Day: August 24, 2006

Populists v. Progressives in Oak Park Politics

Jon Hale of Forum Oak Park takes issue with Dan Haley’s lumping of OP political philosophies into “a narrow range. Liberal, good government, tolerant.”  Rather, there are populists and progressives: 

The NLC/VCA side [winners in last village board election] is populist, catering to what it thinks “the people” want, often to the point of demagoguery, and distrusting the ability of professional experts to help guide policymaking. “Good government” and “tolerance” of opposing views have not exactly been hallmarks of this group’s leadership over the past year. It puts too much faith in the use of public meetings, which it expands ad infinitum until the only folks left standing on a given issue are the extremely committeds, who then are given disproportionate say over the outcome.

This is very familiar.  I can still hear the neighbor and fellow Beye School parent announcing at a PTO meeting in the 80s that he had plenty of time and would remain as long as it took to decide a certain issue.  You hang in there, asking, “Which side are you on?” until the people with lives beyond politics go home.

This side sees Oak Park not as one community, but as a collection of groups to be catered to – especially those that supported it at the polls. In general, this group finds decision-making difficult, especially on complex issues where it’s hard to discern exactly what it is “the people” want and professional expertise is considered untrustworthy.

Ah yes, we need “closure” here.  Majority rules?  How brutal.  Rather than “the people,” what you hear is “the community.”  Yeah, yeah!  Rumble, rumble.

Hale’s Forum, on the other hand, thinks

there is more to policymaking than . . . catering to what we think “the people” want.  . . . there are multiple viewpoints on every issue. A trustee is called upon to consider these public viewpoints then to . . . “revise and enlarge” the public view taking into account the whole variety of community interests, so that policy decisions are based on what’s best for the entire community, current and future.

Not quite philosopher kings, but elected representatives who do not feel need for a referendum on every decision.

This is . . . why we call our Village Board members “trustees” — we, the people, “entrust” them to make the kinds of decisions on behalf of the entire community that any well-informed and knowledgeable citizen would make if he or she were serving as a trustee and had access to not only the public’s opinions but also professional expertise.

Sounds reasonable.

Lois Wille open and clear

Ronald Reagan was “the Teflon president because he could brush away scandals with the sunshine of his smile,” says Daily News and Chi Trib veteran Lois Wille, now retired, in a Chi Trib op-ed.

He said he never knew the details of his administration’s illegal weapons sales to Iran, didn’t know it was illegally shifting the profits to anti-Marxist rebels in Nicaragua.

He seemed blissfully unaware of the mounting AIDS crisis, the soaring deficits and the corrupt activities of senior aides. And he got away with it.

That said, and it must have felt good to say it, she goes on to consider Mayordaley II as teflon also, thanks to his “strong relationship with legions of Chicagoans,” counting herself among them: she herself applauded one of his fairly recent dominative, we may say boss-like actions, his tearing up Meigs Field in the dead of night, decapitating our lakefront control tower in the name of protecting us from airborne terrorists. 

Why did she applaud?  Because he was “atoning for what he did to the lakefront when he OKd the Soldier Field renovations,” which is what I would be tempted to say if I’d also written a book about the lakefront.  I hope not, however, because it imparts a tentative quality to a column that might have given substance to the teflon part.

Maybe not, because on further reading, the column is a paean to Daley, even as it’s an angry indictment of racist others who committed more “social crimes” than she has space to relate, though she does list quite a few.  But more than that, for Chicago newspaper readers it’s a look at Wille’s unalloyed leftism and her anger at what racist others have done to ruin things such as mere editorials could not provide over her many years of writing them.

ARABS’ LAST CHANCE By RALPH PETERS

A culture of blame prevents moral, social and political progress. This is a self-help universe. The nonsensical Arab insistence that all Arab problems are the fault of America and Israel (or the Crusades) ignores the fact that Arab civilization has been in decline for 700 years – and has been in utter disarray for the last 200.

ARABS’ LAST CHANCE By RALPH PETERS – New York Post Online Edition: Postopinion.