As penance for something bad I did years ago, I forced myself to watch the Republican convention. I can’t quite remember what I did, but it must have been bad, because that circus was dreadful.
So many ironies. For one thing, who the hell is some guy from New Jersey to make fun of our legacy of corruption? I mean, that’s the state where just a few years ago authorities busted dozens of people for money laundering. Among them were three mayors, a couple of state legislators, and five rabbis. Not even Blago tried anything like that.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Good god—the mere thought of it is making me reach for the Vicodin again.
And Mayor Daley was happy to play political footsie with them too. I’ll never forget how he gratuitously ripped into Democrats and gushed over President George W. Bush right after Bush eked out a win over John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. “The Democrats have been taken over by Washington elitists,” Daley said, who “don’t like faith-based organizations” or people “who maybe read the Bible or read the Koran.”
To this day plenty of politicians around here believe that the trip to Chicago was Bush’s way of telling the feds to lay off Daley in any subsequent investigations—a way of thanking the mayor for not doing a damn thing for Kerry.
And when former Cook County commissioner Mike Quigley—now a congressman—moved to reform the TIF program by putting the numbers on tax bills, the board’s Republican commissioners joined forces with the mayor’s brother John Daley to stymie him.
There are even TIF districts in Governor Christie’s New Jersey. And from what I’ve been reading on the website of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, “localities too often use tax-increment financing as an all-purpose subsidy for developers.” Sound familiar?
