the Presidential Election and Chicago Politics
Janet Kuypers, 11/04/08
It is 8:03 in the morning on Tuesday, November 4th. I have already gone to the polling station and cast my ballot, like I have done many years in the past. (Granted, this time I had a sheet of a list of incumbents so I could keep that in mind when voting; everyone thinks incumbents should get out of office because they get too comfortable in their position and lose touch with the people, but no one is willing to actually think about it on polling day).
But I’m not here to talk about the fact that I just voted. I’ll assume a lot of you are voting today, because this election, according to all the pundits and talking heads on the 24-hour drive-by media stations, is truly one for the history books. Actually, over the past nearly 2 years (damn, this is a long election cycle), this election process has been one for the books. For the Democratic Primaries, the real viable contenders were woman and a black man.
I mean, these two were real, viable contenders.
Everyone thought a Clinton torch would be passed along to Hillary and she was a shoe-in for the nomination (if nothing else, that would have been cool for women’s rights). And although Hillary doesn’t mention that she’s from a suburb of Chicago, that would still be kind of a cool thing for us Chicago folk. But no, she was beaten by a black man from Hawaii, who has decided to be real and genuine part of the Chicago political machine. When Hillary Clinton seemed a real shoe-in, Barack Obama edged her out in the polls, and after an insanely long battle, Obama got the nod for the Democrat’s Presidential nomination. (Well, it does seem fitting, it may sound crass to say, but black men got the right to vote before white women, ah, sexism is still more of a glass ceiling than racism).
And when it comes to the eloquence of Obama, I remember hearing him in the beginning of his running for President against the slew of other Democrat candidates and thinking that he couldn’t speak effectively. (Actually, I still hear him, and if he is not reading from a prepared speech and has to talk extemporaneously, every 3rd or 4th word is “um” or “ah”, at one of the debates I was trying to take a drink of beer every time he stammered like that, and I just couldn’t keep up with drinking and him talking, he stammered so much when answering questions in a debate with McCain).
Wait a minute, when I think about the weight of this election, I don’t think about the eloquence of Obama. I think of the fact that he, for all intents and purposes, is a Chicagoan, and I think about him getting so much money from supporters for his battle for the Presidency. Not only did Obama pay 7 major networks for a half hour infomercial (with Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award-winning director and executive producer of Al Gore’s “The Inconvenient Truth,” played a role in the informercial production), but he also has Grant Park in Chicago as the meeting grounds for the outcome of the election results this evening.
I believe one million tickets were sold for this Grant Park event, but large screens will be visible outside for people clamoring near the entrance during the evening. Though I can’t confirm this, my husband even said to me that he heard that some major news organizations (like newspapers that leans more Republican) who thought they had access to this Obama event at Grant Park found out their access was lost, when very shortly afterward more African-America agencies, like Ebony magazine or JET magazine... You know, I can’t say with certainty that this happens, but it makes me wonder about not only his desire for more government involvement in people's lives (not very American, is it?), but also his old-time Chicago political roots.
But then again, that goes back to the whole “he’s inexperienced” argument, the fact that he was barely in the Senate nationally before he decided to run for President. I have been comforted with the fact that all of the choices Obama has made in recent months have been after consultation from a wide variety of intelligent sources. I have noted that although Obama has a history of being more liberal and more leftist than any other Senator working now, he has looked to a number of sources to come to more centered conclusions.
Who know what he would do as President (he does say one thing, but after researching you’ll see he won’t do what on the surface he says), but the question for me becomes what this town will be like tonight, with whatever decision is made for who the next President of the United States will be.
I said to my husband that a part of me wants to go down there, not to get a ticket or anything, but just to be a part of the madness. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I wouldn’t want to be a part of it, before my husband said that he’s curious about what the mob-like crowds will be like if Barack Obama loses.
Good point, so I guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t really thinking of going downtown for the madness tonight. And right now it’s still before 9 in the morning, and I’m still listening to the taking heads on stations like CNN (which I originally called the Clinton New Network), or MSNBC, or even FOXnews (you know, when one has commercial, check to see what the other one is spewing). So I guess that since I’m not going to be in the madness tonight myself, I can play armchair quarterback and hypothesize about the upcoming potential insanity because of this Presidential election.