Obama’s Chicago, where “everyone is connected to everyone”

In an odd bit of convergence, this weekend, Time, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune each took a look into Obama’s Illinois roots. This sudden emphasis on Chicago reminded me of a Tuesday night tweet from Republican social media guru Patrick Ruffini: ” Over the next six months, we must mention the words Obama and Chicago and/or Daley as much as possible.”

Michael Weisskopf, in Time:

How did the man… come so far so fast? Much of the answer can be traced to the lessons of his first thumping. It was after that brief race in 2000…that Obama learned how to be a politician. He jettisoned his Harvard-tested speaking style for something more down-home. He learned how to cultivate those in power without being defined by them. And he learned how to be different things to different people: a reformer groomed by an old-fashioned machine boss, an African American heavily financed by white liberals, a Harvard lawyer whose bootstrapping life story gained traction with white ethnics. Abner Mikva, a former federal judge and Congressman from Chicago, credits Obama with figuring out “how to appeal to different constituencies without being inconsistent.”…[During the 2004 Democratic primary] while Obama couldn’t win the support of the Daleys’ political machine–he knew they would back Hynes–he shrewdly planted some political seeds. He wrote Bill Daley, a longtime Democratic wise man, saying that while it was only right for the Daleys to support a loyal friend, he hoped they would be for him if he won the primary. “I thought, that’s a very smooth move,” said the younger Daley, who now supports Obama for the White House.

In the Times, Jo Becker and Christopher Drew quote Chicago mainstay Marilyn Katz

“For better or worse, this is Chicago,” said Ms. Katz, who has held fund-raisers for Mr. Obama at her home. “Everyone is connected to everyone.”

John Kass, in the Tribune:

The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate’s politics were born in Chicago. Yet he is presented to the nation as not truly being of this place, as if he floats just above the political corruption here, uninfected, untouched by the stain of it or by any sin of commission or omission. It is all so very mystical.

Handicapping a post-Daley 2011 Chicago Mayoral Race

As I mentioned on Twitter last week (and on this blog last year), I suffer from mayoral race envy, for I live in a town that hasn’t seen a competitive contest since Richard Daley was elected 19 years ago. This jealousy was only heightened by listening to the Guardian’s special Politics Weekly podcast on Boris Johnson’s electoral triumph. Rather than leave Chicago, I’ve begun to imagine what a real 2011 mayoral election might look like.

Obviously, should Mayor Daley decide to (or, pending ongoing corruption investigations, not be able to) run for re-election, he will be the favorite to be re-elected. Whether or not that would be the best thing for the city, it is not a particularly exciting prospect for a political junkie daydreaming about 2011. So let’s ignore him.

After Daley, any list of 2011 candidates begins with two Congressmen who came close to challenging Daley last year, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Luis Gutierrez. As Walter Jacobson pointed out on Chicago Public Radio,, and as was pointed out here, one of them could end up being our next Senator– of the two, I’d bet on Gutierrez. City Clerk Miguel Del Valle has been turning up at several benefit dinners in the Loop this spring, and I trust that it’s not due to a love for rubber chicken and weak coffee. I’d place Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool into a non-Daley second tier with Del Valle. Two wild cards who may be better off waiting for 2015, are SEIU favorite Ald. Sandi Jackson (Jesse’s spouse) and States Attorney nominee Anita Alvarez. For a wild, wild card, let’s toss U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s name into the ring.

February 2011 seems like a long ways away, but it will be here before you know it.

Debating Burnham’s Lakefront Vision

For the last couple of years, Friends of the Parks has been floating a notion to extend Chicago’s lakefront park system to include two miles on both the Side and North sides, with the hope of finalizing a plan by next year’s centennial of the (Daniel) Burnham Plan. As the FOTP points out, “Both the Burnham 1909 Plan of Chicago and the 1972 Lakefront Protection ordinance call for Chicago’s entire lakefront to be public parks.” I take a particular interest in FOTP’s recently published plan to expand the beach 5 blocks from my home, which would also ease my bike commute by reducing the mile of streets I have to negotiate before reaching the lakefront path to a handful of blocks.

