Rutter: Soderquist showed fondness for bugging citizens
Post-Tribune
David Rutter
September 13, 2016
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/opinion/ct-ptb-rutter-soderquist-st-0914-20160913-story.html
The last time Keith Soderquist won a general election in Lake Station, it was November 2011, and supporters still erroneously believed he could manage his mayoral life.
Mostly what he was managing was 425,000 tapped phone calls into and out of city offices. He was Nixon, the NSA and Matrix all wrapped together.
Between gambling trips to Michigan with stolen food pantry loot, diverted campaign cash plus his electronic hobbies, how did this guy have enough time to be mayor?
His phone tappings were trying to find who might report his family to the FBI for pilfering public money that fed his gambling monkey.
In the last successful campaign of his career, 945 Lake Stationistas — although you'd guess Soderquist, wife and stepdaughter cast three votes for him — said they liked Soderquist just fine as the re-elected mayor, and viewed him as an upstanding force for civic good.
You'd wonder what those 945 folks (minus three Soderquists) think now that Soderquist has been proven to be a ground-slinking skunk. He is such a lowrider skunk that he was forced to confess to even deeper skunkness to avoid vaster time in a federal prison.
We love democracy and hail its benefits because, as the Churchillian aphorism proclaims, it's the worst form of government except all the others. This does not prove democracy is a wonderful invention. It only means all other forms of human governance are abysmally awful. But you'd have a hard time making a logical case that any dictatorial strongman supreme monarch ruling Lake Station would have been more unpleasant and less democratic that Soderquist.
In the low-rent electoral zone of Lake County's municipal politics, Soderquist was the secretive, conspiracy-driven Richard Nixon.
Nixon did not directly steal money from the electorate; he only pilfered power, control and sealed his network by secretly recording private conversations of everyone who entered the Oval Office.
At least the NSA claims it's thwarting terrorists by intercepting everyone's messages.
The Matrix? The perfect invisible monitoring system for humans who think they are independent beings, but actually are being managed by higher powers, which in this case, seemed to be Soderquist.
Higher powers are not what they used to be.
As for Soderquist, the FBI says he secretly installed phone taps to and from city hall, and the city court. It appears he actually listened to 30 or so.
Soderquist confessed to this aural peeping to avoid being charged with electronic federal crimes. They would have gotten more years in federal lockups than his felonious pilfering will cost when he's sentenced on Sept. 28.
This was not the first time that Soderquist displayed an odd penchant for electronically managing citizens.
If residents there had paid closer attention, they might have smelled skunk juice in the air years ago.
As a city councilman and candidate for mayor in 2007, Soderquist led an abortive charge to ban citizens from recording city council meetings.
Apparently Soderquist had gotten word that such recordings were being edited for comedic effect to mock council members and their public statements. The videos then were shown on large-screen TVs at local bars amid the general guffaws and hoots of bar patrons.
The video-banning initiative ended when everyone figured out — after they were told — that the ban would violate Indiana's Open Door Law, which gives citizens the unequivocal right to record public meetings in any way they choose. And also, by the way, the idea was exquisitely, goofily undemocratic.
Soderquist told reporters he "didn't have a problem" with anyone videotaping meetings — very big of him — if they didn't later edit the results.
"I hope they'd use the best judgment and that nothing is being edited. You can alter the tape and hurt someone bad," he comically and prophetically said at the time.
"It is essential that council members and members of the public be able to speak freely and without the threat of being recorded and photographed," the hilarious Soderquist-inspired ordinance stated.
The odd tale of How the Gambling Monkey Ate the Mayor's Career also holds a footnote for Cynthia Robbins.
She was the arch-fiscal conservative who ran against Soderquist for mayor in 2011 and got 311 votes in a traditionally Democratic Party bastion. One of the votes was probably her.
But 60 percent of the adults in town didn't vote.
Soderquist benefited from another political aphorism. Democracy only works if you use it.
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