A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Noooooooooo!!!

Say it ain't so!  The Chicago Tribune is reporting today that Rahm "Rahmbo" Emanuel says that he wants to be the next mayor of my beloved Chicago.

"I hope Mayor [Richard] Daley seeks re-election. I will work and support him if he seeks re-election," Emanuel told Charlie Rose on the host's PBS talk show, in an interview broadcast Monday night. "But if Mayor Daley doesn't, one day I would like to run for mayor of the city of Chicago. That's always been an aspiration of mine, even when I was in the House of Representatives."

In January, after The Washington Post reported that Emanuel, a one-time Daley aide and longtime supporter of the mayor, was mulling a mayoral run, Emanuel did not deny the report. He instead said in statement that he was "100 percent focused on the job at hand: serving President Obama as his chief of staff."

The citizens of big cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans wonder why corruption reigns supreme, why the bureaucracies are always so wildly ineffective and inefficient, and why things never seem to change.  The answer is of course complex and layered in a dizzying array of supplemental causes, but the heart of the problem is the worldview liberal Democrats like Rahm Emanuel (and his current boss) deeply hold.

He believes in bigger government, regardless the results.  He believes that "experts" from Ivy League schools can engineer society from their ivory towers.  He believes that centralization of power is key to solving a city, state, and country's woes.

What a city like Chicago needs, and I can't believe I'm saying this, is a Ron Paul-type to rein in spending, cut budgets, and make fiscal responsibility a higher priority than the arbitrarily-defined "social justice" that bleeding-heart liberals from Berkeley to Boston use to ruin economies, undermine private property, and encroach on Americans' individual rights.

Stay in D.C. for Obama's one term, Rahmbo.