On the other hand, my neighbor Philip Bernstein started Stop the Landfill to oppose the FOTP’s plan. Bernstein is neither a paroter of NIMBY resistance nor a run-of-the-mill Edgewater curmudgeon (we have our share), but is, according to Chicago Journal, a “retired chief of planning for the Army Corp of Engineers in Chicago.” According to STL, “[A]ny landfill, no matter how “clean” the fill is, would have a very dramatic impact on the ecology…How many animals would die and how long would it take for Lake Michigan to recover and what about the water quality?” Bernstein’s site also expresses concern for the cost of such an expansion and its effect on “real estate values.” I dont’t have a horse in this race, but I’m paying attention now, thanks to a link from EveryBlock. That link is proof further that the new site provides a lot more than just crime reports and links to restaurant reviews.

(The Pilipino Traveler on Foot blog reveals that Burnham also developed a pan for Manila:

The Burnham Plan, which the London Times called “a miracle by an Alladin,” was approved by the Philippine Legislature, which agreed to set aside two million pesos every year for the execution of the plan. When the fund had reached some 16 million, however, President Manuel L. Quezon decided to use the money on irrigation projects instead. Quezon noted that rice fields were more important than fine structures for Manila. Of Burnham’s proposed government center, only three units were built…”)

EveryBlock Debuts, as the Sun-Times Winds Down

EveryBlock, the much-anticipated new project from ChicagoCrime founder Adrian Holovaty, debuted Wednesday– at least for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. (Was it a a coincidence that Wednesday was also the anniversary of the birth of Django Reinhardt, Holovaty’s gypsy jazz guitar hero?) I’ve had fun exploring restaurant reviews and Flickr photos near my block, and I’ve heard nothing but praise so far– including from a friend in New York who is turning her neighborhood council onto the service. Adrian and his team are freakishly talented, but the usefulness of the project largely depends on the degree to which local governments will make their– our– information available. (Relatedly, Tom Steinberg and MySociety today unveiled a new set of public transport maps. I’d love for the Chicago Transit Authority to be involved– the CTA announced the purchase of new cars yesterday.)

As Adrian and his team were basking in their deserved laurels today, across the Chicago River the evisceration of the Chicago Sun-Times continued. Michael Miner makes the case that the loss of 29 positions was not as bad as expected, and I think more than one of them was glad to get the layoffs, expected for weeks, over with. Will the Sun-Times survive as a source of local journalism, or is it just a matter of time until we are a one paper town.

“What Makes Obama Run” (c. 1995)

What Makes Obama Run in 1994 by Hank De Zuttern tmay be the first article on political candidate Barack Obama. Some of the praise for the candidate still sounds fresh:

Obama’s work on the south side has won him the friendship and respect of many activists. One of them, Johnnie Owens, left the citywide advocacy group Friends of the Parks to join Obama at the Developing Communities Project. He later replaced Obama as its executive director.

“What I liked about Barack immediately is that he brought a certain level of sophistication and intelligence to community work,” Owens says. “He had a reasonable, focused approach that I hadn’t seen much of. A lot of organizers you meet these days are these self-anointed leaders with this strange, way-out approach and unrealistic, eccentric way of pursuing things from the very beginning. Not Barack. He’s not about calling attention to himself. He’s concerned with the work. It’s as if it’s his mission in life, his calling, to work for social justice.

Obama’s comments on the recently-concluded Million Man March:

“What I saw was a powerful demonstration of an impulse and need for African-American men to come together to recognize each other and affirm our rightful place in the society,” he said. “There was a profound sense that African-American men were ready to make a commitment to bring about change in our communities and lives.

“But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Just as holding hands and singing ‘We shall overcome’ is not going to do it, exhorting youth to have pride in their race, give up drugs and crime, is not going to do it if we can’t find jobs and futures for the 50 percent of black youth who are unemployed, underemployed, and full of bitterness and rage.

De Zutter, the article’s author, went out to co-found Chicago’s Community Media Workshop, which “trains people… to tell their stories to the media…and tries to create better relationships between the media and the diverse communities which make up Chicago and the Midwest.” De Zutter’s place in Chicago journalism continues:

An education writer at the Chicago Daily News in the late 60s, De Zutter was one of a handful of young reporters whose response to the dailies’ timid coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention was to found the Chicago Journalism Review and call them to account. CJR was the inspiration for similar journals soon launched in cities across the country.