’t get their dog out of the pound if you gave them the money to pay the fine”), Obama differs.

During his time in Springfield, he developed an ability to work with both Democrats and Republicans. He is a liberal who ultimately became a part of the city’s political establishment (the dreaded “Chicago machine”) in serving eight years in the Illinois General Assembly, before going on to the U.S. Senate.

HOW ABLE IS Obama to push aside liberal ideals for political pragmatism?

Able enough that it caused him to make one of the few bad votes of his time in the U.S. Senate -- he was one of the lawmakers who voted in support of a conservative measure to erect a physical barrier along the U.S./Mexico border.

Latino activists who tout the measure as evidence that Obama is not sensitive to their needs are overlooking two points. The first is that the bill had enough political support to pass regardless of what Obama did. He cast his vote solely so that Republicans in the future would not be able to run xenophobic campaign ads claiming he was allowing “illegal Mexicans” to slip into the U.S.

The second point is that Hillary Clinton also voted for the bill.

IN SOME WAYS, Obama has shown the ability to learn from the mistakes of being too partisan. His 2002 electoral loss for a U.S. House of Representatives seat to Bobby Rush knocked a bit of the liberal cockiness out of him and gave him a respectable balance between idealism and practical politics.

Those who want to claim Obama is “too liberal” to represent the ideals of the people of the United States of America don’t know what they’re talking about. How else to explain conservative pundit Ann Coulter once saying she couldn’t support Obama because she thinks a U.S. president “should be an American.”

Being born in Honolulu and living the bulk of one’s adult life in Chicago certainly qualifies as “American,” unless your view of American is so restrictive as to be patently un-American. All too often, it is those who themselves are not typical of the norm who are trying to use the power of political office to shift “the norm” to the far right – while demonizing those who are less interested in conservative causes than in living their lives to the fullest potential.

Some will argue that Obama (who is 46) is too young and inexperienced to be president. To that, I quote General Anthony McAuliffe at the Battle of the Bulge in saying, “Nuts!”

I REALLY DON’T understand why people think Hillary Clinton is so much more experienced at public service than Obama. Admittedly, her age (she is 60) gives her about an extra decade in public life over Barack. But thinking that makes her entitled to win this election is as ridiculous as the people in Illinois in 2002 who thought that then-state Attorney General Jim Ryan should be governor, just because he waited his turn behind GOP colleagues Jim Thompson, Jim Edgar and George Ryan.

Obama’s professional life in public service dates back to the mid-1980s and includes time as a community organizer trying to work on behalf of the less fortunate in Chicago’s inner cities. Those same people were the focus of his work as an attorney in Chicago in the early 1990s. He served eight years in the Illinois Senate (which I covered as a UPI reporter at the Statehouse in Springfield during the first three). Then, he went to Washington.

Clinton’s public life is due to her latching on to the career of her husband, who served a stint as Arkansas attorney general, several terms as Arkansas governor, then two terms as president.

The bottom line is this. Obama is a first-term U.S. senator, while Clinton is a second-term senator. Both of them are still low ranking in the world of the Congress. It’s not like either one of them is a three-decade Senate veteran. Both derive their D.C. influence these days from running high-profile campaigns for president, rather than for anything they actually did in the U.S. Senate.

FOR A POLITICO who gets his influence because of his actual senate duties, one needs to look to Illinois’ other senator – Richard Durbin.

Some people believe Hillary gained experience from being first lady of Arkansas and the United States. Some think she provided an intellectual underpinning to her husband’s political efforts that would finally rise to the top if she were elected president.

But giving her credit for being first lady just doesn’t cut it.

Even though Bill Clinton did give her some responsibilities, the biggest act of her time as first lady was when she was put in charge of a 1993 effort to reform healthcare in this country. That measure went down to defeat as it got tangled up in partisan politics.

ONE MIGHT ARGUE that her time as first lady ought to be held against her, although I personally don’t think it should amount to much either way.

How much of a rhetorical spanking does Obama deserve for his ties to Antoin Rezko, a former political adviser to many Chicago Democrats who is scheduled to go on trial next month on criminal charges that say he tried to extort money from companies that wanted to get contact with the political people he had relationships with.

In short, Rezko was a lobbyist who prosecutors believe grossly overstepped the legal boundaries involved in trying to influence government activities.

Obama was one of the people with whom Rezko had ties. Some have made a stink about the extra-large piece of property the senator bought for his home in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He got a larger-than-usual lot because Rezko purchased the neighboring property, then sold a portion of the land to Obama.

IN THEORY, OBAMA now owes Rezko a favor or two. Who’s to say what Rezko would have someday asked Obama to do in his role as a U.S. senator? It is proof, the critics say, that Obama is just a political hack, like all other Chicago politicians.

Bull!

