Rich Miller: Stop calling up narratives from the past

Since the 2022 election, far too many Illinoisans have been far too eager to pine for a repeat of the past.

It started with non-stop rumors about Gov. JB Pritzker running for president. Every word he spoke, every position he took, every out-of-state trip he made was examined for signs of what everybody thought they knew. And they played it up for all it was worth whenever they could. For many, the talk brought back those heady years when Barack Obama captivated the nation and eventually won the presidency, taking lots of local folks with him to DC. Turns out, he wasn’t even the Democrats’ “Break glass in case of emergency” guy.

Around the same time, we saw the Chicago Bears drag out its 30-year-old playbook to demand a new stadium and use a town outside Chicago (Gary way back when, Arlington Heights in late 2022) to put pressure on the city and state to cave in to the team’s demands. Lots of folks just assumed it would work again. Nope.

And then White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf decided to defend his state stadium subsidy against the Bears by promising to build a new ballpark as long as he kept receiving state welfare. Too few people failed to see that the members of the current General Assembly simply weren’t going to literally stop the clock again so that the governor and the House Speaker (or Senate President, for that matter) could twist enough arms to seal a new deal before a dramatic midnight deadline. Those days are over. These days, it’s a half-billion dollars for quantum computing or an equal amount of state cash to spark investments by the electric vehicle industry.

And, of course, for months we were constantly reminded of the notorious 1968 Democratic National Convention violence as last week’s DNC approached.

There were some valid concerns, of course. I mean, the Chicago Police Department doesn’t have the greatest reputation.

There was also no doubt that some protesters would come to town itching for a street fight with the cops, using the Gaza war as pretext and trying to manifest the angry spirit of 1968 again this year.

And lots of young people throughout the nation have been angry about this war as many were about Vietnam (without the added personal threat of a compulsive military draft, of course). But while anti-Semitism has been intensely ugly since last October, we hadn’t seen any truly violent protests, even though Cook County has more Palestinian Americans than any county in the nation.

A smallish block-long protest the Sunday before the convention was intensely covered by the Chicago and national media, but the cops seemed to outnumber the protesters. Still, references to 1968 dotted the coverage, both on social media and in subsequent news stories, including that the protesters came near the Gen. John Logan Memorial statue, which was the scene of an epic battle between protesters and law enforcement back in 1968. At one point, protesters chanted the old line, “The whole world is watching!” during a scuffle that didn’t actually involve the police. It was almost silly.

The comparisons to 1968 kicked up a big notch when the news media reported rumors that 150 members of the National Guard had been deployed to the city. The National Guard, of course, battled protesters in the streets in ‘68. Those fights are a big reason why Chicago mayors have been super reluctant to call out the Guard in the decades since.

It turns out that far more than that were actually called up, but most had nothing to do with protest violence. It was mainly about terrorism or other disruptions. Hundreds of cyber security task force members, communications experts, chemical and biological response troops and explosive device experts were activated. Even some veterinarians were called up to care for bomb-sniffing dogs.

“They’re not called up to beat up protestors in Grant Park,” said one exasperated state official.

One protest outside the Israeli consulate turned violent when street fighters attacked a police line. Just a couple of protesters claimed minor injuries. Fewer than 60 were arrested, which is about a tenth the number arrested on the single most violent day of the 1968 convention.

It just didn’t pan out as some people clearly hoped.

All I’m saying here is that we need to live more in the present than in the past. Our aging president has dropped out of the race, and now our aging news media narratives need to do the same.

• Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.