What a glorious mess

By David Heinzmann

It’s not been a quiet week here in Lake Woe… I mean Chicago.

Actually, a couple of weeks. If you like crime and political intrigue, where else could you possibly want to be than Chicago?

I’ll start at the end, at least for me, with the return of Illinois’ most imfamous pawnbroker, Scott Lee Cohen. On Saturday, I broke the story with Rick Pearson that Cohen is going to try to run for governor, amazing as that sounds. After reading the story, which includes the laundry list of almost all (didn’t quite have room in the paper for each one) false statement and embarrassing revelations that collectively imploded Cohen’s candidacy for lieutenant governor earlier this year, a friend of mine joked, “Other than that, it’s a great idea.”

Anytime a reporter can get a prostitute girlfriend, a massage parlor meeting, unpaid child support and an open statewide office in Illinois…. Well, that’s a pretty good story. But the problem is we’ve already been there with Mr. Cohen, so I’m not sure this attempt at running for governor is going to be that much fun. Maybe you don't get to publicly flame out twice in one year, even in this state.

While that sideshow was developing on Friday, the main event in the city was the federal takeover of state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias’ family business, Broadway Bank. Giannoulias is running for U.S. Senate, a campaign that’s bogged down in some seriously thick weeds thanks to the scandals surrounding Broadway. A mountain of red ink and bad loans—some of them to convicted felons who happened to be connected to the Outfit—caught up to the bank on Friday. Oh, look, more prostitutes. (One of the guys the bank gave loans had been convicted of helping run a nationwide call-girl ring.)

It was hard to keep the political corruption stories straight. The day before the feds finally took over Broadway Bank, there was of course the story of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich filing court papers attempting to compel President Obama to testify at Rod’s trial this summer. Details of what Rod was claiming about what Obama might know were supposed to be redacted in the filing. But thanks to the digital age, reporters soon discovered that when you cut and pasted the court document from a PDF to a Word document, all the redacted parts magically reappeared. Rod claims there’s evidence he had a conversation directly with the president-elect about filling Obama’s senate seat. Obama has been on the record maintaining he never talked to Rod about the seat. From the filing, it’s not clear the alleged evidence adds up to what Rod is claiming. Either way, will the leader of the free world have to provide some kind of testimony in a trial that may turn into a real three-ring circus this summer?

Let’s see, what else: three men bound and executed found in a car on the Southwest Side last week; the vicious wilding-robbery attack on two young women in Bucktown last week—both of them bludgeoned with a baseball bat over their frigging purses; lots of bodies washing up on the shore of Lake Michigan.

But the thing that stunned me, a little more than a week ago, was seeing that 17 people had been shot in Chicago in one night, with eight of them dying. In the years I covered the Chicago Police Department for the Tribune, when the murder rate was significantly higher than it has been the last couple years, that would have been a bad weekend. This was all in about 12 hours, on a week night.

When I was covering cops, I became familiar with the phenomenon of weather-change violence. Murders and shootings typically are down in Chicago during the winter because of the harsh cold. Much of the mayhem in this city is casual malevolence wrought by gang-bangers running into each other on the street, arguing about just about anything and then pushing it to the point that they know only one way to settle it—with a gun. So a lot of that kind of crime settles down during the long cold winter. But look out in spring. The first warm weekend—often in March or early April—will bring a little boomlet of shootings as people head back outside to enjoy the weather, only to be reminded of the simmering hostility they felt toward some rival over the long cold winter.

But 17 shootings in one night is not a boomlet. That’s a serious mess and indicates something else is going on. After a few years of lower, stable homicide numbers, murders in 2010 are now on pace to be about 20 percent higher than last year. And when you’re talking about the number of killings being in the 500 range, 20 percent is a serious and troubling increase.

So pay attention, crime fans, it’s going to be an interesting summer.

Here's to whatever comes next

By David Heinzmann

I always get annoyed when I have to listen to someone with deep ideological leanings—more often than not they are to the right—harangue the press for its perceived liberal biases. Most of the good political reporters I know have been around long enough, and seen enough of the sausage being made, that they really don’t lean one way or the other. In fact they all lean heavily in the same direction—toward general skepticism.