Prosecutors have not put forth any evidence that Obama has acted illegally. This is a case of the appearance of impropriety, which all too often is nothing more than whining about someone’s alleged wrongdoing without being able to prove a thing.

It’s also not like Obama was alone in dealing with Tony Rezko. The man was developing himself as an influence with Democratic politics and was not easily ignored. Gov. Rod Blagojevich has much deeper troubles connected to his ties with Rezko.

IT IS GOOD that the “Rezko” issue is not catching on among the general public (and not just because white-bred America would have too much trouble spelling “A-N-T-O-I-N R-E-Z-K-O” correctly).

Rezko is a lot of chatter about nothing.

There is one reason I would consider voting for Clinton to be president, both in the primary and in the Nov. 4 election – should she get the Democratic nomination.

Her presence in the White House would infuriate a segment of the electorate that absolutely wants to believe Hillary is liberalism incarnate. They want to think people like Hillary are what is wrong with our society and they want to believe such people are damaged goods politically.

IT WOULD GIVE me a perverse pleasure to see those people sputter in disgust at the sight of a President Hillary R. Clinton, and watching them when they realize that historians would wind up remembering their beloved presidency of George Bush the younger as merely a mistake that occurred in the middle of Clinton Era.

But that pleasure would be petty. Voting for someone because it would offend someone else is a juvenile reason to support someone for president. I’d rather vote for somebody to be president because I liked their vision of where they wanted the country to go.

That candidate is Barack Obama.

NOW, BACK TO the delegates. They ought to be the emphasis of Election Day voting for president. Under our electoral system, the political “beauty contest” of casting a ballot for Obama himself doesn’t mean much.

A candidate without delegates is powerless. Right now, Obama and Clinton are in a struggle to get a majority of delegates so as to ensure their nomination.

The delegate count is the reason that Obama can legitimately claim the Nevada caucuses as a victory. He lost the popular vote, but won more delegates from that state because of the local rules by which delegates were distributed.

As of Monday, Obama had 190 delegates, compared to 261 for Clinton. But when one considers those delegates allocated by voter totals (compared to the super-delegates who are political bigwigs who go to the convention without any obligation to support a specific candidate), Obama has 63 delegates, compared to 48 for Clinton.

“TSUNAMI TUESDAY” WITH its elections in 22 states is going to throw those figures totally out of whack, particularly since voters in the three largest cities of New York, Los Angeles and our sweet home of Chicago will all vote.

Obama and Clinton are both going to pick up delegates and win primaries. Voters need to pay attention to make sure they support the right delegates, and they are going to have to check before voting to see who the would-be delegates are in their district for the presidential candidate they wish to support.

The silliest mistake one could make on Tuesday would be to cast a ballot for Obama, but then vote for the Clinton delegates.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Local delegates for the presidential candidates from the Chicago-area congressional districts (http://www.voterinfonet.com/sub/view_all_candidates.asp) include both prominent and anonymous names, but are among the most important votes one will cast Tuesday.

One of the most interesting aspects of the final days of this primary election cycle was the dueling nature of guest commentaries published by the nation’s two major newspapers. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the daughter of former President John F. Kennedy, (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/opinion/27kennedy.html?_r=1&emc=eta1&oref=slogin) wrote a commentary in support of Obama for the New York Times. The Washington Post, feeling the need to match with a presidential daughter of their own, responded with an essay by Susan Eisenhower (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/01/AR2008020102621.html?referrer=emailarticle), the grand-daughter of Kennedy predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, who backs Barack. Personally, I’d have been more impressed if Barbara Bush had written the column.

Not all MySpace pages are personal expressions of one’s inner self. The Obama camp turned his page (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=184040237) into a commercialized venture.

McCain the GOP's answer to Al Gore

That's Al Gore, er uh, John McCain, campaigning among veterans in hopes of getting their vote. Photograph provided by John McCain '08, http://www.johnmccain.com/.

There are three obvious questions that will come to some readers’ minds as they finish reading my endorsement of Barack Obama for president. Here is my attempt to answer them, up front.

WHY NOT CONSIDER A REPUBLICAN?

I’m a Chicago-oriented guy. Even when I have lived elsewhere, people around me used to groan whenever Chicago would come up in discussion because they knew my passion for the city was boundless.

But more importantly, the field put forth by the Republican Party does not move me. I am much too urban oriented for Mike Huckabee to have any appeal. His followers and I will just have to agree to disagree. Mitt Romney is too eager to push his religious beliefs, making me wonder if he truly understands a separation of church and state. And the Rudy Giuliani movement fizzled way too soon, creating the big disappointment of this primary election cycle.

As far as John McCain is concerned, I don’t get his public perception. He is a conservative on enough social issues that anybody who thinks there’s a liberal streak to him is being absurd.

