Jack & Jill Politics

hat tip-Angelar

from the Washington Post:

Obama a hot issue in Chicago mayor’s race
By Peter Wallsten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 15, 2011

As Rahm Emanuel prepared to leave Washington last year to run for mayor of Chicago, President Obama gave his chief of staff an emotional send-off in the East Room. He praised Emanuel for his service and pulled him in for multiple hugs. Emanuel would be a “terrific” mayor, the president predicted in a television interview.

In the months since, Emanuel’s close relationship with Obama – who is still enormously popular in his home town – helped to make the former congressman an easy front-runner in the race.

Now Emanuel’s rivals are trying to turn those presidential ties against him. African American and Hispanic leaders inside and outside Chicago are lining up against Emanuel as a way to vent their long-simmering complaints that Obama has not done enough to help their communities. In recent weeks, Obama’s record as president has become a major undercurrent in the campaign.

Rep. Bobby Rush (D), whose district includes Chicago’s South Side and who defeated Obama in a bruising 2000 House primary, said many of his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus “harbor major resentment” against Emanuel for what they see as his lack of concern about minority issues. That, Rush said, has made Emanuel a “convenient target” for broader frustrations with the White House.

“For those who don’t feel comfortable criticizing the king, it’s the king’s counsel that you aim your wrath at,” said Rush, describing the tensions as “the wreckage around Rahm’s ankles.”
……………………………………
The mayor’s contest has become polarized along ethnic lines in the past two weeks as many black establishment politicians have coalesced around the candidacy of former senator Carol Moseley Braun. A Chicago native who served one term in Washington, in the 1990s, she is the only African American woman elected to the Senate.

…….

Emanuel faces similar challenges from two rivals: former Daley chief of staff Gery Chico and City Clerk Miguel del Valle, who are trying to attract Hispanic voters’ support. This week, Chico was endorsed by Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D), a Chicagoan who has criticized Emanuel and Obama for not pushing more aggressively for a federal law that would put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship.

As a native Chicagoan, I have to call bull on this entire article.

Before I begin, I’ll be blunt as I can be:

I would chew ground glass before I’d EVER vote for Rahm Emmanuel.

Period.

I loathed him long before he became Chief of Staff to President Obama.

Since the beginning, I’ve been trying to figure out where Emmanuel’s base is, and why they’d come out for him. Outside of the people in his Congressional District on the North Side, I don’t see it.

Rahm Emmanuel has not an iota of any tie whatsoever to either the Black or Latino communities in Chicago.

NONE.

To have a so-called distinguished career in politics, to have had one as long without any legitimate ties to either so-called minority communities in the city, well, I think says it all about Emmanuel.

When I hear Black folks talk about the mayor’s race, the President doesn’t even come up. It’s about the future of Chicago. It’s about getting from under the nightmare that has been King Richard II, and his determined and deliberate neglect of the Black community.

And nobody can tell me how electing the likes of a mofo like Rahm Emmanuel would be anything but a continuation of the same policies that King Richard had in place.

In every public forum put on by the Black community, inviting candidates to show up and present themselves, Emmanuel has showed up AT NONE.

I’m lukewarm at best towards Braun, and thought Congressman Danny Davis should have stayed in the race.

fellow Chicagoan goldenstar had the following to say:

There is great inaccuracy in this: the coalescing around Carol Moseley Braun by black politicans. Note wording. It ain’t the black electorate, black voters, black folks. Carol appeals to a particular type of black voter and not most black folks. Folks in their 20s could care less about her sorry past as an elected official and just may not vote. And, for many progressives, of any color, Miguel del Valle’s candidacy has resonance.

The article does not even visit the contradictions/contrasts/differences between the two Latino candidates. There is an ocean between Chico and del Valle and never the twain shall meet. Really.

goldenstar is on the money about the differences between Chicago and del Valle. That the weasel known as Luis Guitierrez endorse Chico just confirmed every suspicion I had about Chico and makes me relieved at the side eye I’ve been giving him for years.

del Valle is a decent public servant. Chico serves himself- erego the difference between them.

more from goldenstar:

People don’t dislike Rahm because of Barack. They dislike Rahm for who and what he is. He worked for Daley before he traveled to DC. He was creep then. He was the head of the DSCC and pulled a couple numbers in some of the hotly contested congressional races in 2006. He was all out for his stuff then.

this, too, is on the money. Couldn’t stand Emmanuel long before he ever became Chief of Staff, and people who can’t stand him have a list very long before January 2009 when he entered the WH as COS.

The press may think, “what’s not to like?” The folks around here think, *now, how are these other candidates looking?” And, many voters are not necessarily voting for a particular ethnicity whether it be their own or not. Daley has suppressed, oppressed, squeezed, hammered, and pushed folks around for decades. Folks want to live in the 21st century in a democracy. That beats a whole lot of pure ethnocentrism.

Folks want to live in the 21st century in a democracy.

Amen.Amen.Amen.

Outside of the press, I still wanna know where Rahm’s base is, and how he’s gonna get 50% in February.