Along the same lines, in the last weeks of my time covering Chicago’s failed Olympic bid, people kept asking me whether I was for or against the city winning the 2016 Summer Games. I had a hard time persuading some of them that I really felt disinterested in the outcome last Friday in Copenhagen.

When the word came in that Chicago had been knocked out of the competition by International Olympic Committee members in the first round of voting, I was as shocked as anybody. But I didn’t feel disappointed or elated. I merely felt the urgency needed to get our first report ready and posted online.

I was sitting at a keyboard in the Tribune newsroom, playing the role of rewrite guy, taking reporters feeds from Copenhagen and Daley Plaza, cleaning them up and fitting them into our stories going online.

When the smoke cleared after lunch, a colleague and I sat down to rewrite the Sunday “now what?” story we had already prepared. Before the IOC vote, the story had been geared to telling readers what to look for first as Chicago started to build up for the Games. We rewrote it to tell people what little lasting legacy there would be in the wake of the failed bid.

Mostly, the answer to that question is the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital campus on the near South Side, which the city paid $86 million for in anticipation that developers would snap it up to build the Olympic Village. Now, it will be developed as regular old real estate, and since Chicago didn’t get the Games, the price for the land goes up to $91 million. And real estate experts say that, in this market, no developer is going to want to touch that land for about five years.

Covering the Olympics would have been a roller coaster ride, for sure. But by the same token, seven years is a long time to report about the buildup to anything. One of my first jobs in journalism was working in the Associated Press’ Atlanta bureau two years before the 1996 Olympics there. I covered a lot of Atlanta Committee to Organize the Games press conferences and don’t remember relishing any of them.

My firmest memory of that time is one Saturday morning sitting in a conference room at the ACOG headquarters for a “press conference” with IOC officials. When I got there, it was me, three or four other reporters and a handful of TV cameramen, our attention directed to the speakerphone sitting on top of the polished wood conference table. The IOC members were on the line from Switzerland. I’ll never forget those poor TV guys focusing their cameras in on that speakerphone in an empty room.

In the aftermath of the Chicago bid, there could be some good stories. For instance, what discussions went on between bid chairman Pat Ryan, Mayor Daley and the White House? Did Chicago people promise the White House that it was safe for President Obama to go to Copenhagen because the city had the votes? On Meet the Press yesterday, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post suggested as much. And as he pointed out, boy, were they wrong.

But that’s not likely to be my story. On Friday, I gave a phone interview to BBC radio on the Olympic decision. I had figured I would be asked about the reaction in Chicago, but when the interview started—live—I was thrown into the role of national political analyst. All they wanted to know was how damaging this incident would be to Obama’s efforts to pass health care legislation. I winged it.

Anyway, there are plenty of next stories out there. And I will admit to being a bit relieved to have a normal work schedule back for a bit. My novel, A Word to the Wise, comes out in two months and I really need to spend some of my energy focusing on getting out there and pushing it.

I start in earnest this weekend, heading to Booked for Murder in Madison for an event Friday night, and then to Books & Co. in Oconomowoc on Saturday. And I’m hoping to meet a bunch of you, readers and fellow bloggers, at Bouchercon the following week.

Onward.

It’s Like Pulling When You Ought To Be Shoving

By Kevin Guilfoile

When I was an undergrad at Notre Dame there was a student newspaper with a liberal bent called Common Sense. They agitated on a number of topics, but this was the late 80s and the dominant issue of the time was apartheid. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations advocated something called "constructive engagement," in which western companies could still make profits in South Africa while they waited for the eventual collapse of the apartheid regime. Liberals, on the other hand, were in favor of sanctions and boycotts to hurry things along. There was a communist bogeyman at the center of it all. It's pretty much exactly the same argument we're having currently over Cuba, except now the conservatives want sanctions and the liberals want engagement.

Anyway, Common Sense was printed overnight and early on Wednesday mornings student volunteers would distribute stacks of the paper to the dining halls and the student center and the library so kids could pick up a copy on the way to class if they wished.

Then one day, the papers started vanishing.

By the time students woke up and emerged bleary-eyed from the dorms, every single copy of Common Sense had disappeared from campus. The next week it happened again. It happened the week after that.