Besides, McCain’s serious chance to be president was in 2000, and he blew it to George W. Bush. While I can understand why that might grate at his ego, I don’t think he is owed another chance to run.

People who back McCain are the Republican equivalent of those Democratic goofs who think Al Gore should be running for president this year. We need to move on.

WHY ENDORSE ANYBODY? NOBODY GIVES A $#!*% WHAT YOU THINK!

It may be so. I am not delusional. I do not expect a groundswell of people across the United States to be so swayed by my “stellar” prose that they immediately rush out to Back Barack.

But when I was a political reporter, I had this belief (I still do) that political writers should be required on Election Day to publish a commentary telling who they voted for, and why. It puts them on the spot a bit, but it also lets readers get a sense of the biases that affect the people who provide news coverage.

Now that I am in a position to dictate editorial coverage (even if it is just for this site), I believe I would be a hypocrite if I did not require this of myself. The bottom line is that I know the only vote I can influence is my own.

FORGET THE NATIONAL STUFF. WHAT ABOUT STATE’S ATTORNEY?

It always amazes me to see people who consider themselves politically astute whose interests do not venture any further away than one block from Clark and Randolph streets.

Hence, for some the big election this cycle is the Democratic primary for Cook County state’s attorney. Half a dozen candidates are looking to replace retiring prosecutor Dick Devine, but the party slated nobody – meaning we all have to figure out for ourselves whom to support.

My vote is going to Anita Alvarez, an actual assistant state’s attorney who is interested in criminal prosecution and legal issues, rather than using the post to build up a public profile for a future run for higher office.

The tone I heard from her campaign makes me think she is more professional than her opponents. Or maybe it’s just that all her male challengers are coming off as snotty little punks with all the trash-talk and cheap shots they have been taking at each other.

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(Democratic) Party crasher wants to be a judge

T.J. Somer is an attorney with dreams of being a Cook County judge.

The resident of Chicago Heights who is corporation counsel of his hometown has never won an election – even though he has tried repeatedly.

The closest he has come to success thus far is when he ran for mayor of Chicago Heights. He gained public attention by losing, challenging the results in court and taking 19 months before conceding defeat.

SOMER’S DREAMS OF running for office began in the 1990s when he was the former Chicago Heights police officer who was the sacrificial lamb to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., when the Republican Party needed someone to challenge the son of the civil rights leader in a congressional district that was rapidly developing a significant African-American population.

So what is different about Thomas J. Somer now that makes him think he has a chance of winning the election Tuesday?

He has changed political parties. Somer is running as a Democrat for a judicial post within a suburban subcircuit.
T.J. Somer hopes that changing political parties will result in a better Election Day outcome. Photograph provided by Bloom Township government.

Somer is the latest example of someone changing his politically partisan label in hopes that “joining the other team” will give him a better chance at winning. After all, it is not that Somer has anything significantly new in his background.

HIS HOMETOWN USED to be a Republican bastion in the south suburbs. Officials who controlled Chicago Heights politics were white ethnics (largely Italian) who leaned toward the GOP because they saw the party as their political instrument that kept them from being bowled over by Chicago city government.

Shifting parties is just a sign Somer can “smell the coffee,” so to speak, of his changing community. Growing African-American and Hispanic populations in Chicago Heights (along with a federal investigation of the Chicago mob during the 1990s that sent former Chicago Heights Mayor Charles Panici to prison) have changed the town’s politics.

Somer (who was not caught up in the Chicago Heights political corruption) is basically the same “white ethnic” guy whose focus is fellow working-class people.

There really is little difference between people of Democratic and Republican persuasions, particularly if they come from the same region. Similar life experiences will produce similar views on issues that triumph over political party ties. I’m convinced the only reason some “hard-core” Democrats in Chicago support the party is because it is the establishment and they do not want to be mavericks.

FORCE THOSE SAME people to live in a downstate Illinois community where the GOP is dominant, and they likely would convert within weeks. I also know that while I am a Chicagoan who leans Democrat, I find I have more in common with those rare Chicagoans who identify as Republican, than with those rural Illinois residents who vote for Democrats.

Somer’s political conversion is not unique.

The most prominent flip in recent Chicago political history was when Edward R. Vrdolyak, then an alderman and head of the Cook County Democratic Party, decided he wanted to be a part of the political party of Ronald Reagan.

After losing a 1987 mayoral primary to incumbent Harold Washington, he flipped to the GOP, where he campaigned for Cook County circuit court clerk in 1988 and later another mayoral bid as a Republican write-in in the 1989 special election.

HIS GOP BIDS were never traditional campaigns, as they were caught up in the mid-1980s spirit of “Council Wars” that poisoned our local politics. He was never appealing to hard-core Republican voters as much as to racially motivated ones.

