Trying To Read The Tea Leaves
Even though I don’t live in Chicago anymore, I still watch it. The slo-mo destruction of a once great city is hard not to watch.
The demise of Chicago is a metaphor for the rest of the United States. Chicago isn’t NYC. It’s a uniquely American city. There are lessons to be learned from Chicago, the state of Illinois, and what happens in this election for the rest of the country.
If you look at the denigration of the city, it started with the establishment of the Democratic Machine in the 1930s. The Democratic Machine replaced a Republican Machine. Don’t for a second think a machine was never working in Chicago. There always was, it just switched parties as the make-up of the city changed. Read “City of the Century” and you will understand. Business and government have always been joined at the hip.
Chicagoans were the first to understand how to use both to their advantage.
But, as time progressed, the Democratic Machine needed to fix things. So, they deliberately stole elections to get their people into the offices they needed them in. As time progressed, it became every office they could get their hands on, all the way up to the governor. They filled the drone jobs in these offices with patronage workers. They fattened those patronage workers with nice pensions and in recent years a corrupt Illinois Supreme Court codified them into law. You never made a ton working for the city but you always got paid and your pension was nice. Of course, with the rise of public sector unions, you can make a decent buck working for the city and get a fantastic pension too.
Voters looked the other way as the Daley’s and their cronies in the Machine milked the city and state government for as much cash as they could. It’s amazing that a politician could be as wealthy as a successful businessman in Chicago or the state of Illinois, but it is a fact.
Mayor Daley the First stole the Presidential election for John F. Kennedy in 1960, solidifying his power as a major player and receiving the spoils from Washington for the deed.
For their part, Republicans were okay with it as long as the Democratic Machine left their paws off their counties. DuPage County was a Republican Machine and the leaders there got fat off the taxpayers as well. So were Lake County, Kane County, and McHenry County. In the 1990s a switch started to take place and now, Democrats have a lot if not full control over those counties too. People like Republican John Porter were replaced with outright Marxists like Jan Schakowsky, or Marxist-lite representative Brad Schneider. Green energy grifters Sean Casten and Bill Foster were elected in the western suburbs.
As the Machine got stronger, voters got more hopeless. Voting new people in didn’t bring change. It didn’t make things better. So, they stopped voting. Besides, many of the elections due to timing on the calendar were set up to suppress the vote. Voter laws were changed so that they could fix elections legally.
Today’s Machine is run by Toni Preckwinkle and she is not a traditional Machine Democrat. She’s a hard-lefty George Soros/Bernie Sanders Democrat. She demands fealty from other Democrats and they pull hard to the left. This is especially true in the city, but it is also true in the collar counties.
Chicago is the economic engine that feeds those counties. It also feeds Northwest Indiana, Southern Wisconsin, and to a large extent, Southwest Michigan.
The Vichy Republicans in Illinois (not RINOs) abdicated their opposition long ago. Like mice in the night, they stroll around and look for crumbs they can pick up leftovers from the Machine. Occasionally, the Machine throws them a bone just to keep them alive. Even the Harlem Globetrotters needed a team to play against.
That economic engine is sputtering under the weight of the Democratic Machine. The data is very clear despite what you might read in the newspaper or the voices you might hear from the dimwits on the radio and television.
If Brandon Johnson is elected, my expectation is the corporate flight out of Chicago and the state of Illinois will quicken.
The current mayoral election in Chicago isn’t between a person who will make things better or make things worse. It’s absolutely clear that if Brandon Johnson is elected, it will be business as usual and things will get worse. There is no doubt given his platform. He is a tax/borrow/grift Democrat under the thumb of the Teacher’s Union.
But, will the city get better under Paul Vallas or will he be the little Dutch boy that put his finger into the hole in the dike? It’s not like Paul Vallas is Rudy Guiliani or something. Guiliani was a Republican. Vallas isn’t close to being a Republican.
I looked at a recent poll covered by City Journal here. This stood out to me because the South Side of Chicago didn’t vote for Johnson in the runoff election. They voted for either Vallas or Lightfoot. It stands to reason they’d vote for Vallas in the general, but read this:
Perhaps most notable is the finding that, while the poll reports a 5-point lead for Vallas among voters who’ve decided whom they’ll support, about one in six (17 percent) remain undecided. Those undecideds are more likely to be black, female, young, and from the city’s South Side—all groups among whom Johnson enjoys advantages, and who seem more skeptical of Vallas’s law-and-order message. Indeed, undecided voters expressed more support for a social-spending approach to the crime problem than they did for one focused on enforcement.
I want you to watch this video of a far-left Democratic State Senator in Nebraska because she is emblematic of where the Democratic Party is today and where the Chicago Machine has been for quite some time.
For what it is worth, Barack Obama was not a Daley/Rostenkowski Machine Democrat. He is a Bill Ayers/Bernie Sanders Democrat. There is a huge chasm between the two and watch this video for your example.
If you are a freedom-loving capitalist, she should send a chill up your spine the same way Stalin/Kruschev/Breshnev did. If you are a Vichy Republican, you are already figuring out ways to work with her. She’s from Omaha, and she doesn’t reflect well upon the people there who elected her. They are as nuts as she is.
Her speech is not about the filibuster at all. It’s not about the “trans-bill” either. The Democrats of today in any state detest any Republican, even the Vichy Republicans. The Lindsay Graham’s and John Cornyn’s of the world might get tossed in the gulag last, but when they aren’t useful anymore they surely will get tossed.
Of course, the Vichy Mitt Romney’s of the world are showered with praise for how smart and open-minded they are. They are simply tools of the hard left and idiots for not realizing it. The line from 1940s French President Petain and people like Romney is straight.
There is no way to find a compromise with people like this. Only brass knuckles work.
Their attitude is “you must be destroyed”. The sad thing is, hard-left Democrats WANT and desire social unrest. They love fear and fan the flames of fear constantly. That allows them to put in all kinds of controls to “keep you safe”, but also allows them to further their patronage armies and pull money into their pockets from the pockets of taxpayers. Covid was all about “safety” but when you follow the money you see who really benefitted.
I don’t think Vallas changes anything in Chicago. He just slows it down. There just aren’t enough people in the city to really affect the change that needs to happen, nor does Vallas have the stomach to do it. The Machine will continue to consolidate socialistic representatives around him and he won’t be able to get anything done. They will force him to kneel, and kneel he will, eventually.
Electing Johnson burns the city down faster. But, that is probably inevitable and the math is certainly insurmountable. Bankruptcy will happen one way or another in Chicago. So, maybe electing Johnson will hasten the decline and be positive for people that want Chicago to rise like a phoenix?
But, boy, the pain and suffering that will take place will be terrible. Not only that, but it’s not clear what emerges on the other side. This isn’t a prairie where a destructive fire brings new positive growth without weeds.
Who wins?
Turnout under 35% and I think it’s Mayor Brandon Johnson. The teacher’s union will help him steal it. They already are bringing people to the polls for early voting and marking up mail-in ballots.
Turnout above 35% and I think it will be Vallas. There will be enough votes for him to beat the margin of fraud.
In 1982, Mayor Washington was elected and 82% of the vote turned out. He was the first black mayor of Chicago and he battled the traditional Chicago Democratic Machine. The run-off election for Chicago’s mayoral race this past February had 35.9% turnout. In the year current mayor Lori Lightfoot was elected, it was slightly lower but above 35%. She was not a Machine Democrat.
Meanwhile
