Chicago
From the
Investors Business Daily:
Decline In Obama's Chicago Clue To His Second Term
Another weekend of violence in the president's hometown, now run by his former chief of staff. If you want to see the fruits of a presidential second term, look at the decline of his city.
President Obama and Rahm Emanuel, current mayor and former White House chief of staff, brought the "Chicago Way" to Washington in more ways than one. Not only did they bring a style of bare-knuckled backroom politics of intimidation and cronyism, they brought a statist philosophy of government knows best that has left America's Second City a second-rate city with nowhere to go but down.
Last weekend was all too typical in Chicago these days, with four dead and 29 wounded throughout a city that's been home to one of the nation's toughest gun laws. Chicago has become the murder capital of America with a 50% increase in violence for the past year.
Obama recently paid his hometown, where he maintains a residence, a visit. As Wayne Allyn Root, writing on FoxNews.com, noted, 35 were injured and seven killed in gun battles with the president home that weekend. Included in that violent mess was a 16-year-old girl. Three of the murder victims were killed in one hour on Sunday morning. It was the third weekend in a row with gunshot murders and injuries in the double digits.
More:
Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recently disclosed a staggering $108 billion debt tab across various governing bodies in the county that translates to $63,525 per Chicago household. Unfunded pension liabilities make up nearly a quarter of that. Not all the debt is Chicago's, a city with the nation's highest sales tax, but enough of it is.
Chicago lost 200,000 people from 2000 to 2009. The only one of the nation's 15 largest cities to lose people. Of all cities, it fell between Detroit, reigning champion of progressive urban decay, and hurricane ravaged New Orleans, in the number of people fleeing to greener pastures.
It closes with the following 'graphs:
While Obama's critics delve into his Kenyan ancestry, and his defenders delve into likely opponent Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital and as governor of Massachusetts, pundits and voters would be wise to look at Obama's Chicago for clues to his past and our future.
Chicago was the political incubator for a community organizer who would become president. It is where President Obama sat in the pews on Sunday listening to the liberation theology of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for two decades. Its liberal academia provided an educational haven for the likes of the former bomb-wielding terrorist Weatherman William Ayers, who was host to Obama's first fund-raiser.
Now the wheels are wobbly, and Chicago has become one of those overtaxed and overregulated places where growth has stalled. Chicago doesn't work so well anymore, having succumbed to the consequences of decades of urban liberalism, and neither does the country to whom it gave Rahm Emanuel, White House adviser David Axelrod and President Obama.
Forget Kenya and look at Obama's Chicago to find out what its favorite son is likely to produce unrestrained by any further electoral battles.
Excellent editorial. Visited Chicago a few times. Gorgeous city, great museums. Lousy politics.
Posted by DaveH at June 26, 2012 2:02 PM