The certain kind of show that is Mayor Johnson's communications strategy

& you tell me: Could Caitlin Clark play in the NBA?

2-22-2024 (issue No. 129)

This week:

• For the record, Team Brandon Johnson doesn’t know what it’s doing

• Last week’s winning tweet

• News and Views — On the Alabama Supreme Court’s extreme IVF ruling, Trump’s disloyalty to one of his most fervent butt kissers, displays in courtroom galleries and the pleasure of four mostly Blago-free years

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• What’s on “The Mincing Rascals” podcast this week

• Quotables

• Re:Tweets — The winning visual tweet and this week’s contest finalists

• Good Sports — Iowa women’s hoops phenom Caitlin Clark is really, really great. But is she NBA material? You tell me

• Tune of the Week — “Leader of the Pack”

Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

It’s amateur hour on the 5th floor of City Hall

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s relations with the City Hall press corps appear to be growing increasingly testy — veteran local political reporter Fran Spielman describes them as “hostile,” and she would know. So he and his team scheduled a Zoom meeting with the Sun-Times Editorial Board Monday “in an apparent effort to turn things around,” Spielman wrote.

But Monday’s meeting ended abruptly — after Johnson and board members had introduced themselves — when press secretary Ronnie Reese insisted the entire session be off the record. Editorial Page editor Lorraine Forte refused to accept those unprecedented terms. Johnson allowed Reese to make the argument for him and never said a word before signing off from the Zoom session.

First, bully for Forte. While it was certainly possible that Johnson would have provided some useful background on the aggressive $1.25 billion borrowing plan he introduced at Wednesday’s City Council meeting, springing an off-the-record demand on a group of journalists is beyond bad form, particularly for an elected official.

I often turned down requests or suggestions for off-the-record meetings when I wrote a column for the Tribune. For portions of interviews in order to gain useful context? Sure. And I occasionally had informal off-the-record conversations in order to get to know sources and understand issues better. Most reporters do, and it tends to improve their work. But the terms were usually clear in advance, and more than once I had sources terminate interviews when I declined their request to go off the record because, I said, “it won’t do me any good.”

Second, what was spokesman Ronnie Reese thinking? Terms of engagement for these sorts of sessions are always agreed to in advance, and the presumption that an officeholder is on the record when speaking to a group of journalists is strong.

Reese is a “writer and social justice filmmaker” who was a deputy press secretary for the Chicago Teachers Union before joining Johnson’s political team in the summer of 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. He ought to have known the rules of engagement, even if Johnson didn’t.

Was he trying to insulate his boss from tough questions about the strange way his administration handled the ShotSpotter gunfire-detection contract, yet another example of poor planning? ($8,million to extend a program Johnson argues is ineffective? Hello!?) Questions about the mayor’s abysmal poll numbers? Questions about his squirrely answers regarding funding for migrant care?

Cook County has already committed more than $100 million in its current FY24 budget for new arrival related costs, primarily for healthcare, and (County Board President Toni) Preckwinkle will work with Cook County commissioners to commit up to $70 million more for this joint funding plan, the release said.

During a press conference (Feb. 15), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson repeatedly avoided answering questions about what Chicago's commitment would be. … When the mayor was asked about the city committing to fund the remaining $71 million needed for migrant care, he repeatedly dodged the question. (ABC-7)

Finally, what was Johnson thinking? That wordlessly clicking out of a Zoom conference with the editorial board of a major local newspaper was a sign of strength? Of leadership? Of independence from his clumsy handlers?

It was an epic own-goal at a time when Johnson needed to score.

Spielman’s resulting commentary offered withering views:

“The mayor had a lot of goodwill coming out of the election but has maybe blown through all of that goodwill and has to start from scratch and rebuild credibility with the media and with the voters. That’s hard to do,” (veteran Democratic media strategist Pete) Giangreco said. … “There is a growing suspicion that someone who’s a very good candidate and a very talented politician is not necessarily a very good mayor.”

Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson, who spent 12 years as Chicago’s inspector general, said Johnson is “unquestionably a gifted rhetorician” who spent the “greater part of his career in the realm of narrative and message and advocacy.” But those are vastly different skills than being well-versed and prepared enough to field questions from reporters and explain himself to the public.

Johnson’s relationship with the news media is “at a remarkably low place,” Ferguson added. …

Johnson goes weeks at a time without making himself available for reporters' questions. When he finally does, his answers sound more like campaign rhetoric. It’s clearly time for a course correction. …

"The phrases he’s uttering are one-off cliches from when he was campaigning, and it would appear reporters are beginning to tune that out," (President and CEO of the Better Government Association David) Greising said. "The lack of serious engagement is undermining not only the ability of the press to work with this administration but the public’s confidence that he is doing the work.”

