Converging on Chicago, Again

[Geee]

American Thinker:



What's going on in Chicago's byzantine politics, and why it matters ‑‑ very, very much ‑‑ who's elected mayor.

If you've never travelled to Chicago, or are too young to remember what happened there in 1968, don't worry. Chicago is coming to you. Because if Rahm Emanuel becomes the next mayor ‑‑ which now seems to be somewhere between a sure thing and a done deal ‑‑ that will be an aggrandizement of Chicago's influence far beyond its already considerable local clout merely as America's premier Corruptopolis.

No, not because Chicago has solved its gang-violence, unemployment, or bad-schools problems, or that it's ready to reindustrialize. Then why? Because ‑‑ when frequent-flier Obama's not picking up prizes in Oslo; taking 12-day vacations in Hawai'i; conducting a dirge-vigil-cum-rally in Tucson; or touring Ottawa; London; Strasbourg; Kehl; Baden-Baden; Prague; Ankara; Istanbul; Baghdad; Mexico City; Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Riyadh; Cairo; Giza; Dresden; Buchenwald; Landstuhl; Paris; Caen; Moscow; L'Aquila; Rome and the Vatican; Accra; Guadalajara; Copenhagen; Tokyo; Yokohama; Kamakura; Singapore; Shanghai; Beijing; Seoul; Pyeongtaek; Bagram; Kabul; Toronto; Mumbai; New Delhi; Jakarta; Yokohama; Lisbon; New York; or Wisconsin ‑‑ he goes "home" to Chicago. And who better to go home and hobnob with than his old friend, the freshly-minted Third-Coast Mayor?

Converging on Chicago to run both the city and Obama's reelection campaign, Mayor Emanuel will have the help of a coterie of unsavories the likes of which has not been assembled there in over four decades.

A little history. Back in 1968, a cadre of political activists and proudly unwashed, counter-culture, psychedelic, socialist, black-power, and hate-America types ‑‑ later to become known as the Chicago Eight[1] ‑‑ organized massive demonstrations intent on disrupting the 1968 presidential nominating convention. Not that of the Republicans, mind you, but of the Democrats, who weren't yet left enough for them. The ostensible reason for the descent upon Chicago's International Amphitheatre was to prevent a "rigged convention [from] rubber-stamp[ing] another four years of Lyndon Johnson's war," per defendant Rennie Davis, and prevent the nomination of too genteel a candidate who would be defeated as, in fact, Richard Nixon did defeat Hubert Horatio Humphrey.