Monroe Anderson

Rahm takes a licking and keeps on ticking

 

 

    This is my commentary on the second Chicago mayoral debate which took place a week ago. This ran on The Root website Tuesday morning. The third and last mayoral debate took place that night.

 

Chicago Mayor’s Race: Rahm Emanuel Takes a

Few Jabs, but He’s Still Standing

By Monroe Anderson

 

Incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel sat through the second of Chicago’s three runoff debates looking as if he needed to pinch himself while trying not to look as if he wanted to punch his opponent’s lights out.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. All bets were on Emanuel brushing aside his four much lesser-known challengers in one fell swoop during the Feb. 24 general election.

Why wouldn’t he?

Emanuel had promise that turned into a portfolio. He was the finance director for mayoral candidate Richard M. Daley in 1989 and presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992. He became a multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker before returning to Chicago to win Rod Blagojevich’s U.S. House seat. In 2009 he resigned his congressional post to become President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff.

Five days before last month’s general election, Obama returned the favor by cutting a radio ad endorsing Emanuel and flying into Chicago to stump for his former badass buffer while designating the city’s Pullman Historic District a national monument. Mayoral candidate Emanuel also had a campaign war chest that was in the double-digit millions.

None of that was quite enough. Emanuel was too much the unlikable mayor, so the city’s voters didn’t like him back. He fell 4.4 points short of the 50 percent-plus-one votes needed to avoid a runoff.

So there Emanuel sat at Thursday night’s debate, side by side with challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, taking incoming flak from the man he’d bested in the first match 10 days earlier. There he sat, in this second debate, watching Garcia make a comeback by interrupting him, deriding his first four years as the city’s chief executive and even laughing at his carefully crafted mayoral message.

Garcia’s credentials were not nearly as impressive as Emanuel’s. Garcia was not even a millionaire and had no prospect of becoming one. He was a mere Cook County commissioner, a former Illinois state senator and city alderman. He was basically a community organizer daring to challenge the up-and-comer who had definitely become ... da mayor.

In the run up to last month’s general election, the Emanuel campaign spent nearly $7 million on 4,600 TV attack ads defining Garcia as the not-ready-for-the-big-time candidate. The heavy barrage has continued with TV spots attacking Garcia’s nonspecific solutions to Chicago’s $20 billion in unfunded pension debt. The mayor’s positive TV ads presented Emanuel all dressed down, wearing a Mr. Rogers sweater while admitting that sometimes he’s been a jerk but that he’s been a jerk for the good of Chicago.

The TV ads were worth every million. Polls indicate that Emanuel has shifted from a too-close-to-call status to a double-digit lead.

And yet the mayor still had to debate this interloper. Garcia, who comes off like the guy you give a big hug to right before he asks you to all hold hands and sway as you sing “Kumbaya,” was being annoyingly on the offense. The commissioner stuck with his populist rallying points, insisting that he would be a mayor who listened to the people, while Emanuel hadn’t a clue what the voters wanted or needed. Garcia charged that Emanuel wasn’t nearly as good a financial manager as his campaign claimed: If so, why was Chicago’s bond rating downgraded last month to two notches above junk status?

Emanuel still possesses all the no-nonsense, show-me-the-money charm of the Wall Street banker he once was; therefore, he is nothing if not disciplined. So he sat there, attentively listening as Garcia charged that his allowing movie mogul George Lucas to build an interactive museum on 17 valuable acres of free lakefront land was a “monument to Darth Vader.”

It had to bug Emanuel, framing a smile and acting civil throughout much of the debate, that like Garcia, the progressives in his political party were characterizing him as a mayor who could not care less for the little people, simply because he quid-pro-quoed his corporate contributors big privatization contracts. Too many in Chicago were beginning to refer to him as Mayor 1%, just like the book with the same title.

Rahm sat during the hour long debate, methodically sticking to his script. Sure, he closed 50 schools in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods, but “our kids have a full school day of kindergarten,” he said. Sure, he closed half the city’s mental clinics, but “we added more spaces through federally qualified entities.”

