State & Local Politics

The former U.S. senator and ambassador to New Zealand is running for mayor of Chicago. She’s running second in a field of six, way behind Rahm Emanuel, who will almost certainly be the next mayor — perhaps as soon as Feb. 22 if he gets 50 percent plus one vote and thus avoids an April 5 runoff.

He could not have designed a better opponent than Carol Moseley Braun, 63, who is living up to her reputation for ineptitude, solidified during her one term as U.S. senator. She buried herself in so many mistakes and scandals that she ended up, in 1998, losing her bid for reelection to a little-known Republican.

Since New Hampshire state Rep. Dan Itse brought his challenge to ObamaCare, citing Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, in February 2009, we have been seeing a new age of Jefferson. Judge Andrew Napolitano now plays primetime “fighting for freedom” five nights a week; Virginia Del. Jim LeMunyon proposes a Repeal Amendment; a 26-state challenge to the federal government moves to the Supreme Court and best practices conferences for governors today feature Thomas Woods’s Nullification. But the turning ahead might best belong to Andrew Jackson. It was the rustic warrior from Tennessee who first fired up the common folk west of the New River and laid their claim to governance. He is much misunderstood and occasionally maligned, but Jackson might well be considered the spirit father of the current red-state uprising.

The New York Times reports today that policymakers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers: “Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional hurdles, because the states are considered sovereign.”



But states are finding their own ways to save money. Last fall, the Nebraska Campaign for Liberty distributed copies of Tom Woods’s book Nullification to 44 of the 49 members of the Legislature. They followed up with discussion with some other senators about the kind of things they’d like to see done and provided some “model legislation” — courtesy of the Tenth Amendment Center.

Not long ago the historian Tony Judt proclaimed that New York had passed as a global city. Possibly because the idea of Reagan/Clinton-era globalism had passed. Culture follows capital, and as Harvard’s Niall Ferguson has said, today it is all about China and America. So better that the American leader today hails not from what Judt considered to be a European city, a “world city” — New York; that is, old New York — but Chicago. New York is a “world city,” Judt wrote, but it is “not the great American city — that will always be Chicago.” L.A. is global, or “world,” as well, which makes Chicago the premier American city.

The news that Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is not running for reelection will set off a chain reaction, bringing multiple candidates from both parties to compete for the open seat.

Because I always want my readers to be ahead of the conventional wisdom, here is my tip of the month. Keep your eye on the Democratic mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, as a rising star in Texas politics. Many Democrats will soon urge him to run for the Senate seat, or to run in the next campaign for governor of Texas.

As she often does, Peggy Noonan grasps the essence when she asks why the movie “The King’s Speech” is so popular and admired. “It is that no one knows how to act anymore,” she writes, “ and people miss people who knew how to act.”

Right again. America is today, as New York Jets Coach Rex Ryan says about the Indianapolis Colts, living on the quarterback. Adrift. There is a tribal element in any group to which basic anthropology applies: You take away the king and it all goes. The Colts get a few good years without Tony Dungy. Then it will start to fall apart. Question today is, how will 20^th-century post-war liberalism do without Ted Kennedy in the near aftermath of his departure? As of today, in light of President Obama’s new appointments, consider the movement dead.

A church that figures prominently in governing issues gives lava lamps to young people especially selected to defy their own generational instincts and carry the ancients forward. The ancients see the lava lamp as a symbol of its commitment to “youth.” Remember “youth”? It is what they used to call teenagers in the 1960s as if it — youth — was its very own minority or ethnic group. Remember lava lamps? They were a commercial fad in 1965. The slow movement of the viscous liquids had a soothing effect on college kids — youth — back then getting stoned and listening to James Taylor in the college dorms in Amherst, Storrs and Cambridge.

All that hurtful talk about “Republicrats” scorning them as squishy-brained and sheeplike, a Congress of Easter Peeps despised by up to 89 percent of the country; the middle age, the mid’lin, the mediocre and mauve — what novelist Curtis White called (scornfully) the “middle mind.” Now they who seek to be neither masters nor men have a name: “No Labels.” And it even claims its own generation, a conspicuously multicultural chorus that sits passively in the pew and looks selected by elder churchmen.

But the young’uns don’t seem to be jumping in. Gawker calls it “the most boring political movement of all time.” Maybe they try passing out cookies at the airport. Or how about the phrase, “Have you heard the good news?”

The Chicago elections commissioners ruled, in my opinion, the rational way, when they declared Rahm Emanuel a resident of Chicago and thus good to go on the ballot for the Feb. 22 nonpartisan primary for mayor.

The next day, Friday, both Chicago papers offered not only reporting but also editorials praising the decision. “Rahm wins Round 1” declared the Tribune. “Election board gets it right on Emanuel,” declared the Sun-Times.

But it was The New York Times national edition that gave Rahm the most lavish coverage that day — and the Times is likely in the Chicago homes of many of Emanuel’s upscale supporters and financial backers. On the front page, just below the fold, ran a three-column-wide photo of a hatless, smiling Rahm shaking hands with a pretty commuter, her blond hair visible under her pink hat. “Cleared for Takeoff in Chicago,” read the caption headline.

America is changing. Just look at the Census to figure out how.

The District of Columbia has added residents for the first time in decades. People are tired of commuting, and the white flight that commenced in the 1960 is reversing. White people are moving back into the city, which is probably good for a whole host of reasons.

More racial diversity promotes greater understanding. More affluence that comes from the reverse flight means better services for all the city’s residents. More attention will be spent fighting crime in bigger pockets of the District, meaning that more children will be safer. The more white kids that go to city schools means more attention will be spent raising standards and expecting accountability.

Those are all good things.

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