Spiegel Slings Mud, Sun-Times Pitches In
But in yet another Sun-Times postscript, a Spiegel vice president was allowed to make the city’s Lake Calumet offer sound like a joke. “If you go out there right now, where the building was to be situated,” general counsel Michael Moran told reporter Mary Ellen Podmolik, “I’d hope you were a very good swimmer because you’d be in 20 to 30 feet of water.”
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Swampland? Valerie Jarrett is commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development, and the Sun-Times editorial enraged her. Hard as she’d worked to accommodate Spiegel, the paper made it sound as if she’d been trying to fleece it. “It’s a comical image,” she told us. “You imagine we’re out there selling the Brooklyn Bridge in essence. I find that insulting.”
Even though Spiegel wants to break ground at a new site on November 30, a date so imminent the company probably knew a year ago it would be leaving Bridgeport, Jarrett says the city wasn’t told of Spiegel’s intentions until early this summer. It was August before Spiegel asked Chicago to nominate sites inside the city. Jarrett produced a list of five, none of which turned out to meet Spiegel’s specifications. But with a clearer idea of what Spiegel wanted, Jarrett came up with Lake Calumet. She says she and her team worked around the clock for a week packaging an offer. “I grilled the engineers. We grilled each other. We played a moot court–‘If you were Spiegel, what sort of questions would you have when you read this proposal?’ When I submitted that proposal I was confident that we had answered all the possible questions Spiegel would have. I’m not going to make these representations without feeling I had the backup necessary to deliver.”
“It sends a bad signal to recruitment in our office. It sends a bad signal to business. I’m more sensitive than I would be in the boom of the 80s, but right now it’s crucial for the private sector to have confidence in government. I’ve worked too hard to have a sloppy editorial in the Sun-Times or a flippant remark by a company jeopardize it.”
The Republican position as we understand it from the company George Bush keeps–from Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and some of the others–is that cultural war must be formally declared. Twelve years of Republican presidencies did not do God’s work to the extent He’d like it done, so now the God-fearing must make His work their own. Liberals, secular humanists, pornographers, and sodomites have held the nation in bondage way too long.
War is a grave matter. Bill Clinton wriggled out of Vietnam and he wriggled out of a clear position on the Persian Gulf, but this time his feet must be held to the fire. The question should chase him wherever he goes: Do you support a cultural war or don’t you? And if you don’t, who are you trying to protect?
