James Warren has lived in Chicago many years longer than I have. I moved to Chicago right as Congressman Rostenkowski was being drummed out of office, so I don’t have many memories of the old Chicago. I of the new Chicago, the Chicago built upon information, upon technology, upon the characteristics that James Warren describes more eloquently than I can.
DAN ROSTENKOWSKI, a gin and porterhouse kind of guy, surely would have felt out of place at the Chicago restaurant where President Obama celebrated his 49th birthday the other day.
Mr. Obama went to the celebrity chef Graham Elliot Bowles’s eponymous new joint, which has featured risotto with green apple, Wisconsin cheddar and Nueske bacon, and foie gras dusted with Pop Rocks. It’s one of many dining spots that make this city a destination for foodies, with the now-defunct Gourmet magazine tagging one, Alinea, as America’s best.
Who knew?
The disjunction between the city’s national image and reality was underscored by homages to Mr. Rostenkowski, the longtime Congressional titan who died last week at age 82. He was recalled as a tough, master dealmaker without a college education who brought home the pork and used his link to the city’s Democratic machine to create an imposing don’t-mess-with-me aura.
It played to an overriding caricature of Chicago: bad winters, Al Capone, slimy politics, the lovable loser Cubs. It can be found in the lame narrative advanced by critics of Mr. Obama and his top aides, which portrays them as products of a nefarious, indigenous “Chicago way” of politics in which backstabbing is a fine art.
Lost in the Rostenkowski coverage was this: He came from a very different Chicago than that of Mr. Obama, whose Harvard pedigree, sophistication, itinerant past and cerebral cool are far more in sync with the reality of this new, little-understood city.
(click to continue reading James Warren – My Kind of Technocracy, Chicago – NYTimes.com.)