Fast-fading Chicago mayoral candidate Carol Moseley Braun scolded reporters Friday morning that there would be “no more drilling down” for details about the tax returns she dribbled out last week.
Sez her.
She should expect (and the public should demand) that journalists will continue to press her for more about how she’s been making and losing money in the past decade. It may be that Braun can use her financial struggles to suggest that she can best relate to the plight of everyday Chicagoans. But before she can do that she’ll need to spell out what those struggles were, and make the case that she’s been a victim of bad luck, not bad judgment.
That will be a tough sell. Ever since she became the African-American “unity” candidate in a heavy-handed rollout that risked alienating non-African-American and African-American voters — Braun has shown an inability to manage her mouth and her campaign along with her inability to run a successful small business.
I agree with what candidate Gery Chico told me over lunch last week, that this election will be about administrative competence — which man or woman is best up to the highly complex, demanding job of providing city services, balancing the books and creating initiatives to keep Chicago moving forward.
I can’t say yet whether I agree with Chico’s view that he’s therefore the best choice — let the debates and resume battles begin! — but the closest thing I’m seeing to unity when it comes to Braun is in the growing sentiment that she’s not the best choice.
Is it too late for U.S. Rep. Danny Davis and state Sen. James Meeks to make like Brett Favre and unretire? Yes. Both formally submitted withdrawal papers last week, and Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen says there are no take-backs. And besides, military and overseas ballots — without either name on them — are being mailed this weekend.
One more note: Davis’ name used to be at the top of the mayoral ballot, which under some circumstances can lend to a slight advantage. Now that he’s gone, the other candidates have moved up a notch and Rahm Emanuel’s name appears at the top
How to market a tax hike
Suggestion for members of the General Assembly. Friday’s headlines bannered a proposed 75 percent increase in the state income tax (up to 5.25 percent from 3 percent), a proposal you didn’t vote on before adjourning for the weekend.
If you should decide to scale this back to a 33 percent increase (up to 4 percent from 3 percent), as Gov. Pat Quinn was proposing during last year’s campaign, one way of selling it to the public would be as a 24 percent tax cut (to 4 percent down from 5.25 percent) compared with last week’s proposal.
Quinn parties while Illinois burns
Yes, private funds will pay for this week’s inaugural festivities in Springfield. But it’s lousy optics for our pols to be feting themselves and making merry with the corporate interests paying for the shindigs while the state is in such financial distress. Gov. Quinn, usually a master of symbolism, ought to have known better and scaled way, way back.
Seasons greetings, a final report
We received roughly 30 holiday cards this year. I’m estimating because some got lost in the piles of other papers; others — such as festive envelopes from acquaintances that contained not-so-veiled pitches related to their business ventures — fell into that gap between friendly correspondence and junk solicitations that I call “funk mail.”
This was down a bit from last year, but not dramatically. What was noticeable was how late most of the cards arrived and how few of them contained anything more than ritual salutations and signatures. A notable exception was the family that offered their year in review in verse, rhyming “summer” with “bummer” to report the midyear death of a parent.
Decades of criticism of family form letters have taken their toll. People are too busy to write personal notes and too self-conscious to generate a few paragraphs of boilerplate to catch up their friends on their doings.
This reticence is odd given that the online social networking revolution is based on the idea that our broad circle is more than passingly interested in what we’re up to. Yet some still consider it presumptuous to send yearly summaries directly to people to whom they are or at least once were actually close.
E-cards get a bad rap — ephemeral! cheap! — but I was much happier to receive holiday e-mails with attached letters and photos than I was to get U.S. mail greetings from old friends saying nothing at all.
We cut way back this year — sending only 75 cards with a short summary of everyone’s doings on the inside — and next year, if my current grinchy mood holds, we’ll cut back altogether and send our ho-ho-hos by PDF.
Ya gotta …
My latest enthusiasm is xtranormal videos, the do-it-yourself animations in which 3-D characters robotically act out dialogue that’s written and directed by home users.
They’ve been around since 2008, but only in the last few months have some of the funnier ones gone wildly viral, prompting a surge of creativity.
On paper, the scripts may not look like much: “Nothing turns me off like hearing about your golf escapades,” says the wife character in “Saturday Morning Golf,” an xtranormal video my friends were sending around last week. “One more story about a spectacular par save on 18 and I think I will be sick.”
The husband character replies, “I don’t think you truly appreciate how hard 18 plays. It is into the wind with water left and out of bounds right.”
The halting, weirdly inflected cadences of computer-generated speech make it funny, trust me.
Meanwhile, I asked my very, very busy colleague Ray Long, head of the Tribune’s Springfield bureau, what he’s recommending these days. Long said ya gotta read “the absolutely outstanding book by Isabel Wilkerson, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.'”
Find links to these and leave your own ya gottas at chicagotribune.com/zorn
