I don’t really know what kind of ground game that Naisy Dolar is putting together in Chicago’s 50th Ward, but she is actively using the Internet, including posting videos on a regular basis. She also has a MySpace page. Dolar is hoping to defeat broken-down aldermanic warhorse Bernie Stone.
Dog Fight in the 50th seems to have an anti-Dolar bent, but is doing fairly frequent updates on the aldermanic race.
Greg Brewer , an architect and community organizer, is the other major candidate in the contest. He’s also posting videos on YouTube.
Meanwhile, Dick Simpson has the coming aldermanic campaign just about right.
The intersection of several factors could lead to 15 or more competitive races involving incumbent aldermen, according to Dick Simpson, a former alderman and current political science professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. These factors include a strong pool of candidates and increasingly active unions and community organizations, he said. […]
According to Simpson, the strong showing of Republican Tony Peraica in a number of city wards during his heated contest against former alderman Todd Stroger for the Cook County Board presidency is one indication of this disruption. Peraica won 12 of the 50 wards outright, and carried a significant percentage in many others. Stroger beat Peraica in the contest for president of the Cook County Board.
While not directly linked to the city elections, the unusually strong support for Peraica could be taken as a sign that voters are seeking a change in the status quo within local government. […]
“You have to have a credible challenger and there are better challengers than there have been since the ’80s,” [said] Simpson. “Most of them have had time to position themselves and do the early fundraising, which is different from most years.”
And as I’ve told you before, SEIU is gearing up for battle.
The Service Employees International Union is one organization trying to flex its muscle in February. It has targeted incumbents in several wards -including Ald. Emma Mitts (37th) for opposition to the Big Box ordinance - and plans to place its support behind candidates considered more supportive of key union issues. SEIU officials are still in the process of determining which candidates will receive their attention. The SEIU is also recruiting “block captains” from its 78,000 Chicago members to canvass their neighborhoods for the elections, the first time the union has done so.
Do you have any local races in your area? If so, give us an update.
When the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released its budget and tax hike blueprint several weeks ago, most mainstream media reporters and columnists never picked up on the fact that the group specifically recommended that the “tax swap” idea be dumped. I wrote about it, and the Southtown gave it a brief mention, but until John McCarron’s Tribune column during the holidays, none of the bigs had really broached the subject.
That muffled “thud” we civic wonks discerned a few weeks ago was neither a sonic boom nor rooftop landing of reindeer on a practice run.
It was another crash landing of the so-called “tax swap”–the complicated proposal for state fiscal reform that has been the centerpiece of the liberal-progressive agenda hereabouts for more than a decade.
Not that the swap is dead dead. Like Mr. Dumpty, it could be reassembled and offered once again this spring to the Illinois General Assembly. In fact, civic types already are busy with the glue. They are practiced at repair, having kept the swap idea alive since its initial tumble in 1997, when then-Senate President James “Pate” Philip shoved it off the wall.
The nudge this time came from the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. These are the corporate chieftains who, nearly a century ago, commissioned Daniel Burnham’s seminal Plan of Chicago. More recently they led the charge to expand O’Hare International Airport. They have clout.
McCarron supposes that the federal tax deduction for property taxes provides an incentive to keep the property tax system in place. I think there is also a legit worry for families who move to areas with good, expensive schools that if the state takes over primary funding the government will screw up their kids’ futures.
Meanwhile, a big push for a big tax hike is coming soon to a General Assembly near you.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich has pledged not to raise the state income tax and won’t back down, his staff said.
But a new, bipartisan caucus of lawmakers wants to bolster state aid for per-student spending by more than $1 billion, and it is expected to include a state-tax hike in its education proposals.[…]
The [legislative] education caucus’ goals include reducing reliance on local taxes for schools. That system creates inequities because wealthy districts can afford to spend more on schools than poor districts.
The caucus also wants to increase state aid guaranteed per student to a level recommended by the Illinois Education Funding Advisory Board. Currently, that recommended figure is $6,405 per child, but the advisers plan to update that in 2007. This school year, the per-pupil amount is $5,334. It would take an estimated $1.6 billion to move to the $6,405 figure.
But Jim Edgar and Dawn Clark Netsch, among others, are skeptical that anything will happen this year.
“I’ll be awfully surprised if something happens,” said former Gov. Jim Edgar, who believes a tax hike is necessary because of the state’s financial problems. “The governor has said he is adamantly opposed to any tax increases. It’s awfully difficult to get a major tax increase when the governor indicates he is opposed to it.” […]
“You’re going to have a lot of legislators say, ‘Why should I stick my neck out on a tax increase if the governor is going to veto it?’” Netsch said. “He (Blagojevich) has the bully pulpit more than anyone else. He has got to be willing to be involved.”
Ralph Martire, who has made a career of pushing for a tax swap plan that nets the government lots more money, is more optimistic, first noting that Senate President Emil Jones is already in favor of providing more cash for schools, then adding…
“If (House Speaker Michael) Madigan becomes engaged, it will become a priority to the state,” Martire said.
And in that event, Martire said, even Blagojevich might be convinced to go along, no-tax-hike pledge or not, because education also is one of his top priorities.
If the governor’s people injected politics into federally funded IDES job placements, there could be real trouble afoot.
Federal authorities have questioned current and former employees of a state agency already under fire for alleged hiring irregularities and political influence, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Unfolding over the last few weeks, the interviews concerning the Illinois Department of Employment Security show that the sweeping investigation into state hiring continues to dog the administration of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, even as it prepares to embark on a second term in January. […]
Agency employees who have been questioned said federal authorities are asking whether they know of any cases in which politics played a role in hiring and promoting people into jobs that were supposed to be free of political influence. […]
The employees said investigators asked specific questions about alleged violations of what is known as the Rutan decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that most state hirings, promotions, transfers and firings should be free of political influence.
