The New Chicago Way

Of course, Washington is knee-deep in the Chicago way with allegations by two
insurgent Democrats, who have admitted that that they were illegally offered
federal jobs in exchange for them dropping their insurgent campaigns against
the preferred candidates of the Chicago White House.

In the old days, these guys might have feared for their lives, both politically
and actually, if they had crossed the Chicago machine. These days, they gamble
that by standing up to the Chicago machine, they can get more of a political
advantage. So they both turned down the jobs and then turned on the folks who
offered them.

The old Mayor Daley used both the stick and carrot to make Chicago the city
that works. He used to have his allies, whom he lavished with city contracts,
and his enemies, whom his machine screwed unmercifully.

By doing so, he achieved a political balance that kept the city running very
effectively.

The new Mayor Daley (well, he is not new, but he is the second one) has a
different philosophy. He just uses carrots. He buys people off, spreads around
the love and does his best to make his city beautiful. The problem with that is
it gets expensive, and Chicago is going broke as a result.

President Obama has adopted the latter Daley’s philosophy, and as a result, we
are all going broke. He spends, he spreads the wealth around, he promises tax
cuts to all but the top 5 percent, he makes no difficult choices, and then he
does his best to hand out political favors.

America, by and large, recoils from Chicago machine politics. They don’t like
to see Chicago politicians hand out political favors to their cronies. They
don’t like to see the country going broke. They don’t like to see incompetence.

The former governor of Illinois, who rose up through the Chicago machine, sees
himself as a victim, and he may very well be, of a system that once favored him
and now has thrown him under the bus. We all got a glimpse of how he operates
on “Celebrity Apprentice.” He is an articulate and forceful advocate on his
behalf, and he is more than willing to use the public arena to make his case.

That doesn’t bode well for the Obama White House. Like Joe Sestak and Andrew
Romanoff, Mr. Blagojevich sees no upside in being loyal to the president and
his people, and he sees many advantages to trashing Mr. Emanuel and his team to
achieve his own objectives.

That may not have been the Chicago way of the past, where loyalty was the most
important political commodity. These days, it is every man (or woman) for
himself (or herself), and that could mean political disaster for the Chicago
gang that currently runs the White House.

The new Chicago way is not working for the city of Chicago, it is not working
for the American people, and it looks like it could cause some huge problems for
the president and his people.

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