The family that owns the Chicago Cubs is doing political damage control, after patriarch Joe Ricketts decided not to launch a controversial multimillion dollar campaign against President Obama. Democrats were infuriated when they learned it was under consideration, and Vice President Biden and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel were two of the angriest.
The mayor was all the angrier because he's been in intense negotiations with the Ricketts family to possibly commit millions of taxpayers dollars to rehabbing Wrigley Field. Sources said that in private he was accusing Joe Ricketts of hypocrisy and worse for considering TV ads that featured racially-charged comments of Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but he was more restrained in public.
"America's too great a country with too great a future for the content they're talking about. And it's insulting to the President. It's insulting to the country," Emanuel said.
Joe Ricketts is a billionaire and a growing force in conservative politics. The New York Times reported that he commissioned a 54-page proposal entitled "The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to end his spending for good."
A key part of the plan: tie the President closely to the racially-charged "black liberation theology" of his former South Side pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Advisors to Joe Ricketts claimed Obama would never have been elected in 2008, if John McCain had made more use of Wright's inflammatory rhetoric.
"Guys like [Joe Ricketts] so misunderstand the state of the nation," said Vice President Biden. "It's like it's 1942 or something."
Most fans arriving for tonight's game against the Philadelphia Phillies didn't want to talk about politics. But the team conceded it did get calls from some angered by Joe Ricketts strenuous opposition to the President.
Tonight, a spokesman for the Chicago-based members of the Ricketts family said Joe Ricketts, who lives in Wyoming, has no role in running the Cubs. He said the family's proposal to rehab Wrigley Field using some tax-dollars generated there was still a job-generating good idea.
"The deal that is being negotiated to create an innovative public-private partnership to save Wrigley is as good as it was yesterday before all of this conflagration," said Dennis Culloton, spokesman for Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts.
Republican candidate Mitt Romney said that he "repudiates" the concept behind the ad and called it "the wrong course for a PAC or campaign."
