Chicago Daily Observer

Strolling the quiet streets on a morning in May you’ll admire the lilacs spilling over the low stone fences, the mansions with the squares of lawn marching to the edge of the boulevards, the funky, vine-covered apartment buildings shaded by overarching oak and poplar. Only after a day or so do you notice what’s not here. There are no movie theaters, for example, and not much commerce generally. There’s nowhere to buy a pair of pants or shoes. There aren’t many restaurants, and only a single overpriced restaurant catering to the culinary affectations of the yuppie trade—strange for a neighborhood with so many wealthy residents. Only in the last few months did the neighborhood get a reliable, clean, and well-stocked grocery store.

Barack Obama was not only speaking to ‘small-town’ America, but the small towns that exist in Big Cities as well – we call them neighborhoods: Obama was talking to Dorchester, Queens, Staten Island, Pilsen, Canaryville, Brighton Park, Edison Park, Norwood Park, Evergreen Park, Morgan Park – hell every Park. Well, maybe not Hyde Park.

This was no Political Gotcha. This is Pure undiluted doctrine – Progressive doctrine. Obama lives this doctrine and it is from the heart – Words do matter. Barack Obama was speaking to his core constituency – Progressives. They are Gown elites – like his Hyde Park Neighbors in Chicago. Like Army brats, University Demographics – that’s what smart types call people – tend to be transient – move around alot.

By spending most of his adult life on the South Side of Chicago, and launching his careers as activist and politician there, Barack Obama has benefited from an unusual political and social base that is perhaps hard for the rest of the country to fully understand or relate to.

The area is both patchwork and blend of hardscrabble inner-city Black neighborhoods, well-to-do enclaves of the city’s Black elite, and the racially-mixed Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood with its strong Jewish presence where Obama and his family make their home. (The Obamas much-discussed house and lot are just across the street from my synagogue.) But it is much less a cauldron of conflict than an exceptional place of political cooperation where certain pacts and understandings were reached long ago that make for bedfellows that might seem strange to other parts of the country or the East Coast commentariat.

Dear “Sun-Times.”

I should let you in on a little news. Your coverage of the Henry Hyde funeral by Dan Rozek missed a significant news story. Paragraph 2: “The longtime Republican legislator, who led a successful effort to ban federal funding of abortions and an unsuccessful attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton… ” Uh, the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton was successful. On December 19, 1998 the House voted to impeach him. The charges were one count of perjury and obstruction of justice. What you should have said was that Hyde “led a successful attempt to impeach President Bill Clinton” but the Senate with a two-thirds majority needed to convict did not do so. On perjury, the count being 45 votes for conviction and 55 against; on obstruction of justice, 50–50 with five Republicans voting against.

Crowding the Mourners’ Bench.

No sooner did Henry Hyde die than the “Tribune” rushed out with a story long on laudatory and very-very short on analysis…topped by the “Sun-Times” which had more of a story. The difference between the two papers is starting to be this-in obit news of the greats, for the sanitized version read the “Tribune” which is like reading the establishment’s official bio; if you want to learn more than he official typescript you read the “Sun-Times.”

Two who crowded the mourners’ bench, burbling their lachrymose tears into their hankies were, predictably, Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel who was White House political director for Bill Clinton when Hyde led the House impeachment and the recently resigned (to spend more time with his family, of course) Republican Denny Hastert (good ol’ Denny, his eyebrows waggling up and down, his lips pursed as if to say perhaps major but then ... Read More...

The man I knew for forty years as “Uncle Henry” is gone. There will not be his like in the Congress again soon. Perhaps never. Some thoughts:

I hope that Congressman Rahm Emanuel has retained some portion of the innate grace from his ballet dancing past not to attend Henry’s wake or funeral. But if he goes it will be typical.

Typical because as everyone in Washington knows including the media that will not publish it, Emanuel, once President Bill Clinton’s assassin (felicitously called his political director) looked skyward in innocence as porno-magazine owner-editor Larry Flynt disclosed that decades earlier Henry had an affair from his Illinois legislature days—which was supposed to tit for tat, to even things up with a president who allowed himself to be pleasured in an anteroom off the Oval Office by a courtesan intern paid by the taxpayers…on occasions enjoying himself with her even when ... Read More...