Isn’t pinstripe patronage just another term for pay-to-play?
Monday, February 09, 2009
There it is .. BHO acknowledged it years ago. Welcome to your new world, America.
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In Chicago politics, pinstripe patronage refers to a political payback system where instead of rewarding voter loyalty with city jobs, significant campaign contributors receive government contracts.
It’s a by-product of the age of big media. Obama learned about pinstripe patronage as an attorney at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, as a July 21, 2008 article by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, entitled “Making It: How Chicago shaped Obama,” documents.
E. J. Dionne, Jr., of the Washington Post, wrote about this transition in a 1999 column after Daley was reëlected. Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked:
a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. “They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest,” Obama told Dionne.
It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself.
Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.
At the time, Obama was growing closer to Tony Rezko, who eventually turned pinstripe patronage into an extremely lucrative way of life.
Despite the element of corruption indigenous to the pinstripe patronage that became part of executing Daley’s Plan for Transformation, back in 1999 Obama glossed over the approach, seemingly endorsing it.
Shortly after becoming a state senator in 1997, Obama told the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin that his experience working with the development industry had reinforced his belief in subsidizing private developers of affordable housing.
“That’s an example of a smart policy,” the paper quoted Obama as saying. “The developers were thinking in market terms and operating under the rules of the marketplace; but at the same time, we had government supporting and subsidizing those efforts.”
Daley releases a few details about stimulus plans
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2181892/posts
*Repair or reconstruct 15 miles of public transit lines
*Retrofit and improve more than 200 schools for the 21st century
*Resurface more than 150 miles of arterial city streets
*Retrofit more than 200 miles of city street lights
*Install or repair 75 miles of sewer and water mains
*Install solar panels in more than 200 city facilities
*Repair a substantial number of bridges and viaducts
*Expand broadband access to over 22,000 homes, including
*10,000 Chicago Housing Authority units
*Enhance technology at our schools and healthcare system
*Weatherize thousands of homes to improve energy efficiency
*Train workers for the new economy, including nurses and health care professionals
*Improve education … by providing tutoring or remediation services, special education programs and continued training for teachers
*Provide additional Head Start and early Head Start programs for children
*Provide meals to children and seniors Provide new funding for police