Entries associated with the tag "Bruce Dold":

The Tribune has just endorsed Barack Obama for president in a graceful editorial that advises anyone thinking the Democrat is an empty suit that the Tribune has seen inside the suit and found an extraordinary person. The Tribune shrewdly invoked Abraham Lincoln, in whose presidency the paper's rooted. "The Tribune in its earliest days took up the abolition of slavery and linked itself to a powerful force for that cause -- the Republican Party," the editorial recalls. Thereafter, "conservative principles" guided the paper, which for reasons the Tribune does not elaborate on caused it to support every Republican presidential candidate for president, Lincolnesque or entirely otherwise, with the exceptions of independents Horace Greeley in 1872 and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. Those decisions "were driven by outrage at inept and corrupt business and political leaders."

Says the Tribune, putting it mildly, "We see parallels today."

So Obama's the first Democrat ever the Tribune could bring itself to get behind. I'm not as surprised as some Tribune readers -- not to mention staffers -- who simply couldn't imagine it happening. I wish the Tribune hadn't asked readers for input. I wish, for this occasion if none other, that the dim suits of old still ran the paper, so the endorsement could be hailed as reason at long last triumphing over habit. Instead, it's history made by a gang that wants Chicago to see how ready it is to smash some pottery.

But Bruce Dold remains editor of the editorial page, and his choice became the Tribune's choice, which isn't how it's necessarily worked in the past. And it's a good, sober, intelligent editorial. The Web site's already got hundreds of responses, and from the dissenters comes the usual stuff: "You people are about as open-minded as a rock," and "Are we supposed to be surprised?" and "What a crock." But it's a brand-new crop of dissenters.

Scott Stantis's father spent his career in local television, and Stantis grew up admiring those seigneurial TV personalities who are giants in the cities that they serve even if nobody's heard of them one state over. Stantis drew on this affection when he composed the editorial cartoon honoring the late John Drury that ran in Wednesday's Chicago Tribune. 

What Stantis didn't draw on was any particular sense of Drury himself. Stantis didn't grow up here, and for the past 11 years he's been the cartoonist for the News in Birmingham, Alabama. (He also draws one cartoon a week for USA Today, and a daily comic strip, Prickly City, that the Tribune used to carry.) Stantis keeps tabs with Chicago because the city fascinates him and also because he sends the Tribune the occasional Chicago-based cartoon. He's been doing that for years and more frequently in the past couple of months, since Bruce Dold, editor of the editorial page, called and encouraged him to.

Aside from the semiretired Dick Locher, the Tribune hasn't had a staff editorial cartoonist since Jeff MacNelly died seven years ago. Various cartoonists have thought they were within an inch of getting the job, and all were wrong. Oddly, Stantis isn't one of them -- even though he'd like the job and would happily come to Chicago for it, he's done a lot of cartoons for the Tribune already, and he believes that he and the Tribune are on the same wavelength politically. I told him it sounded as if he and the Tribune are in one of those office sitcom relationships where everyone but themselves can see it's a match. Except in this case, he said, one of us can see that too.

Ideally, he said, when something big happens in Chicago the story won't be complete until the city finds out in the morning what Stantis had to say about it. MacNelly didn't play that role -- he lived in Virginia and stuck to national issues. And in fact nobody's played that role in Chicago media since Mike Royko, and it could be that nobody will ever play it again. That show might be over.

The Chicago Children's Museum's plan to move off Navy Pier into a much larger new building proposed for the north end of Millennium Park enjoys a lot of high-powered support -- like the mayor, for instance. But the Chicago Tribune stands opposed. "A museum in Grant Park? No," said the blunt headline to a September 2 editorial making the paper's case. There's a ritualistic aspect to any debate about land usage in Grant Park, and the Tribune, sure enough, went back to the 1836 decree designating Chicago's lakefront as "Public Ground -- A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free."

From that proclamation, Lois Wille drew the title of her classic 1972 book telling the tale of Montgomery Ward's lonely turn-of-the-century legal struggle to defend the lakefront. Any Grant Park debate will cite Wille. Her history recalled that the Illinois Supreme Court banned buildings from the lakefront in 1897 and even museums in 1909. (The Tribune said the Art Institute was the grandfathered exception.) Wille used to run the Tribune's editorial page, and the Tribune naturally enlisted her book in its cause. The editorial informed us that "the Supreme Court 'conceded that a museum was a proper building to place in a public park,' Wille wrote. 'But the issue here was more than a park, the court said. The issue was open space' -- the preservation, decreed in 1836, of unobstructed views of Lake Michigan." In the Tribune's view Millennium Park is already "the camel's nose under the tent," and with the new museum on the east side of Columbus Drive, "Here comes the camel."