The question, as my fellow “Mincing Rascals” podcast panelist Austin Berg of the Illinois Policy Institute put it, is whether Johnson is getting bad advice or refusing to listen to good advice. Monday’s little Zoom shitshow suggests it’s an unfortunate combination of both.

If he wants to “turn things around,” he needs to bring in advisers who know how to communicate in a way that helps him govern, and then listen to them.

Last week’s winning tweet

Life is not a fairy tale. If you lose your shoe at midnight, you're drunk. — @BobGolen

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

News & Views

News: The all-Republican Alabama Supreme Court rules that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law.

View: Every extreme ruling like this is yet another signal to voters that anti-abortion rights zealots dominate the Republican Party and electing Republicans is downright dangerous to reproductive autonomy. Here, the ruling imperils the ability of those with infertility issues from taking advantage of a common procedure.

“This ruling is stating that a fertilized egg, which is a clump of cells, is now a person. It really puts into question, the practice of IVF,” Barbara Collura, CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, told The Associated Press Tuesday. The group called the decision a “terrifying development for the 1-in-6 people impacted by infertility” who need in-vitro fertilization. …

Sean Tipton, a spokesman with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said at least one Alabama fertility clinic has been instructed by their affiliated hospital to pause IVF treatment in the immediate wake of the decision.

Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, whom some consider a moderate Republican, is all in with this cruel, anti-life decision, though survey data shows vast majorities of the public will reject it. From the Washington Post:

2013 Pew Research Center data (showed that) less than 20 percent of respondents who view abortion as morally wrong also describe IVF in these terms. Our preliminary analysis of new data from the 2020 Collaborative Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey confirms these findings, revealing high support for IVF among a diverse cross-section of the U.S. public. Among individuals who oppose abortion, only 11.7% of white respondents and roughly 17% to 18% of Black and Latino respondents express moral opposition to IVF.

And that’s among those who oppose abortion rights.

News: Donald Trump endorses U.S. Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., over enthusiastic Trump supporter, former state Rep. Darren Bailey in a downstate congressional primary.

View: Sad trombone. Bailey’s butt-kissing buffoonery was sufficient to earn the endorsement of his party’s biggest buffoon just before the 2022 Republican gubernatorial primary, which he won. But it was insufficient to earn Trump’s endorsement over Bost, the incumbent, who himself smooches Trump’s behind. The likely reason? Trump didn’t want to back another loser and recognized the potential peril in failing to back a loyal incumbent.

News: Leaders in the “True the Vote” 2020 election conspiracy group admitted to a judge they have no evidence of voter fraud, and the main Republican “witness” in the impeachment effort against President Joe Biden has been charged with lying.

View: Pathetic, evil and disgusting is no way to go through life, Republicans.

News: The judge in the upcoming trial of a man accused of murdering a Chicago police officer refused to bar uniformed officers from the courtroom's gallery and prevent spectators from wearing memorial T-shirts or pins.

View: My consistent view on this is that courthouse protests and demonstrations of any kind meant to sway or provoke the sympathies of a jury are wildly inappropriate. I said so when a cop accused of murder was on trial, and I’ll say it again now that an accused cop killer is on trial. My belief in freedom of expression is strong, but it’s outweighed by my belief in criminal trials free from theatrics designed to influence the result.

Ideally spectators would be screened off from the view of jurors and thus prevented from participating in the proceedings.

That verdicts should be based solely on the evidence presented and not the sentiments of spectators seems like such a fundamental principle of justice that it should be written into law.

News: This week marked the fourth anniversary of then-President Donald Trump’s commutation of the prison sentence of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

View: Who again? I thought nearly eight years in prison was enough for the defiant, chirpy sleazebag, but my fear, upon his release, was that we would be subject to a nauseating rerun of his pious, pretrial media blitz. I worried that the “former governor who can never admit he did anything wrong will make the rounds crowing about his innocence based on the judgment of a president who can never admit he did anything wrong.”

But he’s largely slipped into obscurity, making money recording personalized Cameo videos and being quoted occasionally by lazy political reporters who find that his logrolling defenses of Trump have relevance. He has filed a hopeless lawsuit seeking to reinstate his ability to run for public office.

Land of Linkin’

• How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000 by New York Magazine’s personal financial columnist Charlotte Cowles lit up social media last week. Many commenters mocked her gullibility —

  

  — but the story speaks to the fact that even smart, aware people can fall for scams, which are seemingly easier and easier for crooks to pull off. (See “Shoebox Lady Is Not Alone—Americans Got Scammed for More Than $10 Billion in 2023” in Mother Jones.) I give Cowles a lot of credit for sharing her story, because many victims simply feel shame and are reluctant to warn others. As a side note, there are evidently quite a few people who think her story itself is an invention. But I would argue that there are too many easily checkable facts — her call to 911 on the day she was victimized, just for one — and it would be beyond reckless for Cowles to have risked her job and her professional reputation for a few extra clicks.