I also remember when Ald. Bernie Stone of the far North Side’s 50th Ward declared himself to be a Republican on the grounds that Democrats were too preoccupied with racial disputes. He resumed use of the “Democrat” label when it became apparent no one believed the GOP conversion.

Digging back into Chicago political history, one of the biggest flips was that of Richard J. Daley, who won his first campaign for electoral office as a Republican representing the Bridgeport neighborhood in the Illinois House of Representatives.

The GOP label was a technicality that Democrats used when organizing a write-in campaign for Daley after the Republican incumbent died just before Election Day. Back then, Illinois House districts were required to have representatives of both political parties, and Daley as a GOPer was really a trick to steal a seat.

DALEY BECAME A Democrat officially in his second election, when he moved up to an Illinois Senate seat.

So what are the chances that the public (or at least those living in the 15th subcircuit of Cook County) will take to Democrat Somer any more than they did to the Republican version?

He could win this time around, but not because of any ideological flip.

The difference is that he has some money for a campaign (the Illinois State Board of Elections showed him spending $13,994.48 during the latter half of 2007, and starting this year off with $20,330.52), and he has put money into advertising billboards and public benches.

I HAVE SAT on Somer’s name in recent weeks, and it may help him get enough public recognition that some clueless voter will recognize the name when running through what seems like an endless list of people on the judicial portion of the ballot.

But then, I have yet to see an “idiot” card that lists him. None of the public officials who are organizing voter turnout are bothering to urge people to cast ballots for Somer, although the Chicago Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers both say he is “qualified” to be a judge.

The Illinois State Bar Association, the Hellenic Bar Association and the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago, however, all say he is “not qualified.”

At the less public levels of politics, the bulk of a candidate’s votes usually come from having the support of someone with an organization who can turn out voters on one’s behalf. The various bar association rankings are interesting, but many voters don’t pay them much attention.

AND INSOFAR AS eye-catching political mailings are concerned, he’s running against Anna Helen Demacopoulos, an assistant state’s attorney who also wants to become a judge. (Take a guess who the Hellenic Bar Association would like to see win.)

Her mailings emphasize the notion that government could be spying on us, and that we ought to elect judges who will protect our personal privacy rights.

So who will wind up winning Tuesday; the Republican convert or the prosecutor appealing to our outrage over potential abuses of the Patriot Act?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Here are the reports filed with the Illinois State Board of Elections that detail the finances of the Somer (http://www.elections.state.il.us/CampaignDisclosure/D2Semi.aspx?id=353527) and Demacopoulos (http://www.elections.il.gov/CampaignDisclosure/D2Semi.aspx?id=356859) campaigns. Note the significant drop in totals raised and spent, compared to the millions spent by candidates for statewide or county government posts.

Nia Vardalos (the star of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”) doesn’t care if Somer is now a Democrat. She (http://www.annaforjudge.com/) wants you to vote for Demacopoulos.

Dan Lipinski "existence" in D.C. will continue to be a thorn in Dem activist soul

There are some observers who want to believe that a batch of political ferrets on Tuesday are going to have a field day with the carcass of Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill.

Those observers (pundits, wags, smartypants, whatever you want to call them) hate the idea of Lipinski representing the South Side in Washington because he’s not as liberal on social issues as they are, and they want to think he’s going to die politically this Election Day.

These bumper stickers sell for $3.95 each.

While the political junkie in me finds their attacks entertaining, I’m not swayed by their arguments that Lipinski, 41, is nothing more than some sort of George W. Bush clone – both because of his conservative views and because his daddy’s influence got him his current political post.

Lipinski is a former political science professor who decided to actually get into the game of politics when his father, William, retired following a decades-long career as a Chicago alderman and a member of Congress, both representing white ethnic neighborhoods on the city’s far Southwest Side.

Lipinski the younger likely wouldn’t have given up a tenured post at a university if he would have to go through the actual grunt work of putting together a campaign and getting himself elected.
Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., in testifying before a House transportation subcommittee, is trying to follow in the footsteps of his father, who as a member of Congress was considered an expert in the area of mass transit who brought significant federal funding to the CTA. Photograph provided by Rep. Dan Lipinski.

He got the seat after his father won the 2004 Democratic primary to be re-elected, then decided to retire after rigging the replacement process so that party officials chose Dan to be the replacement.

As a result, Dan’s first campaign was in a general election against only token GOP opposition. His 2006 campaigns saw some competition, but he had the benefits of incumbency and was able to win with ease.

Common sense would suggest that Dan is even more of an incumbent this time around, and that any attempt to trash him as some sort of political daddy’s boy is too little, too late.

But that is not stopping Mark Pera, a 53-year-old former assistant state’s attorney for Cook County, from trying such a strategy.