Between the school and health-clinic closings, Chicago’s black voters aren’t as crazy about Emanuel as they were four years ago. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and many of the city’s other black leaders are going with Garcia. Fortunately, Emanuel invested wisely in some key black ministers, politicians and businessmen. They may well balance out the decisive black vote that will determine the winner.

When the debate ended, it was two down and one to go. The last one is tomorrow. The election is April 7. After that, the mayor can wave goodbye and become himself again.

 

Cybercolumnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

Here's my Root commentary on the Sikh tragedy. No more commentary here. It speaks for itself.

 

Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: August 10, 2012 at 12:26 AM

 

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

Another conservative website, Alex Jones' Prison Planet, is headlined, "Homeland Security Report Lists 'Liberty Lovers' as Terrorists."

And then-top Republican of the House Intelligence committee, former Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, charged "unsubstantiated conclusions and political bias," worthy of a House investigation.

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Less than a quarter of the world's population is white. By 2060, fears conservative Pat Buchanan, that percentage may dip into the single digits.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Discouraging Development: Republicans scheme to suppress vote

 

The conservatives are up to their old tricks. I'm calling them out in my latest commentary for The Root.

 

Déjà Vu in Texas Voter-ID Fight

The Lone Star state is among several places where new legislation will hit blacks hard at the polls.

• By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: July 25, 2012 at 12:57 AM

(The Root) -- If you're a strong believer in coincidence, the outbreak of voter-identification laws across the nation just might make sense. If you're a student of American politics and history, on the other hand, you see it slightly differently. In that case, what you see is what we've got: voter suppression.

Thirty-three states, almost all of them Republican-controlled, now require some sort of voter ID. A decade ago, none did. A decade ago, there was no evidence of massive voter fraud. Today, there remains little evidence of voter fraud.

But there is clear evidence that the rash of voter-ID laws could have a profound impact on African-American participation at the polls. As Attorney General Eric Holder pointed out at the NAACP convention earlier this month, recent studies show that 8 percent of white voting-age citizens lack a government-issued ID, while 25 percent of black voting-age citizens lack one. Considering that Barack Obama received 95 percent of the African-American vote in 2008, if you think Republicans might be interested in suppressing that vote, you might be right.

Take the Lone Star state, for example. Since 2002, there have been only two documented cases of a Texan being convicted for voter impersonation fraud. But last year, a voter-ID law was passed as an "emergency item." Under the proposed Texas state law, concealed handgun licenses would be acceptable forms of photo ID while student IDs would not. Some voters would need to travel 100 miles in Texas, particularly Hispanics, to designated government offices just to get their photo IDs; others would be hard-pressed to pay for the documents needed to get the IDs. The currently contested law, if implemented, would make it easier to buy a gun than to cast a ballot in Gov. Rick Perry's state

Texas is one of 16 mostly Southern states with a history of discrimination required by the Voting Rights Act to get pre-approval from the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. District Court in D.C. for changes in voter procedures. Understanding that Holder would be a bad bet, the state is gambling on the District Court in D.C. ruling in its favor. After a weeklong trial, a three-man panel will announce its judgment later this month on whether Texas is up to its old voter-discrimination tricks.

Unfortunately, the Lone Star state is not alone in adopting restrictive voter-ID laws as a tactic to discourage African-American and Latino voters from showing up at the polls. As is the case in some of the problems Americans face today, we can blame it on George W. Bush. In the aftermath of the Florida fiasco that led to the Supreme Court declaring Bush president, Americans became desperate for measures that might stem voter fraud. Halfway through his first term, Bush signed the Help America Vote Act into law, which required first-time voters in federal elections to show some form of ID during registration or at the polling place.

Although voter identification had little to do with the problem of hanging chads, Republican-controlled Indiana saw its possibilities, then upped the ante. In 2004, Arizona passed a law requiring voters to bring a state-issued photo ID to the polling place. The next year, Indiana's Republicans pushed through a law requiring that a photo ID be shown before a voter could cast a ballot. Civil rights groups and the state's Democratic party challenged the law, arguing that it unjustly targeted poor and minority voters without any evidence that in-person voter fraud was taking place in the Hoosier state.

