John Kass is so often wrong in my view that I try to maintain a quota system on how often I write to disagree with him. But there’s an idee fixe at the core of Kass’s Tribune columns, and I would not only defend his right to belabor it but think Chicago is better off that he does.
When Richard M. Daley’s time came, he was smart enough to realize that a lot of his father’s old critics hadn’t opposed Richard J. on principle but because they were young, smart, and ambitious—and wanted inside the tent. So his own was bigger. For a long while the press was beguiled by all the grace notes of the second Daley era—the verdant lane dividers, the interest in the arts, the openness to the gay rights movement, and, above all, the success in positioning Chicago as a global city with an economy driven by finance instead of manufacturing. You could walk for miles in Daley’s Chicago and never be more than two blocks from a Starbucks. It took the press a while to figure out how much corruption there still was. I’m not sure the national press ever entirely caught on.
As for me, the first hour of Chicagoland was a reminder of how the national media doted on Richard M. in the first part of his administration, and of the ongoing legend of Eliot Ness. Kass would add that it’s also reminiscent of the media’s treatment of Barack Obama when he ran for president. In a column last week Kass called Obama a “gentle stalk of asparagus when it came to Chicago’s City Hall” who was wafted to the White House by journalists “placing laurel wreaths” upon his head. I think Kass is all over the map on Obama, but I give him this: journalists do seem to have a weakness for seeing Chicago in terms of constant mayhem and gallant knights—sort of like Gotham in the Batman comics.
