Posted Sep 07, 2008 at 05:10pm
It Played In Peoria
PEORIA and NORTHBROOK, ILL
"Will it play in Peoria?"
Our stop in Peoria on Saturday forced me to sit down and look up the origin of that expression. What I found was that the phrase comes from the days of vaudeville and refers to the idea that any performance that did well in the city of Peoria would do well in the rest of the country. Peoria continues to have the good standing of being the litmus of all things American. Based on that, our stop Saturday in Peoria precipitates that we will have a good next couple months for the bus.
The bus received a warm reception. We set up next to the farmer’s market by the river and had people come through who were enjoying a leisurely Saturday on the river. Quite a few locals were pleased and surprised to see the bus in a town that they consider to be largely conservative. Others were not surprised to see the bus nor were they surprised that it received a good reception given that so many of Bush’s failed policies have hit the town hard. The depressed economy and the fact that we have had the slowest job growth since the depression has impacted the town in immeasurable ways. I spoke to quite a few locals who feel that the jobs are simply not there and a lot of people who have lived in the town for generations are now moving to Chicago and other cities to find work. I came across an article in Salon that describes a 2003 visit by President Bush that blatantly shows what the people of Peoria thought about the Bush Legacy five years ago. The interviews in the article from 2003 sound exactly like the conversations I had on Saturday. They will likely be the same conversations we will be having about McCain if he gets in office, based on his rubberstamping of Bush’s failed policies over the last 8 years.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/04/30/peoria/index.html
About an hour outside of Chicago is Northbrook, IL where we paid an afternoon visit after our Peoria stop. We visited Northbrook because it is the home of the Representative Mark Kirk’s regional headquarters. Inside a strip mall on a busy street, local Congressional staffers work to support a Representative who has backed George Bush on some of his worst policy failures. Rep. Kirk voted repeatedly to keep troops stuck in Iraq. He voted for tax cuts for the richest Americans while he voted against giving American workers the right to form a union on the job. In a scantly-publicized voted, he even voted against ensuring that women get equal pay for equal work. While he wasn’t concerned with using his legislative power to protect women, he did make big strides to support the big oil companies making record profits by doling out billions in subsidies to them while his constituents (as of Saturday) are paying $4.08/gallon for gas. Perhaps Rep. Kirk should make a visit to Peoria to see how his policies that do nothing to help the middle class play there.
