The Invisible Man
In an election year in Chicago there is always some political neophyte like Ray Smith with good credentials, not much money, and no name recognition who runs for a major office and makes no headway whatever.
On the other hand, Neal doted on Partee.
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The Smith campaign’s one big splash was a series of full-page ads last December in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin designed to introduce himself to the region’s lawyers. If you read the Daily Law Bulletin instead of the Sun- Times you would have known about his reform platform, in which he said he’d:
ask law firms to grant their young litigators two-year leaves to work as prosecutors, thus establishing an office of “citizen soldiers” who move on after a few years rather than “become jaded and cynical after too many years in the system.”
Fat chance. Neal conceded that Partee was “potentially vulnerable”–i.e., vulnerable against stronger opposition than he had. But given the field, “Partee appears to be in a strong position to win the Democratic nomination.”
On February 1, Neal put on his reporter’s hat and surveyed the field. Here Neal could not avoid a citation of Smith’s qualifications and issues. Indeed, the Sun-Times’s political editor devoted an entire sentence to them:
Despite Neal’s preoccupation with Partee, the Sun-Times endorsed O’Connor, which certainly might signal that Neal’s influence in-house is on the wane. Since Dennis Britton became editor, Neal has been put on a shorter leash–he now reports to the metro editor; his copy is more closely read. Unfortunately, the hardest job for any copy editor is to improve the stories that a writer doesn’t write.