Also in the piece…
Employees interviewed this month said they are unclear why federal investigators waited this long to seek them out.
It sometimes takes a long time for the federal wheels to turn. But they rarely stop turning once they start.
Meanwhile, some merit comp employees could be up for a raise soon.
An estimated 6,000 nonunion state employees would be eligible for performance-based pay raises in the new year under an emergency rule filed Friday by Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s administration.
In the not so old days, post-election raises for many workers would be based at least partly on political performance. I certainly hope that with the feds watching over their shoulders the administration doesn’t try anything stupid.
Sen. Obama told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board that he had never done any favors for Tony Rezko.
Obama added that he had never “done favors for [Rezko] of any sort. Most of the time, I’ve never been in a position to do favors for him. I don’t control jobs. I don’t control contracts. There were no bills that he was pushing when I was in the state legislature that I know of or that he talked to me about. And there were no bills in federal legislation that he was concerned about, so there was no sense of the betrayal of the public trust here.”
Then, over the holidays the Tribune ran a story entitled “Obama intern had ties to Rezko” in which we learn that Obama gave a 20-year-old a five-week internship answering phones and logging mail.
“Mr. Rezko told the senator of John Aramanda’s interest in an internship and asked that he be considered,” Gibbs said. “Sen. Obama advised him to contact the office, which he did. The application was put into the internship pool, where it was considered, and he was eventually offered an internship. Rezko did provide a recommendation for John.”
Hardly blockbuster material. Tom Bevan over at Real Clear Politics (not exactly the center of the Obama for President campaign) called the Tribune story a “joke” and a “gotcha” piece in a recent posting.
Please. If we went and made a federal case over every Congressional internship that’s been doled out over the years to the child of a friend or political contributor we’d run out of trees and ink by next Thursday.
Backlash to the blacklash?
Meanwhile, the LA Times had a decent backgrounder on Obama the other day, including several quotes from his colleagues in the Illinois state Senate. But this was the best paragraph, I thought.
Just a generation ago, when Harold Washington was campaigning to become the first black mayor of Chicago, he and Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale attended Sunday Mass at St. Pascal’s, a white Roman Catholic parish in Northwest Chicago. They were spat upon, cursed and lucky to leave unharmed. In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama carried every precinct but one in St. Pascal’s Portage Park neighborhood. Talk to people who live there now and you could get the impression that Obama grew up one block over.
It’s been real, but now it’s time to relax. Have a great holiday week and I’ll see you sometime after New Year’s.
Before I go, I want to thank you for everything this year. All of you, from subscribers, to commenters, to readers and advertisers. Have a great break one and all!
If you need someplace to go to satisfy any holiday urge to converse, I’d suggest Illinoize:
*** UPDATE *** My last Sun-Times column of the year, “Pundits lose grip on reality when dealing with the Internet,” is here.
What is it about the Internet that makes some political pundits, columnists and reporters so goofy? It seems like almost every time I read a mainstream media story about political Web sites and bloggers, the pieces are full of ill-informed junk.
(By the way, many thanks to the blog My Left Nutmeg for the kind words about the piece.)
* I just heard from a respected Chicago reporter who said he, too, is having difficulty getting responses from Barack Obama’s press staff.
That’s not a good idea for many, many reasons.
* Meanwhile, Lynn Sweet has an interesting blog post today, “The Obama backlash. It’s started.”
While Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is vacationing in Hawaii–might be the last quiet time for years, poised as he is for a 2008 White House run– a body of anti-Obama material is surfacing–centering around his record and his religious beliefs and yes, his middle name, Hussein. It’s a backlash–and a foreshadowing of what is to come.
* I excerpted some bits from Carol Marin’s piece below, but here’s another one.
Like most politicians, Obama was not averse to bringing home the bacon. According to published reports, Obama secured $100,000 in Illinois FIRST funds from then-Gov. George Ryan. The money went to the Museum of Science and Industry for an exhibit on the concept of time.
So, we got Barack and Rezko and Barack and Ryan. Since he didn’t speak up during the fall campaign, we got Barack and Blagojevich. And he just got Mayor Daley’s endorsement. Not to mention Alexi.
* Some people have claimed Obama is the anti-war candidate, but some anti-war people ain’t so sure.
Obama’s position on the Iraq war was pretty much summed up by his comment, cited at Alex Cockburn’s Counterpunch, as follows:
“On Iraq, on paper, there’s not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago. There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.”
* And then there are the wingnut oddballs who somehow manage to retain their mainstream media credentials, yet write utterly ridiculous claptrap.
So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?
Is that even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?
We know this situation all too well, but the AP has a story about Chicago nepotism today.
Chicago politics seems to practice the royal form of succession.
“It’s our political culture,” said University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor Dick Simpson. […]
Politics as the family business doesn’t just happen in Chicago. On the national scene there are the Kennedys and the Bushes. Tennessee has the Fords, Indiana the Bayhs, and Minnesota the Humphreys.
Simpson said the practice of appointing relatives to political posts can deny the voters their right to choose the best candidate.
Names are like brands, so voters see, for instance, “Lipinski” on the ballot and they go with the brand they’ve trusted for years. I really don’t see much of a way to stop this until the people catch on. Suggestions?
* NBC5: In what he called one of the toughest votes — and one that could become a presidential issue — Obama voted against a bill allowing gun owners to claim self-defense when using their own gun in their own home. He said he worried it would take away local governments’ right to regulate themselves.