Many students saw a conspiracy. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees was an executive at Coca-Cola and Coke did big business in South Africa, so it was easy for some to believe that the University might be directing the mysterious thefts at the order of a powerful alumnus. Then some genius Nancy Drew decided to just stake out one of the stacks and catch the guy red-handed. Turned out it wasn't the University or Coca-Cola. It was Ken. Ken was a weird guy who lived in my dorm. At some point an ultra-conservative Catholic group called Opus Dei had recruited Ken to join them.

Now in Dan Brown novels, Opus Dei is a super-secret and creepy organization with an army of self-flagellating, albino monk assassins. In real life Opus Dei is a super-secret and creepy organization with an army of goofballs like Ken who steal newspapers they don't like and toss them in the dumpster behind Wendy's. Opus Dei wasn't liked by the administration, but disaffected teenage Catholics are the lifeblood of OD's recruiting operation and so it often had agents lurking about, trying to pick off the most vulnerable and anti-social students to join its ranks. When I became a resident assistant I was told by one Holy Cross priest to "keep an eye out for those douchebags."

These days, a coalition of conservative political groups and self-appointed religious watchdogs--most of which have nothing at all to do with Notre Dame--have been trying without success to get the university to rescind its invitation of Barack Obama to speak at commencement, allegedly because of Obama's position that abortion should be "legal but rare." (I encourage everyone to read Eric Zorn's thorough debunking of Obama's alleged "infanticide vote" in the Illinois senate.) Confirmed nutbag Alan Keyes (whom, not coincidentally, Obama destroyed in the 2004 election for US Senate) was arrested on campus last week while pushing a stroller with a fake baby covered in fake blood. He and others will be protesting this weekend, and you'll see it all over the news. Ordinarily I'd hardly pay any attention. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and both George Bushes have given commencement addresses at Notre Dame and there were protesters at every one. My commencement address was given by Bill Cosby and there was even a last-minute improvised protest by African-American students against him.

Notre Dame has had all kinds of commencement speakers from Eugene McCarthy and Andrew Young to Condoleezza Rice and William F. Buckley; from Tom Brokaw to Vernon Jordan; from J. Edgar Hoover to Earl Warren; from Henry Cabot Lodge to Pierre Trudeau to Kofi Annan. Before Barack Obama, nobody has ever suggested there needed to be a litmus test of a person's beliefs before they could speak on campus. (As for the suggestion that it is the honorary degree to which they object, not the address itself, that's a distinction without a difference. Every Notre Dame commencement speaker since 1909 has received an honorary degree. For Notre Dame to have given one to Erma Bombeck and the editor of Commonweal magazine but not to the first black president in US history--one whom a majority of Catholics supported, by the way--would be absurd in the extreme.) 

I doubt half the faculty could pass the ideological fitness test now being demanded of Barack Obama--according to the Trib the university needed a lottery this year to determine which professors would get tickets. As for the actual students you will probably be able to count the seniors who will skip the ceremony on your fingers and half your toes. And speaking of the graduates, if we require recipients of honorary degrees to conform to a specific political ideology, wouldn't we need to require the same from recipients of actual degrees?

If you disagree with somebody of something, and you want to protest him or it, that's terrific. Have at it. If you have an issue with Barack Obama, whether it's his actual position on abortion or his stance on the torture photos, by all means put on some comfortable shoes and make your voice heard. But I've seen opportunistic outsiders try to step into the Notre Dame spotlight before, so understand the three basic kinds of people who will be protesting this weekend. There will be a few individuals who are more concerned about the legality of abortion than they are with its frequency, who believe life issues begin and end with terminated pregnancies and have nothing to do with war, the death penalty, health care, or torture. There will be some frustrated social conservatives who want to use Notre Dame's high profile as a fulcrum to leverage their distaste for the president. But mostly there will be guys like Ken who don't think a president they don't like should be allowed to speak on campus at all. These people don't want Catholic universities to be cultivators of critical thought, they want them to be instruments of propaganda. And if you ask them they'll even admit it. (With regard to Pat Buchanan's breathless assertion in that video that he has the names of ten Holy Cross priests who are opposed to the president's visit, I have news for Pat Buchanan: There is a gigantic priest retirement home right in the middle of campus. I could walk in there this afternoon and find ten Holy Cross priests who think Cloverfield is not a movie.)

