Re: “I’m up and will be watching. I live in suburb of Chicago, so will have Channel 7 (ABC) on.”
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So I take it you live out of the city limits so the corrupt Daley machine doesn’t have so much influence over you???
My family came from Chicago in the early fifties and even then the place was totally corrupt — I’m not kidding; I heard about it my whole life until the senior relatives passed away! And there was almost always a “Daley” involved in the mess.
“My family came from Chicago in the early fifties and even then the place was totally corrupt — I’m not kidding; I heard about it my whole life until the senior relatives passed away! And there was almost always a “Daley” involved in the mess.”
Any major metropolitan city in the U.S. has its share of corruption, and the bigger the city, the more opportunities for corruption. Daley Sr. ran the city with an iron hand, and corruption was kept to a minimum, as much as possible considering some politicians can indeed be crooks. The city was going through very turbulent times when he reigned supreme, the 60’s, 70’s, and into the 80’s. Without his tightfisted grasp on the tiller of gov’t, Chicago would have been a mess. Daley Jr., again surrounded by some corrupt individuals who always seen to infect city gov’ts, has himself remained untouched by any charges of malfeasance. He and his old man were very careful to stay out of corrupt activities within their own family. They are much more interested in wielding power than in building a personal financial empire, like some other mayors.
Daley Sr, lived in the same southside bungalow his whole working life (I have driven by it). His son Daley Jr. lived most of his life also in the same hood, Bridgeport, a real working class district. Only recently has he gone more upscale in living quarters. Daley Jr. has done a great deal to beautify Chicago, creating parks, boulevards with center strips filled with greenery and flowers, improved bridges and infrastructure, let film companies come into the city to make movies, improved the quality of the public housing, leveling old ones and building new multi-income units in their place. He gets the snow removed in winter, and the garbage picked up and carted away on time. He is a champion of arts and entertainment, backer of fests, cleaned up the Chicago riverfront and turned it into a beehive of restaurants, riverwalks, fountains, and environmental beauty. He turned Chicago into a truly international city.
Say what you will about the Daley family, they have done a great deal for Chicago, and Daley Jr. has managed to keep its disparate parts operating smoothly, which isn’t easy in our multi-ethnic city, with its multitude of conflicting interests. And in spite of being a Dem, Daley is actually a reasonably conservative one, more like a Mike Bloomberg in NYC, a quirky blend of liberal on some subjects and reasonably conservative on others. I know that which I speak of, I have dwelled in the city at times in my life, worked in it, I know its politics, I know how it lives and breathes, and I love Chicago in spite of some of its blemishes (Obama being one). Now, how much do you really know about it. Not much, I bet.