Today, with apologies to Richard Roeper, who created the format, you get five columns for the price of one—albeit brief ones, national and local:

First, in our (supposedly) newly invigorated dialog on race, are we really talking straight when it comes to a certain demographic that seems to be eluding Barack Obama? I speak here of white folks with less than college educations who earn below fifty grand a year. Somehow that demographic seems coterminous with what we used to call hard-hats or Reagan Democrats who started voting Republican largely on racial issues.

Somehow, a wealthy white Wellesley-grad woman lawyer from the Chicago suburbs seems to relate better to these folks than the half-black guy who bootstrapped himself into a Harvard law degree?

In a recent NYTimes piece interviewing Pennsylvanians in that demographic, almost all of them detailed why they were voting against Obama. Somehow they all began approximately “It has nothing to do with race, but…”

Do you suppose maybe it really does have something to do with race?
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Hillary Clinton gets caught in a real whopper about landing in Kosovo under sniper fire. Then she gets caught “mis-stating” the facts about an unfortunate woman who, with her child, died because a hospital turned them away because she had no insurance nor could she come up with a hundred bucks for the hospital.

Hillary used this anecdote to sell her health care plan the way Ronald Reagan invented the Cadillac-driving “welfare queen” to sell his welfare cutbacks.

Turns out Clinton’s woman actually had insurance, had the hundred, she and the child were both treated at the hospital, though, sadly, both did die. Clinton got that part right.

Clinton also purported to have helped bring peace to Northern Ireland—though her role was later exposed as being simply a “cheer leader” rather than a player. And on and on through a string of half-truths, mis-statements and outright lies that have caught up to her.

William Safire—not usually someone I look to for ideological guidance—ignited a firestorm years ago when he characterized Clinton as “a congenital liar.”
Do you suppose Safire actually got it right?
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While many are watching the corruption trial of Tony Rezko to see whether Obama’s name comes up again or whether Gov. Rod Blagojevich gets his whatchacallit caught in the wringer, I see it all as a wonderful window into the real workings of state government—as was the trial of former Gov. George Ryan. It’s like unscrewing the back of a watch to see what really makes the hands move.

See why people want to get on all those obscure boards and commissions. See the power they wield because of the hundreds of millions of dollars they get to throw here or there. Or, in some cases, the skim they pocket for themselves.

I’ll be writing more about this, but just consider the stunning case exposed a few days ago: Some people who wanted to develop a hospital in the suburbs—yes, a friggin’ hospital—had to pass out hundreds of thousands in bribes in order to get their multimillion-dollar project approved by the appropriate board.

Silly me—I always thought hospitals were eleemosynary institutions, built where needed to serve sick people. Never particularly thought of them as profit centers for greedy developers, but I’m still a babe in the woods at age 77.

Anyway, when hospital developers lay out their plans, do you suppose they routinely build the cost of bribery into their budgets? If the practice is universal, how much do you think it adds to the cost of health care in America?

Do you suppose our candidates’ universal health-care programs take this cost into account when figuring the tax bite?
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My pal McGooGoo—as Mike Royko dubbed politico-journalist-photographer Paul McGrath—proclaims he is part of the 19 percent minority of Americans who see the country headed in the right direction. Some 81 percent think it’s headed the wrong way.

“No, no,” says McGooGoo, pointing out that it looks as if Obama is going to be nominated, that he’ll become the next president and there will be huge majorities of Democrats in the senate and congress.

Do you suppose we’re actually headed in the right direction?
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Finally, I lament the passing of two giants of progressive-reform politics in Chicago.

Bob Mann was a beacon of principled liberalism and good government for decades in the state legislature—first with his Hyde Park partner Abner Mikva and with Anthony Scariano as part of the “kosher nostra.” Bob’s lasting monument may be writing the Illinois Housing Act, which eventually created tens of thousands of racially and economically integrated housing units for low and moderate-income families and the elderly. After yielding his seat to Carol Moseley Braun and Barbara Flynn Currie, he kept up the fight for civil rights and liberties on many fronts until illness sidelined him. Pretty good work for a guy who began by being slated by the Machine but turned fiercely independent on Day One.

Eugene Pincham has been eulogized as the legal champion of the underdog, which he proved almost every day of his adult life. One of the best lawyers this town ever produced, his peers flocked to the courtrooms for a master class whenever he delivered closing arguments. He was elected once to the county board and later as an appellate judge, but he shed those to run and fight independently for higher office, which he never attained but left his mark. His one excessive rhetorical preachment, reworking an old quote that anyone who lived south of the Loop who didn’t vote for Harold Washington “should be hung,” clearly blocked his ability to reach out for majority votes and win the high offices he well deserved.

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Don Rose, a veteran strategist for progressive civic and political causes, was press secretary for Martin Luther King, Jr. during his stay in Chicago as well as a number of Democratic and Republican campaigns ranging from Republican Bernard Carey for Cook county state’s attorney to Democrat Harold Washington for mayor and many, many others.. He is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.