Notre Dame is a place I love dearly. But the fictional biosphere of unchallenged doctrine that Alan Keyes and Pat Buchanan and sadly Cardinal George would like it to be is not a place I ever would have attended. Not in a million years.

At its core this manufactured hoop-dee-doo isn't really about morality and the Catholic church. It's not even about abortion. It's about intellectual rigor and the free exchange of ideas on the campus of a prominent American university. It is our obligation to call bullshit when people attempt to use their right to speak freely in order to restrict others from doing the same, especially when it happens inside college gates.

In an eloquent letter to this year's graduates, Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins quoted an earlier ND president, Father Hesburgh, who had described Notre Dame as both a "lighthouse and a crossroads," a place where issues of ethics and morality could be illuminated, but also a "crossroads through which pass people of many different perspectives, backgrounds, faiths, and cultures."

He also said this to the graduating students: "You have discussed this issue with each other while being observed, interviewed, and evaluated by people who are interested in this story. You engaged each other with passion, intelligence and respect. And I saw no sign that your differences led to division. You inspire me. We need the wider society to be more like you; it is good that we are sending you into that world on Sunday."

Well, amen to that.

Follow Kevin on Twitter.

I Screwed Up

by Libby Hellmann

Three simple words. But how refreshing. When’s the last time you heard a President admit he made a mistake?

Not that I want to gush about it – or excuse it-- because, hey, he did screw up. And so did Daschle. It’s clear that you can’t vet administration picks on the Honor System.

Still, the fact that so few people in public life are willing to admit their mistakes is – to me – significant. It shows an awareness, at the very least, of individual humility. It begs the question of where the narcissistic need to always be right comes from. Who says? Why?

Admittedly, Obama wasn’t apologizing for some deep, dark sin or secret about himself or his performance. And I realize that for some people, paying lip service to a problem by apologizing can be a substitute for actually trying to correct it. But I think it’s a good first step. It is kind of cleansing.

So with that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to share screw-ups. What do you admit to screwing up? Again, you don’t have to ‘fess up to your innermost sins or fears. Just your average, stupid, screw-up that you wish you hadn’t made.

I’ll start.

I was hired by Good Morning America when it first went on the air (David Hartman was the host). I was one of two “talent coordinators” -- AKA the person who gets the guests. In addition to other guest segments, I was responsible for something they called “Face-Off,” a rip-off of the old Sixty Minutes’ Point/Counterpoint segment. I had to come up with controversial issues, book ten guests a week on both sides of those issues, plus book -- or dodge requests from agents representing -- other guests, stars, authors and one trick ponies. It was a crazy time. I was going pretty much all day and all night.

For the first four days, everything went well, and I was feeling pretty good. Then came Friday. The two Face-Off guests were Pat Buchanan and Nicholas Von Hoffman. I can’t remember what the topic was, but for some weird reason, they actually agreed. On the air.

Fortunately, that first week of the show was entirely pre-taped for just that reason. And I have to credit Pat Buchanan for being incredibly courteous and helpful – he and I came up with another issue about which they disagreed on the spot, and the segment was re-taped. No problem. They Faced Off.

Except I was fired. And I suppose I deserved to be. I screwed up.

There. I feel better.

What about you?

By the way, four members of the Outfit will be at Love Is Murder this weekend. If you’re going, be sure to say hi.

I Kinda Wish I'd Been in DC

by Libby Hellmann

I grew up in Washington (yes, in the city itself), so I never saw it as a tourist destination. Nor did I give much thought to the patriotism and symbolism its monuments evoked. I played and fought with kids from Lebanon, Morroco, and Rhodesia, whose embassies were on my block. I went to the White House for tea… smoked my first cigarette behind the Capitol… my first joint at the Lincoln Memorial. I demonstrated against the war on the Mall and sold underground newspapers on the streets of Georgetown. I worked at PBS and was probably the only person in the country to watch the Watergate hearings twice a day. I met people who only wanted to talk to me because they wanted air time, and I only talked to them because I wanted a story.