The same fab five right-wing activist justices on the Supreme Court who ruled that corporations are people also gave Indiana's ID law a nod. Like dominoes falling, Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have followed with restrictive laws requiring voters to show up with photo IDs in hand -- even though in 2007, five years after the George W. Bush administration launched a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department found virtually no evidence of organized efforts to influence federal elections with ineligible voters.

A study by New York's Brennan Center for Justice last week reported that 1.2 million eligible black voters and 500,000 eligible Hispanic voters in the nation live more than 10 miles from their nearest ID-issuing office open more than two days a week. It also reported that "these voters may be particularly affected by the significant costs of the documentation required to obtain a photo ID. Birth certificates can cost between $8 and $25 ... By comparison, the notorious poll tax -- outlawed during the civil rights era -- cost $10.64 in current dollars."

Just why would Republicans want to make minority voters, who don't have and don't need photo IDs in their day-to-day lives, cough up extra cash or go far out of their way in order to exercise their civic duty?

And why, oh, why are the Republicans hand-wringing over non-existent voter fraud? Let's see. As polls have consistently shown, President Barack Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney are locked in a dead heat. Depending on who's counting, there are 10 to 12 swing states that will determine the outcome of November's election. Among those battleground states, Florida, Colorado, Nevada and North Carolina are heavily populated with either Hispanic or black voters who could make a difference. But that's only if they show up and are allowed to cast their ballots.

And, as we all know, stuff happens. Let's just make sure it doesn't happen to us.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

 

 

ObamaCare The Game could battle the evil Echo Chamber

While attending the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week in New Orleans, I came up with an idea as to how the Obama Administration could help us understand the historic health care law. I wrote a column about it for The Root website.

'Obamacare,' the Video Game?

This writer says that the repacking of the president's accomplishments would keep his message in play.

By: Monroe Anderson | Posted: June 29, 2012 at 12:48 AM

 

(The Root) -- The Saturday before the 2010 November midterm elections, President Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod was a call-in guest on a radio show I was co-hosting. Team Obama was already bracing for a shellacking, since for months one Republican after the next had lip-synched right-wing talking points, accusing the POTUS of having accomplished zip.

I knew the Republicans were playing fast and loose with the truth. I knew that, like it or not, in his first two years in office, Barack Obama had scratched more off his to-do list than any other U.S. president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So I asked Axelrod why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term. I dare not try to reconstruct the entire answer from the president's then senior adviser, but I will repeat two words that jumped out at me: "Information gridlock."

That's right. Axelrod's defense for a failure to communicate was that Obama's accomplishments came at such a breakneck pace that the White House press office didn't have the time to make sure that everyone following could keep up with the score. Maybe. Maybe not. But it would seem that the one achievement that is the most momentous since LBJ pushed Medicare and Medicaid through Congress in 1965 might have gotten a little special treatment: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

It hasn't helped that from its conception through passage until now, the right-wing echo chamber has been in superdrive, dogging and demonizing the president's health care law. But I've got an app for that: Obamacare the Game.

Rather than trying to run down all the complicated bennies and perks hidden in the 2,600-page law, a computer game would have players racing through level after level, virtually discovering the rewards or penalties for either being or not being enrolled in the health plan.

It wouldn't matter whether it was a strategy, simulation or role-playing game, as long as it was available for a free download on the Obama-campaign website for every system from iPad to Xbox to desktop -- Facebook, too. The gamification of the president's historic accomplishment could quickly and easily be a mind changer, slaying the stream of poison that the right keeps spewing. With the flick of a click, Americans would be able to go from unenlightened and turned off to informed and engaged.

How to beat the right-wing smear-and-fear machine came to me while I was in "The Gamification of News" session at the National Association of Black Journalists' convention last week. Although the panel was focused on a cutting-edge tactic for engaging readers and viewers in complex news stories, my mind quickly leaped from there to politics.

