Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The Chicago Way...

“The Chicago Way” is the moniker used to describe the ways of politics in Chicago.  The politics that Obama came out of.  This little story describes it very well:
There was an investigation of voter fraud in Chicago, and the investigators wrote to my friend’s grandmother, asking to interview her. This made her nervous. She was a widow and lived alone, and so she turned to her son who was away in college and asked that he return to be with her when the investigators came to see her.

And so he did. The investigator had a question or two to ask. It was 1947, and he wanted to know whether her husband had died in 1928 as the records seemed to indicate – and she acknowledged that sadly this was so. Then, the investigator posed his second question. “Why, then,” he asked, “had her husband continued voting with such admirable regularity in the two decades since his decease?”

My friend's grandmother reportedly paused then -- and for a long time. Then, if the story is true, she looked the investigator in the eye and posed a question of her own, which brought the interview to an abrupt end. “What is this all about?” she asked. “Why would anyone suppose that just because a man has died he has given up his interest in politics?”

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