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Saturday, June 28, 2014

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Crain's Hinz tips business' hand on Lewis run for mayor

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Crain's Hinz tips business' hand on Lewis run for mayor:



Crain's Hinz tips business' hand on Lewis run for mayor


A good sign for Karen Lewis. She's already got them nervous.

 No sooner had she hinted that she was "seriously considering" a run for mayor than Greg Hinz at Crain's jumped out with a patronizing, borderline racist column, warning Lewis to rethink the prospect. If Hinz's column is any indicator, just the thought of her running has got the one-percenters' shorts in a twist.

I say, borderline racist (trying to be kind) because Hinz  portrays Lewis as the stereotypical angry black woman who "needs to dial down her public persona" and who he finds "too quick to reduce every dispute to racial terms," which Hinz calls "dangerous grounds."

Every dispute -- really, Hinz? You mean like her defense of retiree pensions? You mean like adequate funding and against the privatization of public schools? You mean like opposition to Rahm's school closings or his give-away of precious lakefront city land to billionaires? You mean like her talk before the City Club, where she called for a "LaSalle Street tax" to help get us out from under the so-called pension crisis (which is really a revenue crisis)? Racial, Mr. Hinz? Perhaps you can give us even one example of a dispute that Lewis "reduced to racial terms."

Or maybe Hinz is the one who needs to dial it down a notch.

By now we should all know what Hinz really considers dangerous grounds. He finally comes clean a sentence later.
I also find her proposed solutions to the city's fiscal woes to be far too focused on squeezing the well-off ...
Exactly. He should have just said that in the first place.

Last month's S-T tone-it-down editorial
That tone-it-down stuff has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it. No, I'm not just talking about way back in the day when the Eddies (Vrdolyak and Burke) were leading the "anybody but..." campaign against Harold Washington, who went on to become Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Crain's Hinz tips business' hand on Lewis run for mayor: