If you view leadership as the ability to shove useless stuff down the throats of people who don’t want or need it, then you’d have to conclude that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is having one heck of a year.
Have you ever noticed that the promises he keeps are usually the ones you didn’t want him to make in the first place—and vice versa?
And the mayor closes the debate with his favorite argument of all: I know that change is hard and makes you emotional, but the status quo is not an option. And by the way: fuck you!
Mayor Emanuel began his argument for reratifying the meter contract by asserting there’s no way he can undo it in court because of the judge’s ruling in Krislov’s case. In truth, as my colleague Mick Dumke first reported, the judge ruled something far different: that a legal challenge to the parking meter deal could only prevail if the city were behind it.
What we do know is that by reratifying the meter deal, the City Council made it more difficult for Krislov—or anyone else—to overturn it. Which is what most residents, including the mayor, say they want.
Emanuel also relied on a flawed formula to determine which schools were overcrowded, in that it counted art and special-ed classrooms as empty. Plus, children from shuttered schools aren’t going to be automatically sent to higher-achieving schools—in some cases they’re going to lower-achieving ones.
