Don't forget to thank GOP billionaire for helping to get Rahm Emanuel elected

[think]

Got to give credit where credit is due.

Chicago’s Odd Couple: Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a Billionaire Republican Investor
By ALEXANDRA STEVENSON - APRIL 2, 2015

At a news conference this week, Jesús G. Garcia, who is trying to unseat Rahm Emanuel as mayor of Chicago, accused the incumbent of allowing the city’s rich to “pay to play.”

Then Mr. Garcia got personal. Standing in front of the offices of the $26 billion investment firm Citadel, the challenger accused the firm’s billionaire owner, Kenneth C. Griffin, of benefiting from a relationship with the mayor.

Mr. Emanuel’s single biggest donor, Mr. Griffin, 46, has given more than $1 million to political organizations that support the mayor. The bulk of that money — $950,000 — was donated in recent weeks after Mr. Emanuel failed to win majority support for a second term at the end of February.

Backing Mr. Emanuel, a former Democratic congressman and President Obama’s first White House chief of staff, may seem an unusual choice for Mr. Griffin. A self-made billionaire who started trading convertible bonds from his dormitory room at Harvard, Mr. Griffin does not like big government. He thinks taxes are too high and corporate regulation is too burdensome....

Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/03/business/chicagos-odd-couple-mayor-emanuel-and-billionaire-republican-investor.html

[F4lconF16]

1. The GOP and the Democrats were hand in hand for this

[think]

3. Apparently party affiliation isn't always what it appears

Who would have thought a GOP billionaire would jump ship

[corkhead]

2. Democracy is dead.

[think]

4. Don't know that it's dead but it's certainly not healthy /nt

[hatrack]

10. It's not dead - it just smells funny . . . .

.

[ConservativeDemocrat]

5. It certainly puts the lie to the progressive extremists' belief...

.. that they'd show up if only they had a candidate to vote for.

Garcia was the hard-left's dream. Little hearts, swooning, and budgetary math as bad as any trickle-down Republican. And still they couldn't get a turnout of more than 1/3 of the voters. Maybe because voters can smell when they're being sold something that is too good to be true.

Repeat after me. Rahm is not the enemy. Demographics and the limits of taxpayer tolerance is.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[think]

7. So you side with the GOP billionaire's candidate and cast aspersions at the left?

[ConservativeDemocrat]

8. Dollars don't vote. People do.

It has nothing to do with siding with anyone.

On the DU I read over and over that if only the hard left got its candidate, that all the disaffected and flat out lazy voters would actually bother to cast ballots.

I know that to not be true, but this was the acid test of that theory. And it failed miserably.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[Art_from_Ark]

9. Um, both Republicans and Democrats were voting in that election

But it was just two Democrats on the ballot, one of whom was getting big bucks from Republican donors.
Who do you think the Republicans voted for?

It's also hard to campaign against Chicago's political machine, especially when their candidate has the backing of a sitting President who carried the city by a wide margin.

If Chuy had been running against an actual registered Republican, who do you think would have won?

[deutsey]

11. +1

[ConservativeDemocrat]

12. That IS kind of the way elections work, you know

Everyone gets to vote in them.

Or are you saying that the hard-left could win... if only Republicans weren't allowed to vote?

But again, the premise from the fringe that I see constantly on the D.U. is the idea that running a tea-party-of-the-left candidate is exactly what we need in the general, because for every independent and/or moderate Republican we lose, supposedly we'll gain more than one disaffected leftist who hasn't been voting for the Democrats because they're not socialist enough.

And it isn't just the D.U. either. It's the proscription of the book "What's the matter with Kansas", among others.

However this just isn't true. Hell, it didn't even work in Chicago, an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

Had Garcia won, even in the Democratic prism that is Chicago, the standard DU screamers would be screaming with massively upvoted posts about how this means Democrats should be running Chomsky or Nader for President, or some other bullshit. But it didn't. It failed. Miserably. So pardon if I spend some time to rub all the kooks' noses in the fact that, as extremists tend to do, they've massively overestimated their public support.

- C.D. Proud Member of the Reality Based Community

[tomsaiditagain]

6. The American Pie is gone

because the rich have taken over America. American dreams are about having enough to eat and where the next meal is coming from. I blame both political parties.