We’re Not in Texas Anymore; It’s “Sweet Home Chicago”

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

“You’ll have the time, the time of your life. I know a man, he danced with his wife. In Chicago, Chicago My Home Town” -Frank Sinatra

“The successful leader—given that he is not doomed to fight an unwinnable war—is the person (women can lead as well as, if not better than, men) who has perceived command’s imperatives and knows how to serve them…Today the best must find conviction to play the hero no more.” -John Keegan

While well-meaning reporters struggle to define the trees of President Barack Obama’s emotional “inner life,” they might be better employed, like Rachel Maddow, in attempting to identify forests of issues laid upon his desk by previous administrations. It’s time to stop looking for heros and/or villains and start solving problems.

Being President and Vice President, as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney believed and practiced, is not simply bullying the Dixie Chicks, inventing data to support a war for oil, or suppressing scientific research that discourages the burning of coal for electricity. The U.S.A. needed better than that, but we didn’t demand it until 2008.

Stories of Bush and Cheney’s colossal mismanagement were never properly reported, not only because the major media lacked guts to go to their roots, as was the case with Watergate in 1972-1974, but they also lacked support from the general public to do so. America’s 50-year battle against Fascism and Communism, 1941-1991, took a far larger toll on our spirit than we have acknowledged. We have been like the Yale Whiffenpoofs, “poor little lambs who have lost our way.”

Nine years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we entered an undeclared, second Civil War between forces of oligarchy based in corporate Wall Street on the one hand, and forces of democracy in small investor Wall Street on the other.

The Republican Party of “No” in Texas, Arizona and “red enclaves” in the nation has, since Ronald Reagan, allied itself with dark forces in American history—wage slavery, greed, race, class, religious and gender warfare. From 1980-2008, they were hugely successful in efforts to dispense with the American experiment in democracy, and once again enthrone rule of the few. We see the wreckage in an unregulated Wall Street destroying our economy, and unregulated mineral industries destroying our physical environment in the atmosphere and the Gulf of Mexico.

Confusion about this second Civil War results from both sides fighting under the same flag, but Republicans all too often wave it as a weapon against those who disagree with them, rather than as a proper symbol of pride and reverence.

Such belligerent bragging is most famously done in Texas, and has its charm when confined to popular culture. It’s not so nice when translated into politics, as documented by Molly Ivins, and visited upon us by the likes of Tom “The Hammer” Delay, Dick Armey, and their softer, but deadlier, “aw shucks” version of Bush II.

Barack Obama was raised, politically speaking, in the far more democratic, though equally boisterous, environment of Chicago politics, where competing oligarchies of the Regular Democratic Organization of Cook County [the machine] and the Republican-dominated business elite in Chicago’s “Loop,” have cooperated for more than a century to make sure that Chicago was a “city that worked.”

In public health over 100 years ago that meant the politics of zoning, as well as the financing and engineering necessary to make the Chicago River “flow backwards” and treat sewage along the way to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, rather than dump it raw into Lake Michigan, as Milwaukee would continue to do.

In 1983 it meant acceptance of Chicago’s first black Mayor, Harold Washington, by the Loop business establishment because he was a fiscal conservative, as well as the choice of the people of Chicago.

Examples are legion about the political environment I plied from 1970-2000, and that nurtured the current President of the United States. As a liberal, one would fight with Democratic machine creatures in the primaries, and then duke it out with Republicans in general elections. It was okay to be an intellectual on your day job, but not on election day. You had to be as hard-boiled as your opposition, although there was no objection to your being pleasant. Civility was a clear mark of your resilience.

You not only had to be tough, however. You also had to learn to “fight smart,” as civil rights activists and students of Saul Alinsky had been doing there since 1940 and before. My favorite way to put it is: “you have to live clean, but think dirty.”

Reporters try to get their interviewees to “bleed” by showing emotion, or making an unguarded statement. It drives them crazy that they can’t “get” to Obama, even as they admire his thick skin in the face of outrageous slanders from the right.

How can this President be so cool, so calm and gracious under pressure?

The answer includes, of course, Obama’s own exemplary personal, intellectual and spiritual nature, compared to the deeply flawed George W. Bush.
For those who prefer “nurture” to “nature” the answer is obvious. Unlike many who live in the Lone Star State, George W. Bush grew up in a land of privilege and entitlement. His kind of “Texas Toughness” is something that disappears when you lose your oil wells, big trucks, or battery of body guards.

In “Sweet Home Chicago,” Barack Obama elevated his social work skills through give and take in city precincts, while surviving the equally treacherous challenges of an academic environment in Hyde Park.

Instead of reading their own books, maybe reporters should read, or reread, what the President wrote about himself, “Dreams of My Father,” and “The Audacity of Hope.”

Every day Barack Obama proves that he is who he said he was. That’s a good thing.

Questions and comments: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)