He wants to build up resentment against the way Lipinski was elected, along with the fact that on votes in Congress related to issues such as embryonic stem cell research, abortion and the Iraq War, Dan is more in line with “W.” than he is with the Democratic Party’s platform.

Some political pundits, including many who write for Internet-related forums (the dreaded bloggers), want to believe that a social conservative in Chicago is dead meat.

I’d have to argue those people don’t have a clue as to what Chicago is about, and have forgotten that there used to be a strong conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Elements of those people still live in the Second City, and many of them are concentrated in the white ethnic neighborhoods that surround Midway Airport.

Those neighborhoods also are the heart and soul of the Illinois third congressional district that Lipinski represents.

The fact that Dan Lipinski, like his father, has moralistic qualms about abortion being legal, thinks the president’s war in the Middle East is justified and thinks stem cell research is just another step toward legitimizing abortion is not going to be held against Lipinski the younger.

Lipinski even is among the few Democrats in Congress who likes the notion of erecting concrete and electronic barriers along the U.S./Mexico border and opposes any loosening of standards that would allow people already working in this country to gain a path to citizenship – a combination of stances that caused Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., of the neighboring 4th congressional district to rescind his primary election endorsement.

Pera tells reporters that “Reagan Democrats,” that species of ethnic, urban people who did not want to be made to feel guilty about their negative thoughts toward integration, are not as predominant in the area. He thinks that gives him a chance to win come Tuesday.

That’s not likely. In fact, Dan Lipinski may very well be able to claim to be the member of the Illinois congressional delegation who most perfectly represents the ideals of his constituents.

Let’s face it. Residents of neighborhoods like Clearing and Scottsdale live there because those communities are fairly distant and cut off from the rest of Chicago. There were no CTA elevated trains running into the area until the late 1990s, and the bus routes that run through the Southwest Side still require several transfers in order to get to downtown Chicago or anywhere else in the city.

There are families who have lived in the area for generations without moving. For what it’s worth, I have known “lifelong Chicagoans” who grew up on the Southwest Side, still live there and who have NEVER set foot in Chicago anywhere north of downtown.

It is a collection of neighborhoods that likes the idea of continuity. It was not overly bothered by the political maneuvering Bill Lipinski did on behalf of his son, preferring to think of Dan Lipinski as being similar to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, state Comptroller Dan Hynes and Mayor Richard M. Daley – all of whom had fathers who had significant careers in political office.

So the idea of keeping the Lipinski name as their member of Congress isn’t going to bother them all that much.

It also isn’t going to bother the Chicago aldermen who represent the wards covered by Dan Lipinski’s district. Most of them have endorsed Dan, and they will be organizing their campaign workers to churn out the vote for Lipinski the younger.

That’s why Rahm Emanuel, through his political action committee that is devoted to trying to help elect Democrats to Congress nationwide, chose to give Dan Lipinski a $2,500 donation.

Emanuel figures that blasting Lipinski out of that congressional seat is not worth the struggle. He’s also figuring that a Democrat who only occasionally votes with the party line is still better than a Republican who is openly hostile toward the color blue and all it has come to represent in political circles.

Also benefiting Dan Lipinski is a move that occurred a couple of years before he took office.

Back in the 1990s, Bill Lipinski represented a district that included South and Southwest Side neighborhoods and a significant portion of the southwestern suburbs – almost forming a letter “C” around the city portion of his district.

Those suburban areas were historically Republican, and Bill Lipinski usually had to actually campaign in general elections in order to win. But the 2002 redistricting benefited Lipinski by turning the district into an overwhelmingly city-based district, with only a couple of suburban patches included. Ironically enough, Dan Lipinski lives with his wife in Western Springs, not Chicago proper.

But it means that once making it past the primary, the Nov. 4 general election should be a token campaign since Dan Lipinski won’t have to worry about significant GOP turnout for an opponent.

The bottom line?

Dan Lipinski is likely going back to Washington in 2009, where he will remain as one of the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus. And countless writers of political weblogs will need to undergo some serious psychotherapy to cope with the thought of “Danny boy” continuing to do D.C.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Pundits who want to dump Dan Lipinski can be found here (http://archpundit.com/blog/2007/09/05/time-for-dan-lipinski-to-go-back-to-academia/) and here (http://irregularnews.com/stateprogress/2007/10/12/mark-pera-dan-lipinski/) and here (http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/06/bad-democrat-should-be-treated-same.html) and here (http://www.actblue.com/page/bluemajority). These are just a few of the 3,570 pieces that turn up on Google in a search of the phrase, “Dan Lipinski criticism.”

How conservative is Dan Lipinski? Here (http://www.ontheissues.org/IL/Dan_Lipinski.htm) is a summary, while here is the Lipinski spin (http://www.lipinski.house.gov/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1) on his own record.

