Bush Says "This is a well-run city."

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"For a long time, that's been good enough for lots of us. We've lived by the tacit principle that the highest civic good is a city that works, even if it takes a little wrongdoing to get the work done.Yeah, so the hiring process for tree-trimmers was rigged. How many people--besides rejected applicants, political rivals and professional moral guardians--were going to protest, as long as the trees got trimmed?

We could wink at the existence of a political machine as long as we didn't have to inspect the crud in the gears.

But the Sorich trial made the jury, and everyone in Chicago, look at the details of Chicago patronage--at the crud in the machinery.What the jury saw and helped many Chicagoans to see was a set of hiring practices that wasn't just biased, but fraudulent."

"We took the common man approach," said the jury foreman, S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"We asked the question, `How would a common person interpret that?' And, of course, the 12 of us are common people, so we went around and we all came to the exact same conclusion.
"Twelve citizens without any apparent political motive concluded: This is wrong.
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I would like to have been the proverbial "fly on the wall" when the Presidents' spin meisters got together to discuss what he should say during his birthday visit to Chicago last week.

The Republican President first supports the lifelong Democrat Daley, endorses Republican gubernatorial candidate Topinka and then declares that
"This is a well-run city", fresh on the heels of a guilty verdict in the Sorich trial.

So, is the jury out of touch or is the President just a little confused?

Gary Fuschi
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