jackconaty's Blog

Paul Newman's magnificent career included a 60's classic called "Cool Hand Luke".  It was a story of about alienation and rebellion, a prison chain gang drifter who tried and failed to beat the system.  But the failure to communicate in this presidential campaign may yet leave many voters wondering about the system too.  The vice-presidential debate is a case in point.  Like all the nationally televised debates its one part TV quiz show and two parts stump speech.  The country is in the throes of the greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression, but in 90 minutes there was no indication from either candidate that the solution to that required anything more "wall street reform" and changes in the tax code...more or less you take your pick.  Neither Biden nor Palin coul;d or would address the obvious.  The next administration is going in with handcuffs,  chained to a series of economic realties that will likely require tax increases, spending cuts and a whole lot of pain.  The economic problems will have a negative effect on American foreign policy and on the future of millions of younger people who will also see their options narrowed and their expectations lowered.  But don't look for a "shout out" about all of this until next January.  One candidate is embracing "hope" and the other "change" but neither campaign can or will tell voters tabout the grim realities.  What we have here is a failure to communicate...at least for now.     

1. When I was a kid I played hockey.  One of coaches in those formative years gave my team a very interesting pep talk before a key game against an opponent whose goalie had been hit in the face with a puck just the week before.  "The first three or four shots you take shoot at his face...let's see if he's puck shy."  Self described "hockey mom" Governor Sarah Palin could have given that advice too.  She came out on stage last night here in St. Paul with many delegates holding their breath and don't let them tell you they weren't.  But she warmed them up with some warm and fuzzy stuff about her background and family, and then began firing slap shots.  The Obama people still aren't sure what hit them.  She ridiculed Obama's credentials as a community organizer, taunted him about writing two memoirs but no legislation and suggested he used the word "change" to advance his career while her man John McCain used his career to advance change.  The Obama people say she delivered the speech with " snide efficiency" but you could almost feel them flinch.  Just one week ago, Barack Obama was in Bill Clinton's words, "on the right side of history."  Now he's being forced to share his seat.  The Palin speech drew an enormous TV audience, only slightly smaller than Obama attracted with his extravaganza in Denver. But as all hockey moms know, the puck never stays down one end of the rink for long.  Having proved herself a tough, articulate competitor under enormous pressure, Palin can be  sure she will never be underestimated again.  Actually, it took some pressure off Joe Biden because now he can take off the gloves and go after her without the same risk of being labeled a sexist or condescending.  The Palin-Biden debate will also attract a huge audience and she may find it's a lot easier ridiculing "a Washington insider" than it is debating him on subjects he's been dealing with for decades.  She passed her first test with flying colors. But there will be more shots at her head from the media and her opponents before the game goes on much longer.     

It was always going to be a risk.  But remember John McCain once made his living flying A4 fighter jets off aircraft carriers.  He knows something about risk.  Given up for dead in the primaries, he fought his way back against the Republican establishment and won the nomination. "Maverick", you may remember, was the Navy nickname for the character Tom Cruise portrayed in the movie "Top Gun."  Here in St. Paul, they're already selling McCain's vice presidential selection as a maverick too.  I don't know much about Governor Sarah Palin from Alaska.  Her path to this speech tonight has been improbable and perhaps problematic.  But my gut tells me she's going to be a big hit tonight and surprise a great many people who still wonder why she's on the ticket.  Conservatives love her and I think more importantly she addresses the real overarching issue in this campaign, generational change.  Palin was born the same year the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater.  But no one since Ronald Reagan has really galvanized the conservative base Goldwater established like Palin promises to do.  Look for her to do a little media bashing and much of it may be justified.  The feeding frenzy over the revelation of her teenage daughter's pregnancy is red meat to people in the red states, a reminder of  everything they don't like about the way the "mainstream" media now operates in this country.  And no less than "America's Mayor" will give the warm-up speech in prime time.  McCain has just signaled the flight crew to fire up the catapault...it's going to be a wide ride.