Dis ain't Phoenix, it's Chicago. It snows here

Friday was one of the rare days that I was thankful to no longer be a reporter working full-time in the news business. Had I been on somebody’s reportorial staff, I would have had to overdose on “stupid pills” in order to get through the day. Why?

It snowed.

Can you believe it? It is the middle of winter in a Great Lakes state, and we got hit with the slushy white stuff that is cold, wet and messy.

I’d sarcastically say we should “Alert the Media!,” but somebody apparently did. Every single television newscast I stumbled across on Friday hyped the Second City snowfall as though it was some sort of historic event.

WHEN I WAS a reporter, I hated weather stories. They annoy me even more than having to go to a pet store just prior to Easter Sunday to talk to someone about bunny rabbits. I’d even rather be at the zoo today and see whether or not the stinkin’ groundhog saw its shadow, than have to do a weather story.

The problem with weather stories is that they take a routine event and hype all the trivial details in order to get a fluffy story or two.

IT’S NOT NEWS!

In my news judgment book, the reactions of people to inclement weather can be interesting – if that reaction is unique. Swimsuit sale increases in the middle of summer and slush and snowmen in winter are not terribly interesting.

People in places like California or Florida might not realize it, but a Chicago winter has its moments of beauty. Photograph by Peter J. Schulz, Illinois Bureau of Tourism.

MY OVERLY HARD-CORE news judgment tells me that weather stories become news when people start dying because of the temperature and other inclement conditions.

One of the biggest stories to hit Chicago during my time in the news business was in 1995 when summer temperatures became so excessively high that the number of people dying from heat exhaustion reached record levels.

While it comes before my time (I was barely more than one year old), the heavy snowfall that hit Chicago in January 1967 (nearly two feet in a 24-hour period) also qualifies.

That snowfall brought Chicago to a halt. Streets were deserted, cars were buried for days until all that snow melted, and some people were seriously trapped in their homes or at work.

NOTHING THAT HAPPENED on Friday even comes close to the traumatic events of those two weather occurrences that rank as major events in Chicago history.

In fact, I didn’t see any serious inconvenience on Friday, even though I know some parts of Cook County got as much as 11 inches of snow overnight and in the early morning.

For the record, my nephews and nieces did not have to go to school, which inconvenienced those who had to make last-minute arrangements for someone to watch the kids.

When I went out to pick up newspapers, I had to hit half a dozen stores before I could find a place that actually got its newspaper shipment for the day. Some stores got no papers, while others got lesser shipments and were already sold out by the time I got to them. All of the neighborhood news boxes had either Thursday papers still in them, or were empty.

BUT I FINALLY got my newspaper fix satisfied at a Walgreen’s pharmacy located about one mile from where I live.

I was able to drive my car on streets that had been cleaned. I did not encounter any accidents, and have not been able to find anyone who did.

Basically, my life Friday suffered minor inconveniences. As far as I can tell from watching the newscasts, I am solidly in the majority on those grounds. There were no major, life-altering instances taking place in Chicago.

So (to paraphrase the “immortal” Clara Peller), “Where’s the news?!?”

THIS IS THE Midwest. I expect it to snow, several times during the winter season. If I had a problem with it, I’d seriously consider moving to some place southern or southwestern (not Texas, though. Those people are crazy).

By going all out with their news coverage on Friday, Chicago’s television stations cheapened the event. They elevated a nothing news story to an event of significance by devoting so much time to it.

Then, they cheapened the value of a newscast’s lead story by wasting so much time on fluff.

Was it really the “Most Interesting Happening of the Day” that WBBM-TV found a man whose last name is “Snow,” and got him to talk about the proper way to drive one’s car, if your tires lose traction and you are stuck in the snow?

WGN-TV MADE SURE to show us the Chicago tradition of pulling out the summer lawn chairs and other patio furniture to demarcate a shoveled-clean parking space, and told us in near scare-tactic tones, “They’re running out of salt in west suburban Lombard!”

Couldn’t WLS-TV have come up with something better to lead their evening newscast than to interview a man who spent the day playing in the snow with his kids, getting him to say that Friday’s weather was, “the kind of winter we had when I was a kid.”

But the most ridiculous story (at least among those I actually saw) was a WBBM-TV report that made a story out of the fact that a Chicago mail carrier WAS ABLE TO DO HER JOB and deliver the mail – something I already knew to be true because my mail on Friday arrived about an hour earlier than usual.

I wish I could say this was just a case of brain-dead assignment editors in Chicago. But it goes farther.

I USUALLY TRY to catch a bit of CNN Headline News in mid-day to get something of a world overview of the news (and because, I must confess, I have something of an infatuation with Christi Paul, the broadcast’s mid-day anchor).

I thought for sure that I could turn to the worldwide newsgathering resources of Cable News Network to escape the vapidity of Chicago news.
CNN Headline News' Christi Paul usually has better news sense than what was shown during Friday's coverage of the Chicago snowstorm.

