Headline o' The Day

Mayor's reputation tarnished in teachers union dust-up

The measure of who won and lost in Mayor Rahm Emanuel's showdown with the Chicago Teachers Union won't be clear until the details of the new contract emerge, but last week's strike took some of the luster off the mayor's self-portrait as an innovative leader brimming with new ways to solve the city's most vexing challenges.

The long, stressful path to getting a contract in place offered a glimpse that Emanuel perhaps is not as multidimensional as he tries to appear. Repeatedly, the mayor turned to one tool: the attack.

That singular approach contributed to the first teachers strike in 25 years and served to heighten organized labor's suspicions of the new mayor, whose union bashing kept him from playing a hands-on role at the negotiating table.

I don't know what the Villagers are going to do with that. It's almost as if they don't know what the hell they're talking about:

John Heileman should be forced to eat crow for this spectacularly embarrassing performance, but I'm sure he won't be. We'll just have to settle for Rahm being publicly humiliated. And that's pretty good.

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