It's day two...or is it really day one...of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.  Delegates from Illinois won't say it on camera, but they're as gloomy as the skies here this morning.  They don't like the narrative that's developed so far.  The focus is not on John McCain.  It's on his choice for vice president.  When they arrived on Sunday, most I talked with were upbeat.  They seemed to believe Sarah Palin was a surprising but energizing addition to the ticket.  Now they seem nervous about whether or not she has really been properly vetted and what that might say about the McCain campaign.  No change of heart about all of this, just some uneasy feelings.  Fox News polling indicates Barack Obama has a comfortable lead in Illinois but not as large a lead as one might first suspect.  The latest Rasmussen poll had Obama up by fifteen points.  What that means to delegates here is that Republican candidates down the ballot may not take as big a hit as first feared.  And that now infamous video of the Blagojevich-Madigan hug in Denver is going to make it into direct mail campaign literature this Fall.  No less than the most popular Republican in the state, Jim Edgar, now says he believes Blagojevich will not run for re-election.  That is not what anyone says in the Governor's office.  So what happens at the top here in St. Paul matters a great deal, even for Repubicans in Obama's home state.  They believe Palin can get by any controversy surrounding her family and most agree with Obama that family members should be off limits in this campaign anyway. But they don't want any more surprises.  I'm making appearances every morning on WLS radio in Chicago with Jerry Agar and again with Roe Conn in the afternoons.  And of course we'll have the full coverage of today's events on Fox Chicago News at Nine.  

When I was a kid I used to spend a lot time thinking about how hard it would be to hit a home run to dead center in the old Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds in New York.  I mention that now to give you a sense of what may be a problme with this outdoor venue at Mile High Stadium in Denver for the most important speech in Barack Obama's career.  No one here in the media, or by all accounts in the campaign, is quite sure how this is all going to work tonight.  There will not be many viewers who have anything but dim memories of the last time the Democrats tried this in Los Angeles with Jack Kennedy in 1960.  The thinking in the campaign is the large outdoor football field will demonstrate how inclusive the Obama people want this presidential bid to be.  The very fact that the crowd will be so large, at least 75,000 plus, will no doubt send a message about how well the campaign can organize and the enormous appeal Obama can generate among his supporters.  But there's a reason this sort of thing has not been done for almost fifty years.  There is a risk it will appear a bit too grandiose and play to the "rock star" syndrome the Repubicans have already so masterfully used against Obama.  Will the very dynamics of an open field add power to the message of his words or diminish it?  It's a football field and I know my metaphor limps but even if Obama makes great contact can he reach the center field fence?  And that's really what this speech is all about tonight...reaching the millions of voters in the political center who will decide the outcome of what I still believe will be a very close election.  The challenge for the Obama people goes beyond demonstrating the ability to stage a huge rally.  This is the speech where Obama has to tell us what "change" is going to look like if he's the next president.  Even younger voters are telling me they're worried about "paying the price and bearing the burden" of a Democratic solution to America's problems.  So the bases are loaded and that center field fence is a long way off.   Millions of independent voters will be watching tonight to see if Obama can reach it.

The view from the podium at the Democratic National Covention underlines the intimate nature of the view from the speaker's rostrum.  The teleprompter and timing clock are clearly visible head on and you can easily see the faces of the people in the Illinois delegation who are seated front and center.  After congressman Rahm Emanuel made his speech he made his way back up to us in a spot designated for one on one interviews.  Emanuel is a genuine power broker in the party and the man widely credited, and justifiably so, with the Democrats' success in reclaiming power on Capitol Hill in 2006.  In personal conversations he reminds one of the character "Ari" on the TV series "Entourage" and that is no coincidence.  The character played by Chicagoan Jeremy Piven is based on Emanuel's brother who is a talent agent in Hollywood.  But I digress. Emanuel is a numbers cruncher with polling and people on the ground in every battle ground state in this election.  He concedes the polling shows the race is a toss up right now but insists that in key battleground states the polling and voter registration suggests Democrats are gaining new strength and he says that will eventually benefit Barack Obama as well.  The turning point in the race will not be the conventions, he says, it will be the debates the first of which takes place in Oxford, Mississippi September 26.  After the last debate in October, Emanuel says one candidate will "break out" and of course he thinks that will be Obama.  Political polling is conducted for hard information and results.  Media polling is conducted to create stories.  Let's see if the view from the podium here in Denvel is right. 

