The early adventures of Rahm Emanuel brought the improbable Wednesday night: The new Chicago mayor deflating much of the energy out of a raucous ritual.
Our impressive born-again triathlete copied his predecessor by holding two public meetings on the upcoming city budget. If there is doubt about a new sheriff in town, they were dispelled in a disarmingly brief 90 minutes.
During the 22-year era of Richard M. Daley, these gatherings were untidy, repetitive and occasionally disrespectful to the mayor. Daley stoically served as a piñata as citizens vented for two and three hours on everything: Trimming trees in a nearby park, fixing a catch basin down the block, a mean Park District field house employee, buying electrocardiogram machines for a health clinic, and banning drivers from speeding down alleys.
The sessions had a democratic richness. They were a reminder of how matters convulsing editorial pages, or City Hall, can be out of whack with what folks at the grassroots are mulling.
On Wednesday, Malcolm X College’s underground gym hosted the second meeting, and both the stagecraft and atmospherics were quite different.
Daley’s cabinet would sit at either side of him at long tables, and he’d let anybody line up at a microphone and fire away. In presidential fashion, Emanuel used a raised platform and a lectern with the city seal. This was his show, about him, with the cabinet below and scattered among rows to his left, a mere appendage.
The questions were largely pre-selected from ones written earlier by attendees, with a few fetched online from a city website.
A fatigued Emanuel, whose workaholic ways make him a better performer during daylight hours, left no doubt about his agenda: An insult-free, civil discussion about needed change, especially economic. We’ve deceived ourselves, he said, with dishonest budgets, illusory fixes and false accounting.
It is a candidly blunt analysis and melds with his unbounded vitality. But there is also a penchant for White House-like control and aversion to surprises which at times seems needless, given his intellect, grasp of detail and improving performance skills.
Thus, the first question selected was a softball—what were his plans for the public schools? It was followed by more non-threatening queries that allowed him to tick off points he wanted to make, as if a campaign appearance.
What were his thoughts on economic development? What’s the best way to use tax-increment financing? What about switching to a grid system, rather than the ward-by-ward tradition, for garbage collection?
Emanuel has a challenge in sensitizing the body politic to the realities of scarcity. He’s trying to hammer home his admonition about change, while assiduously crafting an image of being tough, capable and unrelenting.
But, as he evinced slight impatience with the few short moments of non-decorous behavior from a quietly frustrated crowd, I recalled the old line about the restive American who runs up the steps of the Louvre in Paris and asks a guard, “Where’s the Mona Lisa? I’m double-parked.”
He and his aides need not be so mindful of orchestration, so wary of the unpredictable. It’s a executive reflex that can breed an internal culture of anxiety, in which managers wind up afraid of making decisions lest they err and incur the boss’s disfavor.
A heavily union audience did get in fleeting swipes about TIFs, laid-off crossing guards and teacher pay. And a rare unscripted question—from a teenage girl, about too many people hanging out around liquor stores in her neighborhood—elicited his best response as he smartly weaved together cultural, economic and sociological factors to deride too many liquor stores, too few quality groceries.
But the gathering was pretty uninspired, so I leafed through his just announced 10th anniversary selection for the Daley-inspired One Book, One Chicago program, “The Adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow.
Emanuel had called the protagonist a “true son of Chicago.” That’s correct, though Augie himself is out of sync with Chicago’s tradition of big ideas and deeds invoked by the mayor Wednesday.
And beyond the fact that they’re both Jewish, similarities are few between the novel’s protagonist and the force-of-nature mayor. Augie, who’s moved to place more stock in respect than love, is a pretty passive fellow.
And, as Bellow said, he has a “weak sense of consequences.” Emanuel clearly does not, which is good for the city.
by JAMES WARREN | Sep 2, 2011
The early adventures of Rahm Emanuel brought the improbable Wednesday night: The new Chicago mayor deflating much of the energy out of a raucous ritual.
Our impressive born-again triathlete copied his predecessor by holding two public meetings on the upcoming city budget. If there is doubt about a new sheriff in town, they were dispelled in a disarmingly brief 90 minutes.
During the 22-year era of Richard M. Daley, these gatherings were untidy, repetitive and occasionally disrespectful to the mayor. Daley stoically served as a piñata as citizens vented for two and three hours on everything: Trimming trees in a nearby park, fixing a catch basin down the block, a mean Park District field house employee, buying electrocardiogram machines for a health clinic, and banning drivers from speeding down alleys.
The sessions had a democratic richness. They were a reminder of how matters convulsing editorial pages, or City Hall, can be out of whack with what folks at the grassroots are mulling.
On Wednesday, Malcolm X College’s underground gym hosted the second meeting, and both the stagecraft and atmospherics were quite different.
Daley’s cabinet would sit at either side of him at long tables, and he’d let anybody line up at a microphone and fire away. In presidential fashion, Emanuel used a raised platform and a lectern with the city seal. This was his show, about him, with the cabinet below and scattered among rows to his left, a mere appendage.
The questions were largely pre-selected from ones written earlier by attendees, with a few fetched online from a city website.
A fatigued Emanuel, whose workaholic ways make him a better performer during daylight hours, left no doubt about his agenda: An insult-free, civil discussion about needed change, especially economic. We’ve deceived ourselves, he said, with dishonest budgets, illusory fixes and false accounting.
It is a candidly blunt analysis and melds with his unbounded vitality. But there is also a penchant for White House-like control and aversion to surprises which at times seems needless, given his intellect, grasp of detail and improving performance skills.
Thus, the first question selected was a softball—what were his plans for the public schools? It was followed by more non-threatening queries that allowed him to tick off points he wanted to make, as if a campaign appearance.
What were his thoughts on economic development? What’s the best way to use tax-increment financing? What about switching to a grid system, rather than the ward-by-ward tradition, for garbage collection?
Emanuel has a challenge in sensitizing the body politic to the realities of scarcity. He’s trying to hammer home his admonition about change, while assiduously crafting an image of being tough, capable and unrelenting.
But, as he evinced slight impatience with the few short moments of non-decorous behavior from a quietly frustrated crowd, I recalled the old line about the restive American who runs up the steps of the Louvre in Paris and asks a guard, “Where’s the Mona Lisa? I’m double-parked.”
He and his aides need not be so mindful of orchestration, so wary of the unpredictable. It’s a executive reflex that can breed an internal culture of anxiety, in which managers wind up afraid of making decisions lest they err and incur the boss’s disfavor.
A heavily union audience did get in fleeting swipes about TIFs, laid-off crossing guards and teacher pay. And a rare unscripted question—from a teenage girl, about too many people hanging out around liquor stores in her neighborhood—elicited his best response as he smartly weaved together cultural, economic and sociological factors to deride too many liquor stores, too few quality groceries.
But the gathering was pretty uninspired, so I leafed through his just announced 10th anniversary selection for the Daley-inspired One Book, One Chicago program, “The Adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow.
Emanuel had called the protagonist a “true son of Chicago.” That’s correct, though Augie himself is out of sync with Chicago’s tradition of big ideas and deeds invoked by the mayor Wednesday.
And beyond the fact that they’re both Jewish, similarities are few between the novel’s protagonist and the force-of-nature mayor. Augie, who’s moved to place more stock in respect than love, is a pretty passive fellow.
And, as Bellow said, he has a “weak sense of consequences.” Emanuel clearly does not, which is good for the city.