I was wrong.

Even Christi Paul was getting excited, reading copy that told of the heavy snowfall that hit Chicago.

WHAT BOTHERS ME is that the storm that hit Chicago late Thursday and early Friday was not a surprise. Meteorologists saw it coming, it hit just as hard as was expected and at the exact time that was expected. Then the storm moved on, as expected, where late Friday and early Saturday, it was smacking people around in places like New York, Boston and Washington.

News is supposed to be, in part, about surprise. There is none here.

Now some would argue that CNN is headquartered in Atlanta. Down in the Deep South, snowfall is rare. I understand why CNN a couple of weeks ago treated it as news when snow fell in the Atlanta suburbs one day.

But Christi, you’re from Ohio. You know that here in the real world, snow happens. You were the news anchor. You couldn’t have a quick chat to let someone know that the copy you were reading was ridiculous?

BESIDES, I REFUSE to believe that everybody who makes assignments in a television newsroom is some dumb cluck from the South. Somebody out there ought to know better than to get excited every time it snows.

In places like Chicago, we know (believe it or not) how to drive in the slushy stuff. It mostly involves making sure that one’s car is properly maintained, and allowing extra time to drive wherever it is one needs to go.

And if at all possible, we stay home. There’s no great trick to it.

But the realist in me knows that no one in a newsroom is going to pay attention to my rant. Fluff weather stories are easy to report and offend no one, unless you report that the reason streets were not promptly cleaned was because someone on a municipal road crew got drunk. Actually, that would be news!

SO I’M JUST going to have to get a grip on my senses and wait out the winter, knowing that warmer weather is ahead. Pretty soon, it will be summer, and I’ll be watching weather stories focusing on such “hard hitting” topics as bikini sales being on the rise.

Come to think of it, that story wouldn’t be so bad.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The one newsworthy fact related to Chicago’s early Friday snowfall was that hundreds of flights at O’Hare International Airport were thrown out of whack. (http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2008/02/01/powerful_winter_storm_socks_us_canada/5513/) Airports across the country were impacted. But coverage on our local television newscasts focused on people shoveling cars out of snow and kids building snowmen.

This (http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/events/chisnow1967.htm) is what a truly newsworthy snowstorm in Chicago looks like.

Chicago "Daily" Defender, R.I.P. -- 1956-2008

I want to believe the death of the Chicago Defender as a daily newspaper is a good thing. This newsboy hawks the Defender back in the newspaper's glory days. Photograph provided by the Library of Congress collection.

Now that it is reverting back to a weekly publishing schedule (on Wednesdays), the potential exists for a thicker newspaper, one that has longer, more in-depth stories than the current product and whose reporters truly dig into the collective lives of Chicago’s African-American community.

It would be a shame if the shift to a lesser publishing schedule allows the newspaper to dwindle down to insignificance. If that turns out to be the case, then we have to debate whether we would be better off if the newspaper would just die.

The Defender dates back to 1905, but it has only been a daily newspaper since 1956. At its peak, it published Monday through Thursday, and had a weekend edition that came out on Friday. In recent years, the newspaper cut costs by reducing itself to editions on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and weekends.

The newspaper’s editors say they expect the new Defender to be a more substantial paper that could run between 48 and 60 pages, compared to papers like the one published this week Wednesday, which only ran 28 pages and only had seven staff-written stories in the entire paper (four of which were written by the same reporter – Wendell Hutson).

THE REST OF the newspaper that day was filled with syndicated junk produced by the Associated Press (Ugh!) and the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

The Negro press of old used to play a significant role in holding together the African-American community in this country. At a time when the white press diminished (if not outright ignored) the contributions of black people, it was newspapers like the Defender that gave black people a sense that their accomplishments actually meant something.

It also was the black press that for many years agitated for the need to end the Jim Crow policies of segregation that split our nation in two.

To this day, the Defender still pushes for racial equality. The top two items in the Defender platform are, “Prejudice and racism in all of its forms must be eliminated and destroyed,” and “Racial profiling and police brutality must be removed from police practices.”

But the Defender of today (and the newspaper it will become in the near future) is far from the significant news organ that it was back in the first half of the 20th century – back in the days when the Defender (as a parody of the Chicago Tribune’s “World’s Greatest Newspaper” slogan) billed itself as the “World’s Greatest Weekly.”

THE THING IS, the Defender may not have been exaggerating when it made that claim. The newspaper used to have a national edition that circulated across the southern United States. Black people in segregated communities were able to read the paper and see the image of a better life in the north, particularly in the Second City.

The Defender was an integral part in inspiring the “Great Migration,” by which southern blacks came up north on the Illinois Central railroad, boosting Chicago’s black population from about 40,000 people just before World War I to about 1 million by 1950.

