Now this was news. An Illinois plan to annex Green Bay from the Badger State to the north to “protect itself against enemies, foreign and domestic.” But only after the Land of Lincoln had renamed Lake Michigan as “Lake Illinois.”
“I am here today to make an important announcement. The world’s finest geographers, experts who study the Earth’s natural environment, have concluded a decades-long council, and determined that a Great Lake deserves to be named after a great state,” and so on. Well played, Governor Pritzker.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to [eff] things up,” that wordsmith Barack Obama once said. Sure enough, as Democratic recriminations and angst, nay, anger, over the blown 2024 presidential election continue to appear in the media, it’s worth remembering that while Biden declined to get out of the race in the summer of 2023, in time for what could have been a healthy primary contest, instead waiting for a crisis 12 months later, The Great Gray Times called JB Pritzker the “in case of emergency break glass” candidate almost exactly two years ago.
In light of Kamala Harris’s oft-cited 1.47-percent loss in the popular vote, with the new misogyny playing a part, of course, Pritzker looms large, very large, as the coulda-been and possibly future Democratic savior.
And no, his weight is no liability. On the contrary, it’s to his electoral benefit that he looks like a Teamsters boss. There’s no way the Dems’ next nominee can be anything other than a tough guy.
Or wise guy. “I salute the Wieners Circle, not Nazis,” was how Pritzker clapped back at Elon Musk after a social media dig at his girth, referring to a famous Chicago hot dog stand.
Regarding what to the casual observer might be his other main liability, his Judaism, it is nonesuch. For one thing, he wouldn’t turn his back on the de facto leader of the free world, Volodymyr Zelensky. As Pritzker has said, his own great-grandparents were Ukrainian — they fled there for their lives, that is, going on to make something of life here. A big something.
And this is his true liability. As heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune, he’s a billionaire. A real billionaire, not a highly leveraged one like the current White House occupant. Before long the pitchforks may be coming for the plutocrats, but in the meantime, this is the world we’ve made, and you go to war with the army you have, as it were. If there’s a black sheep “pragmatic progressive” to be found among the ruling class, the working stiffs just might wise up and take a shine to him.
Only 1,341 days till Election Day.