Deconstructing Obama — Part Two

Neo-​​Neocon opens a piece enti­tled An Alter­nate The­ory of Obama thusly:

We spend an awful lot of time won­der­ing what’s really going on inside Obama’s mind. What moti­vates him? Is he a com­mit­ted ide­o­logue or a front for some­thing else?

We have spent entirely too much time won­der­ing what this freak really thinks, so the Nolan­im­rod is here to sort things out once and for all.  So pay atten­tion.  Absorb this and you can avoid all future anguished sup­po­si­tions about what Obama really thinks. This is part II.  For Part I — A really Sad Puppy — go here.

Part II — The Chicago Way

The Nim­rod wasn’t always a NOLA Nim­rod.  I lived in Chicago for around ten years.  I lived in Old Town, at Armitage and Cleve­land, in New Town (before it want com­pletely rain­bow), on Roscoe near Hal­sted, and in Uptown, at Pen­sacola and Clark, across from the big ceme­tery whose ros­ter reads like a Who’s Who of Chicago art, com­merce, indus­try, and crime.  Worth a walk-​​through just to see the mon­u­ments.  Many of them are real works of art.  But I digress.

As a Chicago res­i­dent I was daily immersed in and affected by The Chicago Way.

The Chicago way wasn’t any big secret.  You didn’t need a code word or a secret hand­shake.  It was just there.  You par­tic­i­pated when you finally wised-​​up and noticed that you got pulled over every time you drove your car if it were within a month or two of Christ­mas.  Hey — cops got kids, too.  So you started hand­ing a $10 or a $20 over with your license and then

1. you didn’t have to pay a ticket or go to court, and
2. you didn’t get pulled over so much

And you noticed The Chicago Way when­ever you read the Chicago Tri­bune or the Chicago Sun Times, because you would rou­tinely see lead para­graphs like this:

Fred Roti, Precinct Com­mit­tee­man for the First Ward, the Out­fit Ward, …

You might also notice, just in pass­ing, that the politi­cian who always gets the most dona­tions is the Cook County Asses­sor.  Not one of the glamor posi­tions.  Not the mayor, not any of the alder­men.  The asses­sor.  Nice build­ing you got there.  Be ter­ri­ble if your taxes got tripled.

You might have chuck­led when Mayor Richard J. Daley, father of the cur­rent Richard who is known to local media wags as Short­shanks, gave a press con­fer­ence in which he explained why he had given bil­lions in lia­bil­ity insur­ance busi­ness for the City of Chicago to a lit­tle insur­ance agency in Evanston.  His son worked there.

Hey!  If a father can’t help out his boy then who’s gonna?

Where­upon all the reporters mum­bled and nod­ded and slapped their fore­heads and asked each other why they hadn’t thought of that.

Da Boyz

I don’t Wanna See Nobody Nobody Sent

Or you might have noticed The Chicago Way in oper­a­tion when, return­ing to the table in a neigh­bor­hood tav­ern with drinks for you and your girl friend, you found a guy you knew there try­ing to pick her up and who, when he found he had been chat­ting up your girl, got all apolo­getic and embar­rassed.  That sort of thing hap­pens every day and is entirely unre­mark­able.  The Chicago Way kicks in on what hap­pened next.

This guy, whom I knew as a casual acquain­tance,  nice guy, black fel­low, light-​​skinned, very well-​​spoken, not a hint of Negro dialect (and whose father was a judge on the South Side and a major player in the Daley Orga­ni­za­tion), took me aside, said that my girl friend had men­tioned that she was look­ing for a job, and wrote a name and num­ber on the back of a match­book cover and gave it to me.  Told me to have her call the guy whose name he had writ­ten.  All very hush-​​hush.

Tuned out to be a job as direc­tor of a youth voca­tional train­ing out­reach thing on the South Side. Paid around $50k. This was in 1978.  Seri­ous money.  When I asked her why she had turned down the job she said because she had no expe­ri­ence of nor knowl­edge for run­ning a pro­gram upon which kids’ futures depended.

Then the guy called me up.  He was mad.  I told him that she had declined the job because she thought she wasn’t qual­i­fied.  He thought I was hold­ing out for more money.  Jesus Christ!  All I tried to do was pick her up.  Don’t get too greedy here, pal. Then I got wor­ried.  In that envi­ron­ment get­ting greedy is a ter­mi­nal dis­ease.  I told him she was seri­ous.  He told me We have all the peo­ple we need to oper­ate the pro­gram.  She was just going to run it.  Col­lect a check.  Noth­ing more.

We were both idiots.  The point was to give her a pay­off as a way of apol­o­giz­ing to me and to do it with other peo­ples’ foun­da­tion money.  Whether or not the pro­gram actu­ally achieved any of its stated goals was irrel­e­vant. That I walked away from it was a result of me con­vinc­ing my acquain­tance that I wasn’t hold­ing out for more money.

I include this lit­tle vignette because it sounds a lot like a cou­ple of items on the Obama itinerary.

When Barack and his buddy Billy Ayers decided to blow a few mil of the Annen­berg Foundation’s money on a  pro­gram to help South Side youth with their school­ing, and test scores either stayed the same or went down, nobody cared.  The point was that Barack had a job, a title, and some walk­ing around money.

Same thing for Mrs. Barack.  They teach you a lot about run­ning clin­ics for impov­er­ished com­mu­ni­ties at Har­vard Law School and you also pick up a lot of epi­demi­o­log­i­cal know-​​how work­ing on the staff of Short­shanks Daley.  So she was a nat­ural to be given a $100k+ posi­tion as Vice Pres­i­dent for Com­mu­nity out­reach at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Hos­pi­tal. Shortly there­after, when the hos­pi­tal peo­ple found out

1. how much she knew about com­mu­nity health clin­ics, and
2. that her hus­band was now a U.S. Senator

lo! and behold! she was now worth an addi­tional quarter-​​mil!  The Chicago Way.

While we’re doing Chicago Way sto­ries there is one other which you might like:

Da boyz down­town were get­ting a lit­tle annoyed that they couldn’t get their casino out at Rose­mont approved.  So they tried to stuff a con­ge­nial YES-​​vote on to the State Gam­ing Com­mis­sion.  The Gam­ing Com­mis­sion was ready to take in a mem­ber from Chicago, but just not the mem­ber they pro­posed, because the Com­mis­sion felt he had too many ties to too many stinky fingers.

Poor guy!  He was so con­sci­en­tious.  He helped Marc Rich and shep­arded his par­don so that it danced round all the nor­mal jus­tice depart­ment red lights which would have mil­i­tated against it and made sure that it was signed in Clinton’s last minute in office so there could be no second-​​thinking about it.

Poor guy.  They wouldn’t take him on the Illi­nois Gam­ing Com­mis­sion and that was a really good job.

But he has a bet­ter one now.  He’s Attor­ney Gen­eral of the United States.

The Chicago Way.

If you missed the first part of this Obama dis­cus­sion (and want to see it) here is Part One — A Very Sad Puppy.

I wish to acknowl­edge my dear friend and admired men­tor Fausta.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Michelle Obama, Obama, The Chicago Way