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On the ground, this time in Denver, and you can cut the tension with a knife.  By this point in the campaign...any presidential campaign...party unity is a given.  Not here.  The Obama people have their hands full with stories of disgruntled Clinton supporters and there are many.  Del Marie Cobb, the Chicago based political consultant, is on record saying she believes the Clinton supporters are getting short shrift...despite two prime time speaking slots and a video.  And Obama's shrinking poll numbers have others suggesting " we told you so", Obama can't win.  In thirteen political conventions I have never seen anything quite like it.  Well, perhaps the Republicans back in 1992 with all the talk of "culture wars" and the party infighting.  And we all know how well that worked out for them.  And by the way, while most of Illinois' top Democrats get a turn at the podium here tonight...the democratic governor remains back home signing ethics legislation that suggests the party is challenged on that point.  All eyes on Michelle Obama tonight but look for the tribute to Ted Kennedy to be the emotional highlight of day one.  I'm political editor Jack Conaty from Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.  

The older guy leaving the Obama event didn't look like he was having fun.  "First it was freezing, now it's too hot" he said.  "Which was worse?"  I asked.  "The heat." he quickly replied.  It was uncomfortable in Springfield but the weather was just part of it.  Senator Joe Biden is a good man, a solid choice but his selection was in a sense the antithesis of what had occured in front of the old state capitol building 19 months before.  He's passionate, articulate and genuine.  But he's a charter member of the old boys club in Washington and, at least at first blush, anything but an agent of change.  The message Obama carried with him on that icey day in the winter of 2007 was delivered under clear blue skies and crystal clear.  He was all about changing the way business is done in Washington.  But in covering his career for almost a decade, I have seen a clear-eyed pragmatist who is prepared to do whatever it takes to win.  Obama is still chained to the pedestal of "changing the tone of our public discourse."  Biden is not.  And with polls showing this race very close and in fact trending against Obama, the tone in this race is changing quickly.  It's going negative and it will likely stay there.  Biden is brilliant, tough and clearrly not afraid to attack an opponent he has served with for years in the Senate.  Watching the men on stage, and the rather awkward shuffling after the speeches (not to mention the gaffes) I did not get the sense the two are close or even yet entirely comfortable with each other.  They will not appear together at the convention in Denver or anytime before.  But Biden is the heat and clearly the Obama people now believe it was time to counteract the sense that their candidate was just a little too cool and cerebral for the lunch bucket crowd whose votes they need desperately on November 4th.  When clouds appeared over the event in Springfield the crowd actually cheered.  The blue sky message of that bright February day 19 months ago is gone but it may be replaced by one that acknowledges the heat and haze of a presidential campaign that will be decided by voters who are worried about the clouds in their own economic future.  In that sense Biden may help.  His expertise in foreign affairs will help too even if it underlines the very weakness in the man at the top of the ticket that has many voters worried.  The older guy I spoke too was right.  The heat is worse but tis the season in presidential politics and the failure to embrace can only lead to cold and lonely winds for Democrats in November.  

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The big moment could come at any moment.  Barack Obama's choice for a running mate is going to tell us a great deal about him and where he thinks his campaign is right now.  As little as two weeks ago, I would have said that Hillary Clinton was not just a long shot but a lost cause.  But these two weeks have shown Obama's candidacy weakening.  The so-called Britney Spears-Paris Hilton "celebrity" commercial, which I think is one of the best political attack ads in the last twenty years, cut to a raw nerve in Obama's campaign....the doubts even some of his most fervent supporters have about whether he's ready.  We know he's a rock star but is he the rock hard realist Americans want in the Oval Office?  Senator Joe Biden has the passion, the intelligence and the experience to be president.  But he may not be what the Obama campaign needs right now.  It needs a shot of adrenaline, a spark, a surge.   For better or worse, the only running mate that will guarantee that outcome is Hillary Clinton.  The stories are true, the candidates do not like each other and their campaign operations did not like each other.  But the presidency is all about hard decisions, compromises and results.  If Obama selects Clinton he demonstrates the ruthless ambition Americans expect in a presidential candidate.  In one dramatic move, he justifies the role the Clintons will play in the upcoming convention, offers the only olive branch many fifty something feminists will now accept in return for their support, and shows a fearless determination to do what he must do to win.  Many of Obama's hard core supporters will see it as a sell-out.  But the clear-eyed assesment would be that Obama did what he had to do to close the deal.  If you can't deal with the Clitnons how will you deal with a crisis abroad?  It's time to send that message about leadership no speech in Denver, no matter how well crafted or delivered, can accomplish.