On Monday night the matter drew an overflow crowd to the Grant Park field house. Champions of the project dominated the mike time, and the moment of high drama arrived when museum publicist Jim Law unfurled a letter from Lois Wille herself repudiating the Tribune editorial.

"I resent the selective use of quotes from my book, 'Forever Open, Clear, and Free,' to justify the editorial's conclusions," she wrote. "I was offended, too, that as a past editorial page editor of the Tribune, I was not informed by either the current editorial page editor or the author who wrote the editorial that the Tribune would take this position and use my name and my book in an apparent attempt to buttress their arguments. A few weeks ago, Bruce Dold [present head of the editorial page] asked me how I felt about a new Children's Museum on East Randolph in Daley Bicentennial Plaza. I responded that I was enthusiastic about the plans and the site and gave a detailed explanation of my reasoning. I didn't hear from him again."

What was that all about?  

I called Wille and she made the following points: That the Art Institute was not grandfathered in -- it was too low to trouble Michigan Avenue property owners such as Ward. That if the editorial was going to quote from her book it shouldn't have neglected the central issue of obstructed views. That the Harris Theater on Randolph Drive was redesigned to make it lower and put most of it below street level and that the museum has been designed the same way. That in her view "clustering cultural entertainment" along East Randolph is OK "if they're low." And that if the museum is built the Gehry Bridge over Columbus Drive from Millennium Park will finally lead somewhere.

"They had a perfect right to quote my book -- it's out there," said Wille, "but when you leave out the part about 'does it obstruct the view?' I think you're leaving out a really key element. You can also say that if what they quoted was followed today, that whole area would be meadowland, which might be pretty but it wouldn't attract tens of thousands of people from throughout the area." 

She sent the letter Law quoted from to Gigi Pritzker Pucker, chairman of the Children's Museum, and she sent a letter that said a lot of the same things to Ann Marie Lipinski, editor of the Tribune, with copies to Dold and to John McCormick, who wrote the editorial. Dold got back to her.

Are there other issues? I asked. "We have a good relationship," Wille declared. "I'm fond of him [Dold], and most of the stuff I like."

Dold told me by e-mail that he owns a "dog-eared copy" of Forever Open, Clear, and Free. He said, "The editorial board had two lengthy discussions about the project and ultimately decided to oppose it for the reasons cited in the editorial. I know Lois believes the museum qualifies as an exception to the restrictions on building in Grant Park, but I disagree with her conclusion. Lois wrote the definitive book on the fight to keep the lakefront open. We cited facts in her book and attributed the information to the source. To maintain a sense of fairness, we don't tip anyone in advance about a position the board is going to take. So I didn't feel as though I could tell Lois in advance what position we planned to take. I have invited her to write an op-ed in support of the project, but she has declined."

A while later he wrote again. "She's a wonderful, wonderful person and a mentor to me," Dold said. "I have tremendous respect for her."

When I wrote a Hot Type column a couple of weeks ago lashing the Republican National Committee for its campaign to get the faithful to send newspapers automated, prewritten letters championing the president, I fortunately added the caveat that the GOP isn't the only culprit. That column hadn't even hit the streets when Bruce Dold, who edits the Tribune's editorial pages, alerted me that it was happening again and this time the left was responsible. The Tribune had gotten a couple of letters that began, "It's deja vu all over again. The Bush administration, having mired us in a war in Iraq, is now preparing an attack on Iran." The letters then lashed the media for "echoing unconfirmed allegations" that Iran was smuggling bombs into Iraq. "Have we learned nothing from the last run-up to war?"

Dold had no intention of publishing either of these letters, but he wondered where they were coming from.

The answer is CodePink, a national women's peace organization based in California. Its Web site asserts, "We need to tell the press that now is the time to ask serious questions instead of blindly supporting the administration's headlong rush into another tragic and unnecessary war. Please contact media outlets and tell them we demand a critical, vigilant press. Click here to send your letter now!" Three clicks later you will have chosen a newspaper and will now be facing the letter text CodePink has already written for you. One more click and off it goes. One of the letters the Tribune got was from novelist Sara Paretsky. "I changed the headline and rewrote the text," she says, "but their program apparently would only send their text."

So nothing could be simpler--and few blows struck for peace will have less impact. CodePink cofounder Jodie Evans in Venice, California, told me that about 3,000 people had "clicked through" and sent the letter. She had no idea how many papers had published it. About a dozen, according to my computer search, most of them tiny. Generating these letters is increasingly a losing proposition. If a paper gets the letter from just one reader it might print it--for what that's worth. If it gets it from lots of readers--thereby showing the paper how high feelings are running in the grassroots (that's the theory)--or even from two readers, the game is up.