Alive and Kickin'

It's sometimes thought that the modern era of anticorruption efforts and good-government laws have put the old-fashioned big-city political machines out of business.

DePaul University freshman David Krupa learned otherwise after he collected enough signatures on a filing petition to run for alderman in Chicago's 13th Ward, which includes DePaul, against incumbent Marty Quinn.

Quinn is closely tied to Mike Madigan, the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives and a very powerful figure in Chicago and Illinois Democratic politics. For some unaccountable reason, he viewed the quixotic campaign by a college freshman as the kind of threat that needed to be squashed before it got too far. So organizations friendly to him submitted petitions that people signed which said they had either not intended to sign Krupa's petition or that the person collecting the signatures had tricked them into signing something they would not have signed. Such a "I did what?" petition is a part of Chicago law, so that action wasn't shady.

But the wrinkle comes in when you look at the numbers. Krupa's petition required a minimum of 473 valid signatures in order to get him on the ballot. His effort collected just more than 1,700, more than enough. Quinn's counter-petition, though, collected almost 2,800 signatures of people who said their signatures were obtained through deceptive means -- meaning that a thousand more people said they were tricked than even signed the original Krupa petitions. When the two lists were compared, only 187 names on the Quinn "Oh, no you don't" petition were from people who actually signed Krupa's petition.

The party machine is alive and having a ball in Chicago, even if sometimes it can do some really stupid things. From wherever he resides in the afterlife, Da Honrable Richard J. Daley, Mare a da Great City a Chicago an All Its Great People, was heard to comment, "Ward bosses ain't what they use ta be."