“THERE GONNA SAY ‘WHAT A GUY!'”

Here is a letter I wrote to the Chicago Tribune in response to its editorial ripping the Illinois Appellate Court for throwing its wonderboy off the mayoral ballot:


1/25/11

The Tribune’s lead editorial today refers to the Appellate Court’s “startling arrogance” and “audaciously twisted reasoning” in its ruling excluding Rahm Emanuel from the mayoral ballot. What the Trib, and most of the local and national media, fail to see what is truly startlingly arrogant and audaciously twisted: the media’s assuming the role of unabashed cheerleader for the candidacy of Rahm Emanuel. This editorial is only the latest example of this laughable bias in the coverage of this campaign.

The Tribune argues in today’s lead editorial that since 44% of the voters, according to the latest Trib poll, support Emanuel, “clearly they aren’t concerned about his residency.” But the law is the law, and a plurality of poll respondents’ not agreeing with a law does not justify ignoring it. The law says that someone who wants to run for mayor should reside in the city for a year prior to the election. The court, quite reasonably, argued that Mr. Emanuel did not reside in the city for the requisite year. One can legitimately argue that this is an unreasonable, even a silly, law; if the voters want to vote for a guy who just moved to town, why shouldn’t they be able to do so? But the rational response to a silly law is to change the law, not to ignore the law. This law has stood for a long, long time, and certainly no one heard the Tribune arguing for changing it until it affected the Trib’s candidate, Rahm Emanuel.

The Tribune further argues that, after the elections board ruled that Emanuel was a longtime resident of the city, “That should have been the end of it.” Really? Why does the Tribune suppose our judicial system, and our election system, contains an appeal process? Is the Tribune really arguing that no decision of the elections board should be appealable, or only that those decisions should not be appealable when the board rules in the Trib’s candidate’s favor?

Clearly, this editorial is just another manifestation of the Tribune’s, and the broader media’s, breathless enthusiasm for Rahm Emanuel. But what has induced the local media to go completely into the tank for Rahm Emanuel? A logical answer seems to be that Mr. Emanuel is sui generis with the types of people who control the editorial decisions at the Tribune and other local media outlets: lives (or, in Emanuel’s case, pretends to live) in one of handful of wards that hug the lakefront north of, say, Congress, grew up in the suburbs but moved here convinced that doing so not only made one a dazzling urbanite but also gave one the right to dictate to lifelong residents how their city should be run, is highly educated, only gets south of Congress or west of Racine when seeking a story or a photo-op, prefers restaurants in which the prices vary inversely with the quantity of food served, thinks the city’s boundaries really coincide with those of the 5th Congressional District, and wonders how anyone could possibly live in those tacky wards on the corners of the city. And even yuppie newspaper people, though they cluck their tongues at the notion of others doing the same, enthusiastically support members of their own group, however defined.