  

West Virginia is a beautiful state.  You didn't get to see much of it in the political coverage.  Like so much of this campaign it was reduced to a few carefully staged political events and then the inevitable exit polls.  By now you know it's very white, largely undereducated and very poor.  An easy place for the political elites to write off.  But that's a mistake and for the Obama campaign it could be a critical mistake.  No Democrat has won the White House since 1916 without winning there.  West Virginians liked Jack Kennedy in 1960 but they loved Bobby in 1968.  Robert Kennedy seemed to touch people there in a way no political candidate had before or has since. There's a lot of talk about a "new political paradigm" in this election and how the Obama campaign will define it.  But there's a little bit of West Virginia in a number of states the Democrats will need this November and that's why what John Edwards did on Wednesday was so important.

The temptation is to give David Axelrod another thundering round of applause for his brilliant sense of timing.  He handled the Edward's announcement with such skill you might be tempted to overlook just what he accomplished.  He changed the lead political story on the network newscasts (and on cable) less than two hours to air.  He deflated Hillary Clinton's thundering win in West Virginia and put the spotlight back on Obama and "the angry white guy."  Maybe you have to work in the news business, as David did, to understand how hard it is to hijack air time on the traditional network newscasts.  But on ABC, the Edwards endorsement grabbed almost five times the coverage it would have gotten if Edwards had done it at noon.  The spin, at least initially, is Edwards made his belated endorsement to try and unify the party at moment when a lot of angry white guys and white women in West Virginia sent another message.  But be careful and remember that what makes you feel that good can make you feel that bad.

Barack Obama and John Edwards did look like a "dream team" on stage in Grand Rapids, in a state that has its own share of angry white guys.  But Edwards alone can't  make the Obama message resonate with these folks.  Obama must find his own voice with these voters and he hasn't yet.  He has to develop a comfort level with these people and display a genuine empathy for the things that anger them.  He touched on these themes in his speech on race in Philadelphia but he's got to prove he can take it off the podium and down into the street.  Many of these people felt like Ronald Reagan, felt they did not leave the Democratic Party but the party left them.  They have no more in common with a Hollywood movie star than a Harvard lawyer.  The trick is the connection, the ability to relate to the reasons they stay in those small towns in West Virginia.  The geographic beauty is a part of it.  So too is the pride and sense of patriotism.  All they want is a fair shake in a global economy and some gratitude for the sacrafices so many families have made in the name of national defense.  Edwards knows it because he grew up in the region and undertands the culture.  Obama knows it too.  But he has to prove the politics of a post racial candidate will be as color blind as the rhetoric.  It's not going to easy and some will never be convinced.  But this too is part of that new political paradigm.      

Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist told reporters Tuesday night that the Obama team "has a lot to celebrate and they (the Clintons) have a lot to think about."  The implication from David Axelrod is clear...the time for "spin control" is over in the Clinton camp.  A parade of network commentators and analysts have declared the race over.  But the TV networks and newspaper columnists aren't calling the shots.  The stunning headline on one of Clinton's hometown newspapers seemed to say it all.  A photo of her and the headline  "Toast"  greeted readers of the New York Post.  A prominent website reports superdelegates are "unavailable" to meet with Hillary Clinton right now.  But all indications from the Clinton camp, including strategist Howard Wolfson, are the campaign will go on.

As we noted on this blog last week, the controversy over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was handled expertly and the timing of his outburst and Obama's denunciation was as choreographed as an Olympic figure skating event.  Clinton's call for a federal "gas tax holiday" this summer was adroitly played as an example of old style Washington political pandering.  She looked very good on the campaign trail....better than her obviously fatigued opponent.  But it now appears that will play like a ballplayer going four for four while his team gets clobbered.  In American politics, there are no extra points awarded (or delegates for that matter) for good performances when you're campaign is outspent.  Losing is losing.  Clinton was clobbered in North Carolina and barely survived a last minute Obama onslaught in Indiana.  Her options and her money are dwindling quickly.  And to what end?  What is the rationale now to continue?  Is there something she and her husband know about Obama that will make him ultimately unelectable?  Or will the charge of the light brigade continue with a motivation born only of ego and ambition?  Last night in his speech, Obama again hit stride telling the country why he wants to be president.  One major reason is to try and put aside the politics of division.  Is it time for her to get out?  And who, if anyone in the Democratic Party, has the stature to tell her and her husband it's over.   Obama campaign co-chair Bill Daley says no one.  He told "Fox Chicago Sunday" the race will go down to the bitter end in June and only then will it end.

