Obama's Chicago in Decline

Wall Street Journal:

In the past week or so, we have learned more about Alaska than we ever cared to know, including details about tiny Wasilla, where Sarah Palin once served as mayor. But about Mr. Obama's hometown we hear very little. Chicago, let it be said, is a place in decline. In recent years -- and well before the current economic turmoil -- it has lost its two leading banks and thousands of jobs in the futures and commodities markets. Not only does it have the highest retail sales tax in the country, at 10.25%, it is the only city with a head tax on employment. Its public schools are in terrible shape. The city's middle-class population continues to flee. (Chicago lost 63,000 people between 2000 and 2006.) Meanwhile corruption and crime, not to mention machine politics, continue to thrive. In Chicago, it is no big deal to discover that an alderwoman's boyfriend is a member of the Gangster Disciples; this was the same gang that was given voter-registration money by Mayor Richard M. Daley. Chicago's murder rate is three times that of New York.

If there were ever a place in need of "change" and "reform," it is Chicago. And yet, Mr. Freddoso argues, reform for Mr. Obama "is something to discuss during election campaigns, not to be implemented or followed" when it might jeopardize his ambitions. Mr. Freddoso can't find a single example of a cause on which Mr. Obama has risked his political capital. This fact, Mr. Freddoso notes, "does not separate him from most other politicians in either party." It simply means that he is "like most of the others."

Is murder out of control? Are the Chicago schools failing minority children? Is the local economy faltering? These have not been Mr. Obama's concerns. He has been a down-the-line Chicago pol on such matters -- decrying police misconduct, calling for yet higher teacher salaries, and urging new subsidies for the state's industries, such as ethanol and coal. As a state senator, he routinely backed earmarks to reward potential allies. Emile Jones, the president of the Illinois state senate, pushed along Mr. Obama's rise by giving him meaningless ethics bills to shepherd through final approval after other people had done the hard work.

If there is nothing terribly shocking in any of this, it does dull the glow of Mr. Obama's halo; and some of his dodgier Chicago affiliations may remove it. In 1986, Mr. Obama's political mentor, state Sen. Alice Palmer, returned from attending the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union optimistic about the U.S.S.R.'s future. A decade later she brought Mr. Obama -- already a member of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's black-nationalist church -- together with 1960s terrorist Bill Ayers, who would hold the first fund-raiser for Mr. Obama when he was running to fill Ms. Palmer's state-senate seat. Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked together on the boards of two foundations.

Via Newsalert!