Since then I have interviewed two of the gamification panelists, Manuel "Mani" Saint-Victor and Scott Anderson, to see what they thought. They both agreed that it could be done and suggested how to do it.

"Have people walk through the process of being a different person with a different illness -- [the] Sim [City] approach," said Saint-Victor, who is a former psychiatry resident physician at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and a founder of Marveloper Media. "Let them walk through and let them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not telling them which is and which isn't."

Scott Anderson, who is my firstborn as well as the co-founder and lead programmer at Enemy Airship and one of Game Developer Magazine's top 50 game developers for 2009, had a similar idea. He thinks the game should be "how to survive without health insurance." In his version of Obamacare the Game, "You have all these setbacks, and you have all these crazy things people will have to do to survive," Scott said. "It might not be fun, but it'll be effective. People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things happened to me, I'd be screwed."

Although gamification hasn't come to politics in a big way yet, it is already being played out in advertising through reward cards and loyalty systems, Saint-Victor said. Of course, almost everybody is familiar with the SimCity games, and there's even a game called Cut Throat Capitalism, which explores the economics of Somali pirates and why they do what they do. "You basically pick what ships they go after and how you'll treat the hostages," Anderson said.

The Supreme Court may have upheld the individual mandate on Thursday, but hold up on the high fives. Just how badly the Obama administration and campaign need to get beyond the information gridlock is patently obvious.

A majority of Americans -- 54 percent -- still believe that Obamacare should be repealed. Republicans have spent three times more money bad-mouthing the president's health law than Democrats have spent explaining it. Right now there are 3 million small-business people who qualify for a health care tax credit.

A mere 170,000 have applied.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

Carol Moseley Braun: A mayoral foot race?

 

    The Root asked me to write a piece on Carol Moseley Braun's run in the Chicago mayoral race. I talked to half a dozen Chicagoans who are hip-deep in the city's politics. None had anything glowing to say about the campaign of the woman who was the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. I called her press secretary, Renee Ferguson, a good friend whom I've known since college. I'm still awaiting a return call. I called Braun's campaign office. I'm still awaiting a return call. So here's the commentary I wrote for The Root.

Since I didn't have any positive feedback from anyone, I ended up writing a not-so-positive piece.

 

 

Carol Moseley Braun's Quixotic Bid for

Mayor of Chicago

The former Illinois senator wasn't the first choice of the black power elite to take on Rahm Emanuel in the crowded mayoral race. Or the second. 

 

 

 Getting the nod as the black consensus candidate for next month's Chicago mayoral election worked like a charm for Carol Moseley Braun -- the third time around.

The first time the coalition of the Windy City's self-appointed black power elites met to bless one of the half dozen or so African Americans vying to replace the unexpectedly retiring Richard M. Daley, Braun was not the first choice, or the second. Those honors went to the Rev. James Meeks, an Illinois state legislator who boasts ministering a mega-church with 20,000 faithful, and Larry R. Rogers Jr., a prominent personal-injury attorney and commissioner of the Cook County Board of Review (property taxes).

Nor was Braun the first choice the second time around, after Rogers opted out, and when the reality set in that many of Chicago's white and Hispanic voters might just not be that into the anti-gay, pro-school vouchers Meeks. During Round 2, Rep. Danny Davis was crowned the one-who-would-mostly-get-most-of-the-black-votes.

The second decree of the coalition of aldermen, business leaders and community activists worked just fine for Davis -- but Braun, not so much. Mission unaccomplished.

Finally, after a year's-end intervention, with the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson summoning both candidates to a late-night meeting at Rainbow PUSH, Davis stood down on New Year's Eve. That left Braun, who had the support of two of Chicago's most prominent business titans -- John W. Rogers Jr., chairman, CEO and chief investment officer of Ariel Investments, and real estate mogul Elzie Higginbottom -- as the last viable black candidate standing.