Before 1960, though, DC was a sleepy Southern town. Congress left in June and didn’t dare return until mid-September. Summers were hot and humid – DC is literally built on a swamp -- and it was segregated. There were separate water fountains for “Whites” and “Negroes.” But it was a safe city, and I took the bus or the streetcar or my bike all over town. There was an Easter egg roll on the White House lawn every spring, and if you looked carefully, you might spot Ike or Mamie smiling at the kids.

That changed when JFK was inaugurated. Overnight Washington became a glittering, sophisticated mecca. The Kennedys infused the town with excitement and hope and youth. You knew from the beginning, when Robert Frost read a poem at the Inaugural, when Kennedy asked what we could do for our country, that things were going to be different.

Which might have been why my mother took me to Kennedy’s inaugural parade. Traditionally, native Washingtonians never go near politically staged events. We know better. But my mother made an exception this time. I think she knew that Kennedy's election was a watershed event. I remember taking the bus down to Pennsylvania Avenue and standing on the sidewalks in the cold with the crowd. Since I was a kid, people let me through to the front – there was no phalanx of police then -- and I had a first-rate view of the procession. I remember the President’s car slowly passing -- it was a convertible – and how it seemed to stop as it came abreast of us. I jumped up and down, waving and shouting, and to this day I was sure Mrs. Kennedy looked directly at me and smiled.

For over forty years I never went to – or wanted to go -- another inauguration. The pageantry just wasn’t very meaningful. Until yesterday. I found myself wishing I could have taken my own kids down to Pennsylvania Avenue. It would have been tough to get through security, stand for hours in bitter cold, endure the lack of facilities. But the opportunity for a glimpse of history, to bear witness to another watershed event, would have been worth it.

What did you think of yesterday?

The End... The Beginning...

by Michael Dymmoch

I pretty much stayed out of the political debate. There’s been no shortage of information (and misinformation) about the race and the candidates, and our readers are smart enough to make up their own minds.

I voted early yesterday, then put the election out of mind. I didn’t even turn on my TV until 11:00 PM—to get coverage of the rally in Grant Park. Here in Chicago there weren’t any fireworks, though the rest of the world was/is celebrating like crazy.

Barack Obama’s words to his supporters were eloquent, wise, gracious, hopeful and brief.

We are all winners.

Sex in the White House

by Libby Hellmann

Those of you who read The Huffington Post might have come across this article about Barack and Michelle Obama’s relationship. It is the Huffington Post, of course, so it was highly complimentary. It talked about how they touch each other in public, how you can see their obvious love and respect for each other, etc.

My reaction? B-O-R-I-N-G. In fact, the Obamas may become the first Democratic occupants of the White House in years who are as boring as the Republicans in the bedroom.

Think about it. How many times did we see Nancy Reagan’s adoring gaze when she looked at Ronnie? Do we really want more of that? Remember all those love letters with the saccharine nicknames?

Excuse me, let me out.


What about Bush 41 and Barb? Be honest -- can you imagine them .. well.. you know? Or Nixon and Pat? Please. George and Laura? Well, maybe, when they were young. And yes, there was Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, but that happened During The War.

It’s much more fun to gossip about what went on behind the Clintons’ closed doors: the temper tantrums… the lamps being thrown… the Monica problem. And what about Jack Kennedy? Everyone knew he was a philanderer. Even LBJ was known to be a stud, when he wasn’t revealing his scars or his dogs’ ears. Okay, admittedly, Jimmy Carter and Harry Truman were boring, but what about FDR?
We still read all sorts of stories about his escapades, and, occasionally, even Eleanor’s.

Frankly, up until recently, the Democrats’ sex lives have just been more colorful. Maybe they took the call to “go to the mattresses” more seriously.

But now everything’s changing. First there were allegations that John McCain had an affair (in addition to the one with Cindy which broke up his first marriage). Then the National Enquirer claimed Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband’s business partner. Are the Republicans trying to play catch up, libido-wise?

Democrats acting like Republicans...Republicans acting like Democrats... And if Obama wins, he and Michelle may bring something approaching stability... even (gasp) love... into the White House.

B-O-R-I-N-G.

