Unfinished Business-- With Miguel del Valle in Andersonville

Because Steven Spielberg neglected to send me $50,000 this month, I decided to ride the bus rather than jet down to Andersonville, the northside neighborhood where Miguel del Valle was spending some time today. We had a great day, walking around meeting the locals.

I’m involved in this race because the whole ed reform drama is being played out in Chicago. On the one hand, we have Rahm Emanuel, who in interviews tends to downplay the fact that he’s utterly and completely in Bill Gates’ pocket on the question of public education. On the other hand we have Miguel del Valle, whose view of public education is more democratic and more nuanced and not driven by inappropriate, market analogies that frankly have no place in the discussion. You might read here for an idea of what I’m talking about. You'd go to Miguel del Valle to talk about building up a school; you'd go to Rahm to talk about tearing one down.

Anyway, here’s some video from the day. You’re going to see a little bit of Andersonville from the bus, and then you’ll see state representative Robyn Gabel endorsing Miguel-- you might remember some of her vocabulary (“justice,” “fairness,”) from the types of speeches that Democrats used to give. Then there’s a rousing endorsement from legendary activist, author, and labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan, who does a magnificent job of pointing out that there’s really only one progressive in this race. Then we’ll see a little bit of Miguel talking about education funding, a basic equity issue that Democrats used to talk about before people like Rahm started focusing exclusively on blaming urban teachers for everything. We haven't heard anyone lead on this issue since Dawn Clark Netsch-- Miguel calls it the "unfinished business" of our state, and I couldn't agree more.

Then you’ll hear a mysterious blogger asking Miguel about what’s going on in the Democratic party, followed by a little bit of me eavesdropping on a transportation discussion. May I just go on the record as having always wished for an improved Western Avenue bus service? Finally, you’ll see a little birthday frivolity-- it was Katy Hogan’s birthday. She owns the Heartland Cafe, where Barack Obama started his campaign for president, long before he was dragged to the right by among others a certain carpetbagging investment banker whose core constituency writes much bigger checks than you or I could ever dream of doing.

It was a nice day, a fun day. January in Chicago is no picnic but when you’re around warm people, you forget the weather.



Here are some additional pictures. I'm actualy just testing the Flikr slideshow embedder thingy here; these aren't the best photos in the world.