Word: chicago
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...course, Chicago roots aren't always enough for a candidate, as Adlai Stevenson proved twice. But for now, Republicans might need to look for a new line of attack. With Obama on his way to the White House, the Axelrod-Emanuel-Podesta trio by his side and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin the new center of influence in the U.S. Senate, Chicago Democrat appears to be a winning label...
Except for the soft hydraulic whir of expectations being raised, the first week of the Obama transition was a quiet one. Indeed, the big news came from neither Chicago nor Washington but from Detroit and Beijing. In Detroit, General Motors - the stupendously clueless automaker - begged for a bailout lest it go bankrupt, thereby raising the question: If our resources are limited, why should we invest in the failed corporate past rather than in the technologies of the future? The obvious answer was to protect jobs. But how long would those jobs last without a significant overhaul of the company...
...attack also missed because it was hard to square with Obama himself. The description "old Chicago pol" conjures a stout machine boss wearing a porkpie hat and chomping on a stogie - not a whip-thin black guy trying to quit smoking. Nor was the Chicago machine an ingredient in Obama's political rise. "He didn't rely on the machine for his success," says David Moberg, who has covered Chicago politics closely as a longtime writer for alternative magazine In These Times. "When he ran for the state senate, Congress and the U.S. Senate, he was opposed by the party...
...Chicago didn't only not hurt Obama's political prospects - it ended up helping him with the electoral map. In recent presidential elections, Democrats have struggled to hold on to their once solid base in the Midwest as they focused much of their energy on Southern candidates who could help broaden their appeal in culturally conservative parts of the country. With Obama, the party eschewed that strategy and instead found its standard bearer in its industrial Rust Belt roots, a place where Obama's reputation and early ground game could have maximum impact. It was no accident that on election...
...have also learned that their Midwestern base provides some inoculation against charges that dog their coastal colleagues. When Republicans call Nancy Pelosi a "San Francisco liberal" or derisively refer to Upper West Side and Cambridge lefties, they tag those Democrats as ideologically extreme and culturally élitist. Politicians from Chicago can be just as liberal as those from New York, New England and California, but they come from the much-fetishized heartland, which makes attacks on them a tougher sell to swing voters. And they have an advantage within the Democratic base as well: while party leaders have long assumed...