Actually, given everything else that's going on in the world, boring's probably not so bad.

What do you think?

Gender Politics Piss Marcus Off

by Marcus Sakey

I'm a diehard feminist.

Because that's a trigger-word these days, I guess I better tell you what it means to me. Simply put, it's the belief that men and women should be afforded the same rights and opportunities. Everybody gets an equal shot, everybody gets treated with basic respect and dignity. Period.

What the word does not mean is that men and women are the same, that our differences are something we should ignore. I understand the ideological basis for the argument, the idea that we are people first and gender second, and that acknowledging gender gives rise to hierarchy. But that's rhetoric, and it's crap. We aren't people first. Our identities are inextricably linked to our gender, with all the biological and sociological differences that entails.

And I think that's great.

The reason I bring that up is that I gotta say, I've been startled by the sexism I've witnessed lately. The topic? Sarah Palin, of course.

Sean raised a number of interesting points about her selection as McCain's running mate. I tend to agree with him; I can't imagine why someone who supported Clinton would vote for McCain, and I'm stunned at the suggestion that a significant portion of America is so fevered in their enthusiasm for having a woman in the White House that they will vote for a uterus instead of a policy. To me, that's as sexist as it comes.

Maybe I'm missing something, and if you feel like I am, I hope you'll try to explain it to me. But the idea of voting for someone primarily because of their gender seems the equivalent of being friends with someone because they're black. The idea is offensive. You don't pick your friends by skin color, and you don't pick your leaders by gender.

I have posted before about my frustration with the campaign Clinton ran. But it would never have occurred to me, had she won, to vote for McCain because of his gender. So why is the opposite an okay sentiment?

Hell, why is it even okay to say in public? Imagine the reverse.

And while we're on the topic of sexism, how about the media coverage of Palin? Yeah, I get that she's a little thin on credentials, that there isn't a lot of political backstory to dig into. But is anyone else offended that every news story seems to mention, within the first two paragraphs, that she's a wife and a mother of five?

So what?

Should that information be in the story somewhere? I suppose. But stories about Obama don't generally mention his wife and daughters above the fold. More like the last paragraph, which is where that kind of information belongs.

Worse, I've seen a number of opinion pieces that suggest that the fact that she is a mother has some bearing on her job performance. Some think it a positive thing, some a negative. Me, I gotta wonder--when she's on a diplomatic mission to Iran, how do her children come into the equation? And if they do, do Obama's as well? Should we vote based on whose are better dressed, better behaved?

What do you think, folks? Am I crazy to be wound up by all of this? Am I looking at it the wrong way?

Prufrock and Me

by Libby Hellmann

““I grow old.. I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled..” The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

I wasn’t going to blog on politics. I really wasn’t. We’re not a political blog. But then Marcus did and it sparked a lively conversation. And I decided I could rationalize it by saying it’s in my DNA. I grew up in Washington, DC, where, when you’re talking about the neighbors at the dinner table, you’re talking politics.

But this isn’t really about politics. It’s more my personal political journey. My first “political” act was triggered by my mother when she dragged me downtown to see the funeral cortege of President Kennedy in 1963. She said it was something I would probably never see again. I remember the flag-draped coffin, the horse with its saddle and stirrups on backwards, the tears and somber expressions. But I had a more personal connection to that event also. I went to the same high school as Luci Baines Johnson and was sitting across from her in study hall when the principal came in that Friday afternoon, beckoned Luci out of the room, and rocked her (and our) world forever.

In 1968 I was supposed to take a semester off college to work for Bobby Kennedy’s campgaign. It didn’t happen. The assassinations kept piling up. Camelot was dead. Vietnam raged. I marched. I protested. I started working for an underground newspaper. Then I dropped out and hitchhiked across country. I thought I was headed to a hippie commune in Colorado where everyone lived off the land. What I found was a crash pad where people subsisted on peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. I kept going and was in the middle of the Nevada desert, six hours from Las Vegas, with a back pack, sleeping bag, and no water, when something kicked in. What was a nice Jewish girl doing in a place like that?

I got myself back East. I re-joined the system. Went to grad school. Started working in TV news. Helped produce the Watergate hearings and watched them twice a day. Then the impeachment hearings. Moved to Chicago. Worked at a PR firm. Eventually started writing.