The notion that Braun, the first and only black woman to serve as a U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador to New Zealand, was a viable contender, and the belief that a black consensus candidate was a viable strategy, both lasted for about 3½ days -- and since then, it's been one "oops" moment after the next.

As a harbinger of missteps to come, on Dec. 29, just two days before Week 1 of her "The One" campaign began, Braun got into the first of her two pissing matches with folks who buy their ink by the barrel.

In response to a critical column by Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times, Braun lashed out at the columnist during a news conference to outline her public-safety platform, stating that, "He is a drunk and a wife beater, and that's a matter of record. I didn't make that up. It's the truth."

Steinberg, in his column headlined, "Carol, I Miss You Already," had facetiously claimed, "part of me wishes she had a snowball's chance in hell of becoming Chicago's next mayor," because he'd have so many things to ridicule in a hypothetical Braun administration. 

On Jan. 5, when asked to discuss her problematic personal finances as she appeared at the scene of a South Side shooting to decry city violence, Braun took on the mainstream media again, flippantly responding, "Some of you may work for the Tribune or the Sun-Times, and last time I looked, the Tribune was in bankruptcy."

This miscue followed a bad answer two days earlier, when she was asked why she was refusing to release her tax returns, as the other candidates had done. Her response: "Because I don't want to."

Not 24 hours later, Braun flip-flopped, releasing some of her tax returns. It's understandable why she didn't want to.

Her tax returns and personal financial statements did not speak well for a candidate seeking to manage the $6 billion annual budget of the nation's third-largest city. In 2009, Braun claimed a net income of $15,954, all of which seems to come from her public pensions as a former U.S. senator, Cook County recorder of deeds and Illinois state legislator.

Her 2008 federal income-tax return showed that she lost more than $225,000 that year -- $200,000 of it in what she called a "net operating loss" that she did not bother to identify on the form. She would, though, indicate to reporters that her financial troubles stemmed from Ambassador Organics, her spice-and-tea company.

The next day, Braun released new pages from her tax return, showing that she had a loss of $120,000 from her public-speaking business, CBM One Corp. Just days after Braun's pointing out that the Tribune is in bankruptcy, the newspaper reported that she was late in paying property taxes on her Hyde Park home -- which she has on the market for $1.9 million -- five of the last six times her bill was due, and that she had paid more than $3,400 in late penalties.

Unfortunately for the 63-year-old Braun, this is not the first time she has found herself mired in misdeeds and money problems. Her one term as a U.S. senator was tainted with controversies concerning campaign finances and a visit to Nigeria to meet with military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha.

And while none of Chicago's other black mayoral wannabes come close to matching Braun's résumé, it's understandable why she wasn't the coalition's first choice. In a Tribune-WGN poll conducted last month, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was backed by 32 percent of voters, followed by 30 percent undecided. Gery Chico, a Hispanic who is former schools chief, and Rep. Davis each had 9 percent, while Meeks had 7 percent. Braun polled at 6 percent.

Even Braun's support among the city's black power elites mirrors her recent polling. Mellody Hobson, the president of John Rogers' Ariel Investments, has signed on as the co-chair of Emanuel's mayoral campaign. And former White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, John Rogers' ex-wife and the mother of his daughter, hosted a sellout fundraiser Tuesday night for Emanuel, featuring Jennifer Hudson, at Chicago's House of Blues.

With six weeks left until the nonpartisan election, it's still possible that the coalition's default candidate could become a contender. If Emanuel falls short of the 50 percent-plus-one vote threshold -- as it now looks like he will -- and Braun garners the second-largest number of votes, she could conceivably rack up all the "anybody but Rahm" votes during the April runoff.

But in order to do that, Emanuel, who is running a Rose Garden campaign, would have to falter big time. And Braun would have to move her campaign from stumblebum to fleet of foot -- while making sure it stays out of her mouth.

 

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show, and was the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him at http://twitter.com/#!/MonroeAnderson. 

This commentary was also reposted on the websites of NPR and WBUR.