There's no evidence yet he's wrong and no amount of "fuzzy math" in the Clinton campaign will change what has now become the inevitable outcome. 

   

 

Did he look angry or sad?  Was he disgusted or hurt?  Should all of this have happened much sooner?

Senator Barack Obama does not speak as fast as some in the media would like.  In TV soundbite form he runs long, complete with pauses and what sometimes appears to be a superior intellect in search of the perfect word.  For far too long, glib has passed for intelligent and there's always that ever shortening attention span that sometimes appears to contracting faster in America than the GNP.  But this time it worked for Obama and it may well become the defining moment of his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright said Monday that "politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."  I think he meant that to be construed as a criticism.  But Wright has the cadences and the myopia of the 1960's.  His anger and his demeanor have been forged in the crucible of the african-american experience of that period.  When he references "liberation theology" he often cites 60's era thinkers and writers.  But for a man so filled with antipathy to the soundbite culture of the 21st century, he clings to that annoying habit that some men of the cloth wear so easily.  He will use one-liners from Jesus lifted from scripture without concern for context or extrapolation.

The Obama campaign knew this confrontation was coming.  They made the decision that Wright would have to explain Wright and not Obama.  While Wright gave every impression of ego-centric narcissim at the podium in the National Press Club in Washington Monday, his appearance there was no accident any more than were his stops before the NAACP in Detroit or with Bill Moyers on PBS.  The results of the exit polls in Pennsylvania were indisputable.  Wright and those oft-played snippets of his fiery sermons were hurting the Obama campaign.  It had to end and it wasn't going to be pretty.  But please don't think that Jeremiah Wright got out of bed on Monday morning determined to end Obama's candidacy.  He had cancelled all of his public appearances when his "sermonettes" became a national controversy late last month.  He could have cancelled all the latest ones too and probably would have if asked.  The Obama campaign disputes this and says Obama really didn't know what Wright said until his aides showed him a video of Wright's seemingly arrogant and ignorant performance on Tuesday morning.  I don't buy that.  Obama goes out and plays basketball,  watches the Wright video and seemingly without breaking stride goes out and holds the most important press conference of his career.  Watch it again carefully.  He knows exactly what he's saying and knows exactly what he wants you to know about why he's saying it.

This isn't about the upcoming votes in North Carolina and Indiana. Not really.  Obama's statements yesterday will probably not change the outcome in either state.  North Carolina will be closer than it should have been though he will most likely win.  I think he will lose in Indiana.  But when it's all said and done he will net a few more delegates than Hillary Clinton.  So yesterday's press conference and comments were aimed at the superdelegates. Most of those who haven't yet commited publicly yet are reportedly leaning towards Obama.  But they were getting nervous about his erosion of support from "angry white males." and worried about what six months of Jeremiah Wright "swift boat" TV ads would look like and the damage it would do to his campaign in the general election.

Remember the first of those ads was set to air in North Carolina on Monday.  Instead Wright took center stage in Washington...Obama took center stage on Tuesday in North Carolina and by Wednesday the "Wright in the pulpit" ad is dated and somewhat anachronistic.  The Obama versus Wright confrontation may have looked like a car wreck but it was as carefully orchestrated as a crash scene in a Hollywood film.  And just like in Hollywood, in the end, no one really gets hurt.

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On Fox Chicago Sunday, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod gave us the politically correct answer.  The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is his own man and he speaks for himself....not the campaign.  Fair enough, but not far enough.  Wright was a part of the campaign on an advisory basis until he became the living embodiment of what many Americans have since learned is called a "sound bite" in the media.  The ten or twenty or thirty second video clips honed from Wright's sermons over the years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago have been the way Wright has been defined to millions of voters...but now he's redefining himself.  Axelrod would not say this is a campaign tactic, but I will.  Let Wright explain Wright instead of Obama explaining Wright.

 

The Reverend Wright says attacks on him are really attacks on the black church in America.  He says the church has a long history of liberating the oppressed by feeding the hungry, treating the addicted and marching for civil rights.  He himself draws the line with Obama calling himself a pastor and Obama a politician.  Wright says he hopes the controversy surrounding him will have a positive outcome by sparking and honest dialogue about race in America.  Obama said at least that much himself in his speech on race in Philadelphia earlier this month.  But in the midst of the dialogue and the dialectic...what happens to Obama's post-racial identity politics campaign theme.  Can it survive?

