Tuesday, April 30, 2019

More empty advice for Lightfoot. This time from Mayor 1%.

Lightfoot talks with south-side residents at Kennedy-King College.
Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot has so far been good at soliciting input from community members. But along with that has also come lots of empty, self-serving advice from the old guard. I guess it goes with the territory.

Last week it was Bill Daley's flack Peter Cunningham counseling the incoming mayor to think small, forget the "black, gay, female agenda" and city corruption, and focus instead on garbage collection and pothole repair. 

The latest bits of wisdom come from Rahm Emanuel, Mayor 1% himself, urging Lightfoot to copy his autocratic style of leadership in handling the city council. I call it the S & M model or what Freud called the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip). 

Rahm advises Lightfoot...
“You have to not so much walk in somebody else’s shoes [as] you have to think about what’s the benefit [for them]. … What’s the pain to pleasure?”
For Rahm and old-line machine pols like Eddie Burke, this has meant buying loyalty from obedient  aldermen with TIF money and re-distributing funds from the big downtown developers. Crumbs from the super-profit table to dole out to some and not others. The pain/pleasure principle.

On point, S-T's Fran Spielman writes this morning:
But being mayor isn’t only about making tough decisions and giving people what you deem to be in their best interests. It’s about listening to disparate views with sensitivity, building consensus and giving people at least some say in their own destiny. On that test of leadership, Emanuel failed.
Hopefully, the mayor-elect, who ran and won handily on a promise to make a clean break from Rahm's pain/pleasure style of politics, will follow her own course and Rahm will save his advice for his patrons at his new job.

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