The newspaper went out of its way to detail the evils of segregation, particularly the ways in which lynch mobs were not a rare southern practice. It also was the Defender’s sportswriters who were among the leaders in putting the pressure on Major League Baseball to integrate itself – a move that finally occurred in 1947 when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

But that recitation of fact does not do the newspaper justice. One has to read the power of the prose that ran in the Defender back in its glory days. One of my favorite books is a copy I own of “Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender,” in which several of the Harlem writer’s columns (his critics slandered him as the ‘poet low-rate’) for the Chicago-based newspaper are collected.

The graphic details of segregation and the humiliations that black people had to endure as just a routine part of their lives makes it clear why the African-American population gets worked up over so many slights that white people would prefer to think of as petty.

ONE HUGHES COLUMN particularly catches my attention. On Sept. 18, 1943, he wrote about the disgust black people felt because of the difference in treatment Southern white people applied to them as opposed to dark-skinned Latinos.

He tells the story of a woman who was denied food service on a train, once it ventured south of the Mason-Dixon line into Virginia, although stewards admitted they could have served her had she been of a Hispanic ethnic background.

“How dare you refuse to serve me? How dare you ask me if I am Spanish? Spaniards may be served in this diner, may they? But not an American citizen buying war bonds and paying taxes and sending relatives to fight in Europe for Democracy!,” Hughes quotes the woman as screaming at train stewards. I can picture the scene in my mind, filled with emotion. It is a clear anecdote as to why black people of a certain age might not view Latinos as allies.

The Defender of recent decades has petered out into a neighborhood paper. Its circulation area is select black neighborhoods on the South and West sides, along with suburban towns south of Chicago that in the past decade have developed significant African-American populations.

Now there’s nothing wrong with neighborhood papers. Some of them are well written and do a good job of digging up stories about their tiny communities that might otherwise be overlooked.

IN SOME WAYS, the Defender is no worse (or skimpy) a newspaper than a publication like the Marion Daily Republican. The paper in that Southern Illinois city can easily be just as small and as overloaded with wire service copy as the Defender on any given day.

Both newspapers employ tiny staffs filled with young kid reporters who are willing to work for a year or two at low pay, before moving on to a better paying, more ambitious job.

So long as that is the situation with the Defender, I will be skeptical that any change in format will boost the paper’s quality.

The old weekly Defender employed some top-notch talent and had ambition to try to make the paper the best it could possibly be. The modern Defender is looking for ways to cut costs, and paying talented writers what they’re worth is not in their mindset. In fact, it may very well be counter to everything they are planning to do.

There’s also the problem in that the new Defender may want to think it is the voice of Chicago African-Americans. But the Chicago Sun-Times, in many ways, has replaced the Defender in that role.

THE SUN-TIMES IS the Chicago metropolitan paper with a significant black readership, much more than the Tribune – which prefers to focus on communities with certain higher economic standards where black people are scarcely found.

I have always thought the Sun-Times’ future (assuming its owners don’t just give up and accept death) is to accept the notion that it is no longer a major metropolitan newspaper, and is instead a local paper – albeit one with big ambitions and a glorious history of its own.

Its local community would be the city of Chicago proper. It could be the paper that roots around and “owns” the readership of people who want to know about Chicago itself.

Surrendering coverage of the Chicago suburbs to the small daily and weekly newspapers the company has purchased in recent years is a sensible and practical move.

Doing that would require the Sun-Times to start scouring the inner-city neighborhoods for stories that only the Defender now pays any attention to. It would require the Defender to upgrade its quality for a head-on fight with the Sun-Times.

IT COULD TURN OUT that one of the biggest questions confronting Chicago journalism in the next few years is whether both the Sun-Times and Defender can survive. Or will the success of one paper mean the death of the other?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago Defender’s shift to a weekly publishing schedule is explained for newspaper industry professionals (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/ad_circ/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003705058) and for upper-income Chicagoans (http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-thu-chicago-defender-weekly-rosenthal-0131jan3,0,2584838.story).

I actually first learned about the shift from Sun-Times columnist Stella Foster (http://www.suntimes.com/news/foster/764198,CST-NWS-stella29.article), which is the first time Stella has ever broken a story I was interested in. In accordance with long-standing newspaper tradition (by which news about a publication’s business is most thoroughly reported in competing newspapers), the Defender itself has written nothing about the change.

The Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/248.html) and Encyclopaedia Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9002511/Chicago-Defender) both have entries detailing the significance of the Chicago Defender, while the city commemorates the importance (http://www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/D/Defender.html) of the Defender’s long-time Bronzeville neighborhood headquarters.

The Defender went all-out with its coverage the day in 1948 that President Truman officially de-segregated the U.S. military. Photograph provided by the Library of Congress collection.