For 2024, Dems pick a dying Chicago to pitch a lost Joe Biden – RedState
I mourn my favorite American city, Chicago.
i should say it was my favorite American city. He fell on hard times now, very hard times.
Not really fallen either. It’s been driven out by a series of irresponsible mayors and a rampaging woke culture that perverts the blunt muscles and broad-shouldered, productive historical prominence of the Windy City.
I have lived and worked there many times over many years with many good memories including later. It’s a beautiful place that has preserved an 18-mile lakefront for people, not industry, with beaches, private marinas, parks, museums, a zoo, and a paved path.
Once the nation’s second most populous city, Chicago has now fallen to third as thousands flee it and a Cook County wracked by crime and violence, high taxes and dire financial prospects crippled by the allocation of exorbitant public pensions. Companies like Boeing have moved elsewhere.
The Obamas moved their millions out of their adopted hometown to distant waterfront properties. And even the Chicago Bears, the murderous behemoths of the Midway, bought a huge lot for a new stadium in the suburbs.
And yet the Democratic National Committee just passed in Atlanta select Chicago again as the site of its 2024 national convention.
Interesting to see if these turbulent political times and this confused party leader recreate the violent and divisive 1968 Democratic convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey and introduced me to the tear gas experience.
The 2024 convention will also be a dubious opportunity to showcase a once-grand city where residents and in-the-know tourists now fear walking Michigan Avenue’s former “Magnificent Mile.” The store vacancy rate there is close to a third.
Shops have been looted on this street, some have been boarded up and others have simply given up. Macy’s, Old Navy, The Gap, Banana Republic and Timberland, among others, have left for safer areas.
Things got so bad in Chicago that Democrats voted out incompetent Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot in favor, not of a reformer, but of another Democratic progressive, controlled by the powerful teachers’ union who promises more policies missed.
It’s Brandon Johnson, a teachers’ union organizer who has called for a vast expansion of the city’s social programs and, since he’s also a staunch Democrat, new taxes on city residents.
Strangers can say, “Have fun, people. You get what you elected. But that ignores the large number of decent residents with no political clout (a kind of Chicago word) who just want a safe place to live and maybe can’t flee.
I have lived in several major US cities run by Democrats. These huge urban failures are sad, all-too-familiar, despairing scenarios.
Their mayors don’t really run these metropolitan areas plagued by poverty, crime and homelessness. They simply sit atop them, presiding over the ongoing decay and pulling out what they can for themselves and their followers.
Chicago has been governed almost entirely by Democrats for nearly a century. In the 1930s, Mayor Anton Cermak was a pioneer in building a modern urban political machine and in fighting criminal gangs.
He did well. But he was assassinated, perhaps by accident (he sat next to newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt), perhaps on the orders of fellow Chicagoan Al Capone, who viewed government reformers with disfavour.
No details. The homicide case was quickly and conveniently closed when the killer was tried, convicted and executed, all within a month.
From its beginnings in 1837, the roughly hewn town has lived up to its name. Chicago is an Indian word for a wild, smelly onion that also lived there.
The 1987 film “The Untouchables” had a fitting scene in Chicago with Sean Connery playing a local Irish cop and Kevin Kostner a young federal agent seeking advice on operating the Chicago Way.
Chicago’s opening to the edge of vast prairies fostered an innovative spirit that spawned such inventions as the skyscraper, Ferris wheel, mobile phone, first radio soap opera, roller derby, deep pizza, wagons – railroad beds, Twinkies and the zipper. Please.
Sears-Roebuck, Amazon’s mail order precursor, was also based in Chicago. Personally, I particularly enjoyed the Chicago Cracker Jack.
Television commandeered American politics with its first coverage of national political conventions, both in Chicago in 1952 from the now defunct International Amphitheater. Similarly, the CBS television program released from Chicago eight years later and changed American politics forever.
Thanks to its central location, Chicago quickly became a hub for agriculture and transportation—railroads, trucks, Great Lakes shipping, and later airplanes—first with Midway and then O’ Hare, once the busiest in the country.
Mayor Richard J. Daley ruled for nearly a quarter century, overlapping with my college years there. (His son Richard M. Daley later reigned almost as long.)
Richard J. saw the economic future coming. So he instructed the obedient Democratic State Legislature to annex a thin strip of city land to a 10-square-mile mega-field and trace it inside Chicago to become O’Hare.
The airport is actually named after a St. Louis native, Butch O’Hare. He was a WWII Navy pilot who became an ace fighter and Medal of Honor recipient by shooting down five Japanese aircraft in one day. (His father was for a time Al Capone’s lawyer, who turned on the mobster and was later shot in the street by someone.)
Yes, Chicago has been corrupt. Legendary local columnist Mike Royko once suggested that the city’s motto – “Urbs in Horto” or “City in a Garden” – be updated to be more accurate “Ubi Est Mea” or “Where is mine? “
But the political trick of years past was that the city also worked for the locals. Dedicated party riding captains ensured this, helping elected leaders win their votes.
My Chicago secretary was robbed in the 1970s on her way home from the grocery store after work. The next day, she asked a team of garbage collectors in town if she might have seen her new red suede handbag thrown away by the fleeing thief. They had. It was in their truck.
City workers pushed her into the cab, called the precinct captain, and met him in their garage. He ordered the trash to be thrown away until the purse appeared.
The captain took my secretary to his laundry, paid for the cleaning, gave her the receipt and delivered her to our office to explain her delay to me in person.
Months later, on the Saturday before the election, the same captain showed up at the secretary’s apartment, you know, just to see how she was and, by the way, don’t forget to vote next week.
Result: the young woman who had lost $ 60 at knifepoint voted enthusiastically to re-elect the man who was president of Chicago the night she was attacked.
It is also the Chicago Way, the old Chicago Way.
