Commentary
Dreams of my mayor: Obama eloquence not learned from Chicago’s Mayor Daley
By Martha Rosenberg
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Nov 25, 2008, 00:11

CHICAGO, Il -- Chicago may be President-elect Obama’s home town but when it comes to the articulateness of politicians, yes it can’t.

In the city that has had a Mayor Daley for so long people think it is the name of the office and ask, “Who’s your Mayor Daley?,” you don’t have to have two bestselling books to hold public office.

Look at Mayor Daley -- the person not the office.

While his father, Richard J. Daley, is remembered for proclaiming that “we shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievement,” and assuring the public after the 1968 Democratic National Convention violence that the “policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder,” Richard M. Daley also has conversational belly flops under his belt.

He has even joked that the toughest job in journalism belongs to the City Hall reporters who have to quote him.

Like the misunderestimating George Bush or Gilda Radner’s Roseanne Roseanna-Dana, Daley will change verbs, tenses, subjects, moods and even his mind -- his voice ever rising with Vegas like glissandos -- until reporters run out of tape or have to go file.

When asked in the 1990s if the General Assembly would approve a domed stadium near McCormick Place he replied, “I don’t think they can do it. Maybe the governor can. Maybe there’s something down his sleeve. I want to look down there. I look down there a lot. There’s nothing down there.”

A follow-up about creditworthiness -- “Standard and Poor’s or Moody should grade them just like me. Otherwise we’re saying to our parent corporation, ‘Do anything you want.’ What happens is a parent corporation does it, and then we all follow. They’re in debt; we go in debt. Who cares? And that’s what is wrong with America,” -- would earn “mismatched subjects!” from a teacher and “long false start” from an audio engineer.

Still, no one has incarnated the Daley Method style of press quotes like the non-Chicagoan Sarah Palin.

She may be younger, female and lack the Midwestern accent in which tree is the number between two and four and duh is a preposition -- but she is truly Daley’s heir. They seem separated -- vocally -- at birth.

Look at her response to the charge from McCain staffers that she didn’t know if Africa was a country or a continent.

“So, no, I think that if there are allegations based on questions or comments that I made in debate prep about NAFTA, and about the continent versus the country when we talk about Africa there, then those were taken out of context. And that’s cruel and it’s mean-spirited, it’s unprofessional, and those guys are jerks, if they came away with it taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news. It is not fair and not right.”

What does “it” refer to? Why Africa “there”? (see: South America “down there”)

How can there be a “versus” when there is no country Africa? (And who is “we”? Did anyone else make the mistake?)

And what is the something to be spread on national news -- inaccurate reporting? Or mononucleosis?

Then there’s Palin’s meandering Checkers speech about the clothes she did or didn’t receive but, by golly, she gonna return ’em.

“There is no clothes audit, except for when the belly of the plane got cleaned out, all the piles of the clothes that they had in there, they wanted me at my house to go through it and box things up and send it. There’s no attorneys coming up, and there’s no need for it or anything else. But that’ll be nice to have that chapter closed because, as I said from Day One, I never have asked for anything. I’m not, I’m not keeping anything either.”‘

Seems when it comes to helping the Republican Party, Palin wasn’t there to create disorder; she was there to preserve disorder.

And when it comes winning elections, yes she can’t.