Corruption Hangover Follows Election Night High

Dec. 10, 2008— -- A little more than a month ago, the world stared, transfixed and mostly starry-eyed at a park in Chicago where the city's most famous son -- who had done as good as a local boy can do -- declared victory in the presidential election.

Heady days followed for a city that if not for Barack Obama, would have made headlines this year primarily for its growing rate of gun violence. The president-elect headquartered his transition team in Chicago's Kluczynski Federal Building, the mayor ordered thousands of banners with the president-elect's likeness hung all over town and all the attention buoyed the city's collective hopes of winning the bid for the 2016 Olympic Games.

Despite -- or more likely because of -- the first family's residence in the Second City, much of Chicago's recent and, much less celebratory, news has also made national headlines.

Last week workers protested upcoming layoffs by taking over a window factory on the city's North Side. On Monday, the parent company of the Chicago Tribune, the city's oldest and most storied newspaper, declared bankruptcy. And Tuesday, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested and charged with corruption, completing the economics-culture-politics troika of bad news.

To be fair, Blagojevich works from the state capital in Springfield, but according to the Chicago Sun-Times in the last 30 years no less than 79 local elected officials have been convicted of a crime, including three Illinois governors, one Chicago mayor and 27 of the city's aldermen.

For some Chicagoans, this week's news is the little anticipated hangover to an Election Night high, changing the mood of the city from hopeful to downtrodden. But for many other locals, a corrupt politician and struggling economy are par for the course in the Windy City.

"There is this new gloomy sense to things," said Anna Tarkov, 28, who writes a local politics blog called DailyDaley for the Web site windycitizen.com. The blog is named for city Mayor Richard M Daley.

"People are saying, 'the Tribune declared bankruptcy yesterday, the governor was indicted today, what's going [to] happen Wednesday?' People are feeling different today than they were a week ago. It is different when you read about these sorts of things happening somewhere else, but when it hits close to home it's pretty depressing," Tarkov said hours after the governor's arrest Tuesday.