John Kass, Rahm Emanuel, and the Chicago Way

By Nicholas Stix
November 11, 2008, 10:36 a.m.
VDARE

“It took only 36 hours for President-elect Barack Obama to take the off ramp from the Change We Can Believe In Highway and slam his foot on the gas in the express lanes of the Chicago Way,” is how Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass opens his November 7 column. The “Chicago Way” is Kass’ shorthand for the Windy City’s corrupt machine-and-mob-riddled politics, which has been run, with a 13-year intermission, following the death of the current mayor’s father, for 53 years by the Daleys.

Kass, a child of Chicago’s working class, is the closest thing there is to a spiritual heir to Mike Royko (1932-1997). The working-class, Polish-Lithuanian Chicagoan, who never attended college, but who did his post-doctoral research at the Billy Goat saloon, was the greatest newspaperman in Chicago, and maybe in American history.

Kass is a royal pain in the neck to “Mayordaley,” the son, as Royko was to “Da Mayor,” the father. Granted, Kass is a Republican, whereas Royko was an Orthodox Democrat, but times have changed. The anti-white racism of today’s Democratic Party can no more be reconciled with the party of Royko’s youth, when it was working-class whites’ political home, than today’s politically correct, Evian-drinking, middle/upper-middle class, anti-military, anti-white racist (even if the majority of the staffers are white), smoke-free, tolerant newsroom can be reconciled with the smoke-filled, hard-drinking, working-class, veteran-filled
newsroom of Royko’s glory days.

[W]ith his first official act, Obama selected a Chicago Daley machine guy for his chief of staff,

U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Tomczak).

So much for transcending politics as we know it, eh?…

Among Chicago politicians, the Emanuel announcement was treated with enthusiasm. But it was enthusiasm of the political salivary gland at the prospect of federal pork and leverage.

“It’s a gain,” said Mayor Richard Daley, speculating on all the contracts he would be able to give with new federal money. “It’s a real gain, gain, gain,” he said, repeating the word as if in prayer….

From Washington, however, you could hear that giant sucking sound as the Washington media praised Emanuel, as if the appointment was testament to change. There was so much sucking up, they may have created an El Niño effect that will plague our planet for years.

Some of the sucking up is understandable because their currency is access and, as chief of staff, Emanuel will be gatekeeper to the president. But the least they could have done was rate themselves NC-17. And they could have acknowledged what they were doing, which was praising him to their readers and viewers in hopes of maintaining or guaranteeing that access.

Washington media types talk about him as a Clinton guy, but Emanuel is really a Chicago City Hall guy. At City Hall, the unwritten rule is we don’t want nobody nobody sent. The guy who sent Emanuel to then-candidate Bill Clinton in 1991 is named Daley. Bill Daley, the mayor’s brother.

Loyal readers know why I put the (D-Tomczak) at the end of Emanuel’s name. It refers to the corrupt Daley administration Water Department boss, Donald Tomczak, now in federal prison in Duluth, Minn. He sits there because he was convicted of bribery. Emanuel didn’t have anything to do with that. But he was a political beneficiary of Tomczak and the Chicago Way.

Two years ago, at the federal trial of Mayor Daley’s patronage chiefs—who were eventually convicted for building an illegal political army of city patronage workers to maintain the mayor’s control on Chicago—Tomczak was a key witness.

And he testified that he was ordered to put his political regiments on the streets in 2002 to elect Emanuel and defeat a liberal Democratic grass-roots candidate.[“Emanuel pick shows change is state of mind,” by John Kass, Chicago Tribune, November 7, 2008.]

What I don’t get is why some people see a conflict between Obama’s socialism and his corruption. The political economy of socialism has always involved the corrupt enrichment of cronies, and the stealing from the productive and giving to the unproductive, while the economy shrivels up. And racial socialism is the most extreme socialism of all. Obama is just being a good racial socialist!