The New Machine
Remember the old-fashioned horse-race journalism that ignores platforms, trivializes issues, and marginalizes talented but underfunded underdogs while slavering over billionaire nincompoops? Terrible, but it was as much fun to read as the sports section. The other day some guy from the local ward office called asking for permission to plant a Claypool sign in my front yard. I wondered: Daley endorses Stroger, but how hard is anyone in the city working for him? An old-time political writer like the late Steve Neal could spin five columns out of an idle thought like that. Is Neal’s kind of punditing a lost art?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Edwin Eisendrath declared against Governor Blagojevich and immediately disappeared. If he’d hoped absence would lend him some kind of mystique he hoped wrong–the press promptly forgot about him. Where was the sly column whispering the unattributable speculation of unnameable sources (in other words, reporting one step removed from making it up) that Eisendrath merely wanted to position himself as the alternative in case Blagojevich got indicted before November? But give Eisendrath credit: he roared back to life in the campaign’s closing weeks with TV ads about juggling chain saws. That race will probably end up a chain-saw massacre, but at least Eisendrath understood that we want our elections to be more like our carnivals.
And that’s in an average year. This election brings, according to Orr, “the most extraordinary change in Illinois history.” The old, discredited punch cards are gone, replaced in the city and county after years of research and haggling by a combination of optically scanned paper and touch-screen computers. “I don’t have any doubt that voters will like them,” says Orr. “The big challenge has been getting them ready behind the scenes and getting the judges ready.” He wishes he’d been able to try out the new equipment on some quiet little local election, but it didn’t arrive in time.
The burly frame of sports columnist Sludge loomed over the desk of Biff McGuire. McGuire, sports editor of the Daily Reflux, was skimming Sludge’s latest effort. Like every other sports columnist in America, Sludge had chosen to speak out on Barry Bonds.
Sludge beamed.
“Wry, sardonic, but ultimately forgiving of the peccadilloes born of human frailty is an alternative favored by some A-minus ethicists.”
