Image via AFP
DALEY NEWS
The mayor had no public schedule today, probably because, as Channel 7 put it, the mayor is suffering from an Olympic hangover. So the old man is staying in, shielding his eyes from the bright light of the public, avoiding the loud din of governing, and trying to keep the Loop from spinning ‘round him.
After a two-year bender, the sudden come-down from the Olympics has got to be painful for a man getting old enough to really feel his excesses.
DALEY CHATTER
For two years, the Olympic excitement began to build in Chicago, even amongst that chattering class tasked with holding Daley’s administration to account:the journalists. Sure, they’d run the occasional investigation into the shady dealings of someone like Michael Scott or take issue with the city council’s lackluster attempts to get answers about the games.
But much of that seemed to take a backseat to the thrilling potential of the games. And the excitement seemed to build, until the exhilarating rush of Friday morning, when local journalists who rarely get a guest-spot on Chicago Tonight were suddenly being interviewed on cable news networks and linked to on national blogs!
What a way to launch a national political career!
But then came the anti-climax of Chicago’s defeat, which left a vacuum of exhilaration, a deplorable state of being for a political journalist with outsized aspirations. So that horde of feckless local scribes, saddened by the Olympic corruption stories they will never get to write and the national TV stand-ups they will never get to do, invented a new drama: Is this the end of Mayor Daley? The question is ridiculous of course. The mayor is not the quitting kind. But that won’t stop our local news writers from trying to clutch a little of that Olympic afterglow between their fingers. So three days later, the stories continue. However, since idle speculation is only good for a day's worth of stories, and since the old man has been laying low for the last three days, the media have taken to asking any and every politician they can find to comment on Daley’s future. A tiresome exercise. I can't wait for someone, anyone -- the mayor, aldermen, journalists -- to get back to the jobs they are supposed to be doing.
In other news, once the mayor picks himself off the mat, he has a budget to put together. Usually the budget announcement comes the first or second week of October, but this year, there’s no indication when that might come about. That might be because the mayor has been busy with other things, or it might be because the city is facing a half-billion dollar deficit and no one seems to have any idea how to deal with it.
Like most city departments, the CTA is experiencing money trouble and today Daley’s recently appointed but not yet confirmed head of the CTA Terry Peterson said that fare hikes are not off the table. A similarly strapped library system is moving to reduced hours. And this comes on top of mandatory furloughs for city workers and a sell-off of city parking meters. Yet we’re still a half-billion in the hole. Losing the Olympic vote is beginning to look like the best thing to happen to this city.
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