It wasn’t long after the snow stopped falling when reporters began to press the honorable Mayor Richard Daley about why there seemed to be no contingency plan for dealing with the blizzard conditions that closed down Lake Shore Drive last week. His response, as reported in the Chicago Sun-Times?

“They had ‘em – ask him.”

The “him” in question was Daley’s hand-picked Steets and Sanitation Commissioner Tom Byrne, who, like a mound of snow in a city parking lot, found himself stuck fast under the bus.

You don’t become as powerful or as long-tenured a politician as Mayor Daley without an aptitude for this sort of bus-chucking. Bad things will happen when you’re in office, and even the best elected official can only hide so much from the public, who have a nasty habit of blaming their leaders when they fail to provide leadership. If you can’t find someone to slow down that bus, it may well run you over.

It’s a lesson that applies at every level and to every type of politics. Just look at our own fine university administration during the Great Occupancy Fiasco of 2010.

There was President Morton Schapiro, our own Dirty Harry Callahan of town-gown politics, telling the Daily that “nothing is going to happen on July 1 that’s any different than what has happened for the last 10 years, and if anything does happen differently, trust me, Northwestern University is not going to stand for it.”

You could just see him staring down Evanston Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl in a dark alley, telling her to go ahead and make his day.

The uproar about the decades-old housing ordinance was obviously a volatile situation that threw students into a frenzy. So naturally, Dirty Morty had to make sure we knew he was the guilt-free good guy, standing up for the students against the big, bad Evanston government and cutting through the red tape of the bumbling university underlings who came before him. Can you hear that quiet thump as the bus rolls over all those people?

Let’s assume that the popular belief among students is correct, and President Schapiro did swoop in from Florida to lay down the law on behalf of the students. What exactly is gained by tough talk in the Daily, except to stroke Dirty Morty’s ego and leave a bad taste in the mouths of Evanston’s mayor and City Council? Clearly, both NU and Evanston handled the situation poorly and failed to communicate with each other or with the students. But once the battle was won, why not take pains to be diplomatic in victory and build bridges with the city, instead of engaging in bus-chucking for an adoring student audience who will leave in a few years?

The bus-chucking has even trickled into ASG after President Claire Lew decided to take the ASG Senate to task for canceling a regular assembly. Never mind that a stern e-mail and a sit-down meeting would likely have been enough to ensure no more cancellations this year or that the Daily had already taken shots at the Senate in an editorial.

ASG got some negative ink, and the bus was coming for someone. Better ASG speaker Tyris Jones than our noble president. I don’t care to slam Ms. Lew, who has been a much more visible and effective ASG president than most. Let’s just call it a healthy concern for a fellow student. Bus-chucking of this caliber at such a young age could cause a young person to fall into a rough crowd – if she’s not careful, she might end up a Chicago alderman or the governor of Illinois.

Or maybe the president of NU.

Mike Carson is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].