The threat of Carol Moseley Braun becoming mayor…running second in the polls…beckoned me to support Rahm Emanuel as the only recourse to allowing Chicago to become another Detroit under the erratic Ms. Braun. But now that threat has been dispelled.
It was dispelled for all practical purposes last Sunday when at a church function, the wild-card Ms. Braun turned to Patricia Watkins, the other African American candidate in the contest and said the only reason Watkins hadn’t heard what Braun had been doing after her U.S. Senate service was that “you were strung out on crack cocaine” and had an arrest record for it. Watkins is up from Cabrini-Green, has beaten a drug habit and was never arrested for crack.
After which Braun refused to apologize. We have the true white media-ordained Black Messiah to thank for Braun, the always alliterative Rev. Jesse Jackson. .
The day she hurled the hideous calumny to Watkins, the threat of Moseley Braun becoming mayor disappeared. This means that there is every possible chance to elect the undeniably good-tempered, most experienced candidate—Gery Chico who made a great record as an educational reformer, having worked with Paul Vallas as president of the Chicago School Board. Instead the shruggers appear to be giving it to Emanuel, a disgustingly manipulative chameleon sans moral core.
I had feared Chico would be dominated by Eddie Burke but that prospect…had it ever existed…ended with Burke’s repudiation by the Illinois Supreme Court which acted wisely to keep Emanuel on the ballot.
So we turn to the immediate question at hand. And this is what the media should focus on: Haven’t middle class taxpayers had enough to put up with due to Old Watery Eyes Quinn’s tax hikes without bearing the Little Prince’s tax hike he’s ordained from the Tuileries?
The time remaining—Feb. 22—is sufficient to change the odds. The campaign is now starting to resemble the situation in Paris in the fall of 1791. The elites are clinking cocktail glasses at the Tuileries, the palace on the right bank of the Seine while the crowd gathers below. Across the country….across the world…average people are growing tired of the same-old, same-old. The revelers inside the Tuileries are Wall Street donors, LaSalle street pragmatists, Hollywood agents…all committed to Emanuel.
As I have said earlier, we should thank David Axelrod for producing the cinema verite commercials that show the candidate at his lackluster realistic best: haggard, laconic, unsmiling, petulant. That and another commercial showing Bill Clinton extoling him. That would be the Bill Clinton who advised his wife to by all means run for the Senate from New York—to spare them both from having to move to ….ugh….awful Chicago.
Yes….that Bill Clinton who now tells Chicagoans they’ll get a great bargain by voting in Emanuel as their mayor.
As Churchill said seventy-five years ago: The battle for France has ended. The battle for Britain has begun.
The spectacle of Moseley Braun has ended. It is not the prospect of après moi le deluge. The time is now to reexamine the Emanuel tax on “luxuries” and decide if there is not a better alternative at hand…as assuredly there is in Chico.
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