• Also on scam watch: “On Facebook, scammers are copying real funeral announcements and asking people to pay to watch livestreams of services.” “The scams involve pulling details of real deceased people from legitimate funeral services pages and then making copycat announcements, before pushing victims to a site that asks for their credit card information allegedly in order to watch the funeral of their loved one.”

• Meanwhile, the needle on my hoax-o-meter is twitching over this story: “Bitcoin dad’s beef with daughter goes viral after Musk response.” The back-and-forth between west suburban investor and advertising executive Ben Hart and his social media influencer daughter Madi Hart feels orchestrated to me. Quite entertaining, but I ain’t buying it as a real dispute.

• “Artificial Intelligence is after my job, and maybe yours, too,” in which Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg asked Google’s Gemini AI program, "Write a column defending the use of Artificial intelligence in the style of Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times." The result, as I told Neil, resembled what you’d get if a smart high school student were assigned to write a pastiche. Some good lines, but not a convincing imitation. Give it another year or two, though, because “these babies are still learning, like toddlers with screwdrivers and boundless curiosity,” as the program wrote.

• Speaking of AI, last week I posted a broken link to Google's ImageFX, the new AI image generator. This is the correct one.

• Jerome’s Event List is a very comprehensive daily listing of entertainment offerings in the Chicago area, for when you’re trying to figure out what to do.

• “Slurring Trump Says He Purposely Acts Confused And Like He’s In Cognitive Decline” Sure, Jan.

• The Lincoln Project with another powerful anti-Trump video:

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square:

■ Chicago Reader columnist Ben Joravsky turns a critical eye to “a curious phrase in the mainstream media” covering Mayor Brandon Johnson: “The mayor’s base.”

■ With early voting on for the March 19 primary, it’s time again for the Chicago Public Square Voter Guide Guide.

■ Former Chicago City Council member and political science professor emeritus Dick Simpson makes a case for the “Bring Chicago Home” referendum at the bottom of the ballot.

■ As Gov. Ron DeSantis concedes that his book-banning crusade has gone too far, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau imagines the classroom of a courageous Florida teacher.

■ HBO’s John Oliver is offering Clarence Thomas $1 million a year for life and a $2 million tour bus if he quits the Supreme Court—but the deal expires in a month. (If you’ve gotten used to seeing Oliver’s show free on YouTube the next day, sorry about this.)

■ Amazon’s folding its free Freevee streaming TV service.

■ Radio rocked: In a twist for a business known for conservative and reactionary ownership, a Texas federal judge has signed off on a plan to extract Audacy—parent to Chicago stations including WXRT, WBBM, The Score and WBMX—from bankruptcy by making an investment fund founded by liberal billionaire George Soros the company’s largest individual shareholder.

■ Author and tech cynic Cory Doctorow: With a near-monopoly on search, Google has “turned into a pile of shit.”

■ Expatriate Chicagoan Mike Gold is giddy over a Wicker Park Walgreens’ transformation into a bookstore.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

Minced Words

Host John Williams welcomed Austin Berg, Cate Plys, Marj Halperin and me around the virtual roundtable on this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals,” the best local news chitchat podcast, says me. We spoke at length about the proposed White Sox stadium in The 78 and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first-year stumbles, among other topics. Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Quotables

Children, pregnant women, and the elderly have been sent here in the dead of night, left far from our designated welcome centers, in freezing temperatures, wearing flip-flops and T-shirts. Think about that the next time a politician from Texas wants to lecture you about being a good Christian. — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker

So do you think the Republicans ever look up and think,"Hey, we chained ourselves to this vile, traitorous, toxic, criminal loser and traitor who never thinks of the public good, but only of his own benefit, while continuously destroying both"? Nah, I didn't think so. — Neil Steinberg

I’ve noticed that right-wingers’ criticism of Kamala Harris often lacks specifics. They rarely talk about her stands on issues or her conduct in office. It’s as if it’s enough of a crime that she’s a Democratic woman of color. And for them, I guess it is. — Mark Jacob

Let me see if I have this straight: Billionaire businessman doesn’t like the last stadium we built for him and wants us to pay for a new one. Couldn’t even bother with the usual, not-quite-a-billion demand and just going full Dr. Evil. Not a penny, pal. — Illinois state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago

One of the things that is so troubling about this political season is the extent to which you’ve got people who used to be good and honorable members of Congress, who have simply apparently abandoned the need to actually elect people of character and honor and are instead embracing (Donald Trump). — Liz Cheney

