POLITICS, STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, AND DEFENDING RAHM

3/3/11

Today’s (i.e., Thursday, 3/3’s) Chicago Tribune, in yet another example of febrile media hyperbole, featured a front page article by David Kidwell, Hal Dardick, and John Chase, proclaiming that

“A secretly funded political group aligned with Rahm Emanuel has donated more than $445,000 to aldermanic candidates to help the mayor-elect in a high-stakes battle over control of City Hall.”

The group to which the article refers is For a Better Chicago. It is "secretly funded" because election law allows the group to protect the identity of its contributors. The extent to which it is “aligned with Rahm Emanuel” is twofold, but certainly limited. First, For a Better Chicago advertises itself as a pro-business group and, as such, believes in many of the policies in which Mr. Emanuel purports to believe, including doing something about the city budget, wasteful spending, and public pensions, not attempting to slam the door on businesses that the union chieftains around town find unacceptable, presumably due to their failure to pay sufficient tribute to the aforementioned labor poohbahs and their henchmen and toadies in the City Council, and generally making the city of Chicago a place in which people want to invest, and not only under government duress. Second, For a Better Chicago is run by Greg Goldner, a long time Chicago political operative who managed Rahm Emanuel’s first congressional campaign in 2002.

The article is interesting not only for the example it provides of the typical hyperventilation that passes for journalism these days, especially when the dark forces can somehow be identified with that ever evil business community; the article is also interesting for highlighting several ironies of the recently, and lamentably, completed mayoral campaign. The first two of these ironies were readily apparent, and quite delicious, even in the throes of the campaign. The third is not, but is still quite astonishing.

First, a guy who has served as chief-of-staff for President Obama, widely, but perhaps not accurately, considered the most liberal president in the last fifty years or so, was the most pro-business candidate in the mayoral race and looks like he is about to become the most pro-business mayor in our fair city’s history. (Well, that title may go to William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson (1915-1923, 1927-1931), but the businesses for which he was most “pro” were associated with guys named Torrio, Capone, and Nitto (Apparently, Frank Nitti’s real name was “Nitto,” but was misspelled in a newspaper story early in his career, and “Nitti” stuck, but I digress within a digression.), but I digress.) Since much (but by no means all) of the measures that are considered pro-business are identified with those of a conservative stripe, we could say that President Obama’s former chief-of-staff was the most conservative candidate in our race for mayor. This indicates that either Chicago has wandered so far to the left side of the political spectrum that it has fallen off the table, that ideology means nothing when compared with personalities and personal advantage, that Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Obama were not nearly in synch ideologically, or that ideology means nothing to Mr. Emanuel, my favorite of the aforementioned theories.

Second, many conservative types (including yours truly), who normally would be expected to approve of Rahm Emanuel’s advertised policy prescriptions for the city of Chicago, opposed Rahm Emanuel, obviously for reasons that transcended policy. This indicates that personalities or associations often trump policy; that is, we’ll often vote against people we agree with because there is something about them, or the people they associate with or work for, that we just don’t like, or we’ll vote for people we don’t agree with because there is something about them, or the people they are identified with, that we like. This is not as crazy as it sounds; ideology, or even policy, is often a disposable, even quaint, consideration for many politicians, while their character, background, and the personal ties they have with us remain more or less permanent.

Third, I, after all I’ve written about Mr. Emanuel during the campaign, am writing a piece seemingly defending our mayor-elect. Wasn’t it Metternich who said that countries have no permanent allies, only permanent interests? Could the same be said about people, at least as concerns their political interests and proclivities?