THE CHICAGO WAY

I have friends from Chicago as well as some fond memories of Chicago. My friends from Chicago will excuse me for saying that, in my view, it's a dreadful place. And I temper this dislike of a potentially fabulous city because of fond memories of trips with my parents to Chicago in the late 40s and early 50s when I would be taken to jazz clubs to hear people like Lionel Hampton and Art Tatum play! As a teenager I was probably the only girl I knew who didn't have a poster of Elvis but DID have a framed, autographed picture of Art Tatum (one of the nicest men I have ever met and a genius at the piano).

All that having been said, and despite the fact that one of my favorite writers hails from Chicago and seems bound and determined to defend the political moraes of this corrupt city (Rev. Andrew Greeley), I have to say that "doing it the Chicago way" is going to ill serve this nation for the next four years. More and more I am convinced that our new president is nothing more nor less than a classic Chicago pol - as corrupt, manipulative and dishonest as any of them. This is a point that has been made by others, far more eloquently than I make it, so I won't belabor the thought.

I have to wonder if President Obama planned the apparently incomplete vetting process that has given us such withdrawn Cabinet post nominations as Bill Richardson and now Tiny Tom Daschle. And if he did, for what purpose? Is this the Janet Reno effect? Two fairly qualified candidates rejected for nanny problems softened us up for that great hulking cretin's 8 years as Attorney General? Based on that criteria, what debacle faces us next in the wake of Daschle's withdrawal? Is Barack Obama performing with snotty incompetence deliberately in order to reduce the impossibly high expectations of his cultlike followers? Or is he genuinely incompetent?

Of one thing I am sure, he's a student and practitioner of the Chicago way and that lesson he has learned well. First he says that there will be no lobbyists in the Obama White House - then he hires three of them!