Uh, oh…it’s never a good sign when a politician talks like this:
Roland Burris, being Roland Burris, put it to me this way Friday when we talked: “We are the senator.”
And we, that is he, the former Illinois attorney general, told me that he will try to avoid making a scene when he comes to the Capitol on Tuesday to claim the seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Burris is arriving in town Monday night.
That’s the lead of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet’s column. And the use of the royal “we” by a politician does NOT bode well for the politico’s a) sense of humility, b) threshold beyond which he’ll allow himself to be politically-humiliated, c) sense of the relationship between what the people want and how and why he can ascend to power.
By using the royal “we,” it sounds as if he’s expecting a coronation.
Who does he think he is? Caroline Kennedy?
There’s more:
“There is no confrontation here, there is no antagonism here,” Burris said in a phone interview from Chicago. “And so we are proceeding very diplomatically, and we are proceeding with all concern about not creating any type of circus that will entertain the media.”
The new Senate will be sworn in Tuesday. Senate Democrats don’t want to give Burris the oath of office because he was appointed by Gov. Blagojevich, who is facing federal public corruption charges for trying to sell the Obama seat in a variety of schemes.
His problem: even if he manages to get the seat, he will fill two years being closely-watched, intensely-vetted, challenged on almost every word by politicians and pundits who don’t want him there. So he’ll just take his seat quietly? He are deluding himself…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.