One of the saddest, most staggering, most infuriating parts of this whole tragic affair is that Trump’s derangement is visible to everyone—and yet the people in a position to put this madness to a stop have done nothing. Worse, they’ve urged him on. I’ll never get over this. — Steven Bechloss

Russia has been laundering money through Trump properties for decades, and they’ve been financing him the whole time. For a guy who shits on absolutely everyone, the fact that Trump has never said a bad word about Russia tells you a lot. — Sundae Divine

When it’s 60 degrees in February, it feels like I’m stealing from my kids and grandkids. This is wrong! — John Williams

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• R.I.P. Bill Post, inventor of Pop Tarts. He will be cremated or just buried as-is. Either one is OK. — @TheFishpants

• Life is extra surreal for French speakers right now because, in French, “Chat GPT” sounds like “chat, j’ai pété,” which means, “Cat, I farted.” — Various sources

• Trump Sneakers? I already have a pair of BideNikes, cushioned enough for 8 a.m. mall walking yet stylish enough for 4 p.m. early-bird dinner. — @RickAaron

• Yelp review: The dinner was delicious and the service was great. Could have done without all the kung fu fighting though. Two stars. — @dmc1138

• I told the kids I had trouble with handwriting when I was little, and my 5-year-old asked if it was because pens were made of feathers then. — @naanking

• Government: Here’s your tax refund. Me: Thank y- Broken furnace: I’ll take that. — @RodLacroix

• New menu starting today at Mar-a-Lago. Breakfast: Bologna sandwich. Lunch: Bologna sandwich. Dinner: Bologna sandwich w/pickle. — @WilliamAder

• I grabbed my husband through the shower curtain, and he screamed like a six-year-old girl. I promised I’d never do it again, but let’s be honest, we all know I will. — @sixfootcandy

• All movies about teenagers have to be set in the ‘90s or earlier, otherwise we’d just be watching kids on their phones for two hours. — @CooperLawrence

• I am in tremendous debt to the piper. — @JuliusIrvington

Vote here and check the current results in the poll.

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Good Sports

Iowa women’s basketball superstar Caitlin Clark is astonishingly fun to watch — a deadeye shooter and clever passer who plays with confidence bordering on sass. The shot she hit to break the NCAA women’s scoring record was variously reported at from 35 to 40 feet, which was not unusual for her and has reinforced her reputation as the Steph Curry of women’s hoops.

The 6-foot senior guard will have a year of college eligibility left after this season, but is considered likely to enter the WNBA draft. Some are suggesting that her talent and star power are so immense that she could become the first woman to play in the NBA.

I will withhold my response to this suggestion for next week’s issue. But readers! What do you think?

Tune of the Week

Singer Mary Weiss’ death last month at age 75 prompted me to look back 60 years, when the then-15-year-old lead singer for the Shangri-Las burst onto the national music scene with the chart-topping single, “Leader of the Pack.”

It was the female trio’s biggest hit and was a classic in the “teen-tragedy” genre in which death was eerily romanticized. Others included “Teen Angel" (1959), "Tell Laura I Love Her" (1960), "Last Kiss" (1961) and "Dead Man's Curve" (1964). The Spark Notes précis for “Leader of the Pack” goes like this: Girl falls in love with the head of a motorcycle gang, then breaks up with him because her parents insist he’s from “the wrong side of town.” Weeping, he speeds away on a rainy night and dies in a wreck.

I felt so helpless, what could I do?
Remembering all the things we'd been through
In school, they all stop and stare
I can't hide the tears, but I don't care
I'll never forget him, the leader of the pack

From Weiss’ obituary in The New York Times:

It was excessive and melodramatic, requiring acting as much as singing, but Ms. Weiss sold it with her yearning performance. … The Shangri-Las had six Top 40 singles between 1964 and 1966. … Wearing leather pants — as opposed to the formal gowns favored by female groups like the Supremes — they embodied 1960s bad-girl chic and inspired legions of other musicians.

The group broke up in 1968, and Weiss did very little professional singing after that.

In 2007, she released her first and only solo album, the well-received “Dangerous Game.” She told Rolling Stone that year that whenever a songwriter proposed “the perfect song for Mary,” it inevitably featured a gruesome death in the vein of “Leader of the Pack.”

Teen tragedy songs — also called “splatter platters” — were related to murder ballads and other gruesome ditties in the folk tradition. But they have yet to come back as a pop music phenomenon. The last one on Wikipedia’s chronological list is Meat Loaf’s 1978 “Bat out of Hell:”

The sirens are screaming and the fires are howling
Way down in the valley tonight
There's a man in the shadows with a gun in his eye
And a blade shining oh so bright
There's evil in the air and there's thunder in sky
And a killer's on the bloodshot streets

Get the picture?

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

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