Years ago, in another job, I reported something wrong. Awkwardly, litigably wrong. The editor who could have asked for my resignation told me to write a correction. I poured my heart into it. I owned my crime and marveled at the enormity of my misjudgment. The editor gagged at this cry from the heart and told me to start over. Keep it to a short paragraph, he said. This is a newspaper, not a confessional.
Miller was coming clean but blaming Kass. A nice performance.
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He was, of course, in Washington serving the president. Kass said that Chicago’s election board “purged Emanuel from the voting lists for the first time” last October, but that before the February primary he’d somehow been reinstated by means election lawyer Burt Odelson called “magical” and “mysterious.” After voting in the primary by an absentee ballot that listed the address of the house on Hermitage he still owned but no longer lived in, Emanuel was dropped from the rolls again in May. But this October he was back on.
A day later Kass returned to his theme. Again he let it be known that he personally believes “Rahm is a Chicagoan and should be allowed to run for mayor.” Nevertheless, the “fact” that Emanuel “was twice purged from the Chicago voter rolls yet was allowed to vote absentee” had been “confirmed by all sides now.” Now it was mayoral candidate Gerry Chico telling Kass how “mysterious” it was that Emanuel had been reinstated.
Again letting no one doubt that “I appreciate and respect Rahm. . . . And I believe he should be on the ballot,” Kass shook his head in dismay: “There’s that nagging issue. It’s called the law.” State law said Emanuel had to be a resident of Chicago for a year.
More specifically, the timeline of Huberman’s political career in Chicago had said that in June he laid off “the 200 lowest performing teachers rather than basing it on seniority.” This was nonsense—as anyone who’s read Ben Joravsky’s Reader pieces on those layoffs would know.
“Yes, the Tribune owes a retraction to these teachers,” Lewis wrote. “But even more so, it owes a retraction to a readership that understandably believes that all or nearly all of the teachers fired by Huberman in June were the ‘lowest performing.’ . . .