Why the personal disclosures? Because I’m now on the older end of the Baby Boom, and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek says there’s a difference. Which can affect whether you support Obama or Clinton. If you’re a younger Boomer, born after 1955, you tend to be more hopeful, reject the politics of the past, and support Obama. If you’re an early Boomer, you don’t. (Btw, the Outfit is split down the middle and I suspect our politics are too)...

I’m on the older end. For me, the disappointments of the Sixties, the Seventies, and the past 7 years are still raw. Messages of hope, of redemption for the future, just fall flat ... even with such a likeable, eloquent candidate as Obama. I find all his promises just that-- abstract, feel-good ideas. (Remember “if it feels good, do it?”) I keep thinking the guy is a politician first. Trying to win an election. I doubt that we’ll see any fundamental change in a system where civil servants spend their entire careers working in government and presidents spend a maximum of eight years. And I admit it – I subscribe to the “other shoe” theory of politics. I fear that something bad is going to happen if we get our hopes up too high.

There’s a thoughtful piece worth reading in the New Republic’s “Washington Diarist.” In “Forever Young,”, Leon Wieseltier says your politics comes from how you view the world:

“The question of whether Barack Obama will make a fine commander-in chief finally depends on your view of the direction of history in the coming years.” The author says, “I cannot escape the foreboding that we are heading into an era of conflict, not an era of conciliation.”

I agree. I just can’t ignore that there are people—even entire nations -- that want to destroy us and that they’re devious enough to pick on an untested leader with limited foreign policy experience.

Am I a skeptic? Yes. A cynic? Probably. Clearly on one end of the Boomer spectrum. But I don't want to ruin it for you. Those of you who are full of hope for the future, enjoy. Get involved. Make it happen. Some things will change just by having a Democrat in office (assuming we beat McCain). Just don’t expect me to join in.

So... which type of Baby Boomer are you? Does it even make a difference, or am I just whistling ts elliot?

Union Made in the USA . . .

by Sean Chercover

I am not a Democrat, nor am I a Republican; I’ve always been a registered Independent voter. I’ve voted for Democratic candidates, Republican candidates, and even Natural Law Party candidates (it seemed like the funniest option at the time).

I worked briefly as a volunteer on H. Ross Perot’s campaign, partly because it was a funny thing to do, but mostly because I was sick of the Republicrat either/or con game.

I’m still sick of the con game. I’m more convinced than ever that Washington is corrupt to its core, and that our brand of two-party politics is a scam. I seriously doubt that it is fixable, and all evidence suggests that the majority of Americans don’t even want it fixed.

But in this next federal election, I’m backing a candidate anyway. Not because I believe that he will make everything better, but simply because things have gone way too far and we are in danger of slipping off the deep end into our own Orwellian nightmare (if we haven’t already passed the point of no return).

Illinois senator Barack Obama is my candidate. I don’t agree with all of his positions, but that’s neither here nor there; I don’t agree with all of the positions of any of the candidates, from either party. And there’s still plenty of time for Obama to do or say something that will make me regret my choice. But unless and until that happens, I’m an Obama girl. I even have an Obama baseball cap and t-shirt and bumper sticker on my aging Chevy Malibu.

The good news is that both the baseball cap and the t-shirt are union made in the USA. The bad news is, they suck. I mean, they really and truly suck. The seams are all over the goddamn place, there are loose threads and haphazard stitching, the cap’s button is way off-center . . . etc.

I have ball caps and t-shirts made by exploited children in Bangladesh, others made by slave prison labor in China. And by far, the worst quality cap and shirt I now own are Union Made in the USA. And this distresses the hell out of me.

I do not expect American-made products to compete on price. I’m happy to pay a couple bucks more for a cap made in the USA by a union member making a fair living wage. In fact, I actively seek out such products.

No, I don’t expect us to compete on price. But if we can’t compete on quality, we are totally screwed.

Jesus, I’m a cheery bastard today. If anyone has anything optimistic to say about American manufacturing or politics, I’d love to hear it.

In the meantime: Go Cubs! Go Bears! Go Obama!