 

That is the enormous gamble Obama's advisors are making with this string of public appearances by his former pastor.  Axelrod, one of the most brilliant political strategists in the country, lives by the axiom that "anger doesn't sell on the campaign trail."  The selling of Barack Obama depends in large part on the notion that America can leave the politics of confrontation and embrace the politics of conciliation.  That was the reason some African-American political leaders had a problem with his candidacy right from the start.   "There is no black America or white America" made for a wonderful speech in Boston four years ago, but to find the full text of that speech you still have to look under "dreams."  To millions of Americans, Obama's candidacy does represent an historic opportunity to get beyond the politics of racial division once and for all.  But his challenge now is selling that to the lower-middle class white voters who believe, fairly or unfairly, that they have been asked to pick up the largest tab on racial reparations in America. How well he can do that, or perhaps now, if he can do that, may well determine whether he is a Jack Kennedy or an Adlai Stevenson.  

 

Watch the complete David Axelrod interview here

The Pennsylvania primary is now history.  We're reminded one more time that some white voters...particularly women over 55 and lower middle class white men are still not convinced Barack Obama is the best choice.  His campaign spent more than $11 million dollars there...some of it on negative advertising...and he still got whacked.  He told me he didn't expect to win there but his campaign didn't expect to lose by nine points either.

Conventional wisdom says Hillary Clinton needs a "narrative" to reinvent herself for the super delegates...give them some reason to look closely at her for the top spot again.  That may never happen.  If Obama wins as expected in North Carolina and Indiana the race is all but over.  She can't really catch him in the delegate count or the popular vote.  But she has done damage to his candidacy, perhaps not irreparable, but real.  His speech in Evansville last night was flat, he looked weary and the soaring rhetoric wasn't there.  The politics of distraction and personal destruction are wearing on him and giving some voters pause about where it all goes from here.  The so-called "angry white man" vote will never be his nor will the women Maureen Dowd calls the "shoulder pad feminists."  But in this age of ever shortening attention spans and the American Idol syndrome of instant voter gratification, Obama and his people have to worry about a sense of voter fatigue and over exposure.  It all appears to be getting too petty, too similar to the politics he says he got into this race to change.

Pat Buchanan suggests Obama "has peaked" and like a ballplayer after a hitting streak  gone sour he's taking too many pitches with two strikes.  It's not good enough to back into the nomination, he has to impart the sense that he's won it.  For lack of a better phrase, he has to "keep the dream alive."  And it would help if he could find a narrative that convinces those "angry white man" that he understands them as well as he understood the anger of his pastor Jeremiah Wright.  He does, of course, but he's got to make the case with his gut as well as his head.  Hillary and Bill Clinton can't let their dream go no matter how implausible it becomes.  Barack Obama can't let the Cllinton  politics destroy his.    

I first got to know Pat more than twenty years ago.  He was my guide to what was happening while I did what are called "ride-alongs" with the Chicago Police Department.  It was a new and exotic world to me.  But Camden patiently explained why things we're done as they were done in District 11# on the west side of Chicago.

The Chicago Police Department has to handle the dirty laundry the rest of us don't want to see.  The cops don't create poverty and they deal with the corrupting influence of drug trafficking that has turned big-city police departments into the equivalent of occupying armies.   Street busts build statistics and put a lot of people behind bars....but that sort of policing does not curb the insatiable appetite of middle-class and upper middle class drug users.

Pat took me into a world I didn"t have the credentials to join...a world of teenage and pre-teen drug dealers sparring with cops in a seemingly endless game.  In fact, the critically acclaimed T-V series "The Wire" calls it "the game."  Pat likes that series because it's the only thing on television that can even resemble the life he's known on the department.  "There is no such thing as a non-political police department" Pat says and of course he's right.  Crime statistics can be manipulated, cops can and do go bad, and all of it reflects on the man in charge at City Hall. 

In his dealings with the media, Pat was honest if not always forgiving.  The false urgency of the evening news and its obsession with street crime bothered him.  But day in and day out he would hang in there....extremely careful about what he said and how he said it.

The new top cop Jody Weis wants a new face on the often bad news.  He has a right to make any changes he wants.  But there may come a day in the not too distant future when he'll wish he had Camden back there.  Intelligence and experience aren't easily replaced.