Bill Daley kisses off lazy husband vote with Valentine’s Day card

SHARE Bill Daley kisses off lazy husband vote with Valentine’s Day card
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Valentine card sent to Mark Brown’s wife from Bill Daley. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times

Bill Daley sent my wife a Valentine’s Day card.

What’s up with that?

I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Surely being a candidate for mayor doesn’t allow a guy to creep on another guy’s wife at election time, especially when it might show him up.

What if I had forgotten to get my wife a Valentine’s card?

OK, so I did forget.

Well, I didn’t forget exactly. I just remembered a little late.

And when I went to the convenience store in our building late Wednesday night after my wife had gone to bed, I learned to my chagrin that they don’t sell greeting cards, which is hardly my fault.

So I had to settle for a very tiny heart-shaped cheesecake with some sort of red berry sauce on top.

That’s as good as a card, isn’t it? I can promise you it sure cost as much.

I know I’d rather get a tiny cheesecake than a card any day, which must be why my wife looked in the refrigerator Thursday morning and commented that I must have bought it for myself.

I’ve got to admit that if she doesn’t eat it, I probably will. No sense letting food go to waste. But she gets first dibs.

Maybe you are thinking that I should have just taken a piece of paper, folded it in half and used scissors to cut it into the shape of a heart — an old-fashioned homemade Valentine like we used to make for our mothers in third grade.

That would have been a good idea, and I seriously considered it — until I remembered that I did that last year.

But this isn’t about me. This is about Bill Daley and his chutzpah.

His card arrived in the mail Wednesday, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

My wife showed it to me the minute I walked through the door that night. I’m guessing she didn’t want me to discover it later and start in with the questions.

The cover was in pink with several photos of Daley with women, showing what a sensitive guy he is.

There was a quotation from Maya Angelou: “If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love.”

Valentine card sent to Mark Brown’s wife from Bill Daley. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times

Valentine card sent to Mark Brown’s wife from Bill Daley. | Rich Hein/Sun-Times

From the outside, I suppose it could have been mistaken for just another Daley campaign mailer, several of which had previously come to my home — all of them addressed to my wife, I should add.

But inside it said: “HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, May your day be filled with smiles.”

At the bottom was Daley’s signature.

OK, it didn’t say: “Love, Bill.” But my wife seemed to get the message.

I warned her Daley just loves her for her vote.

She gave me one of those looks. Guys know the look, sort of a half eye-roll to indicate she knows something you don’t.

Daley spokesman Peter Cunningham tried to brush off my questions.

“He loves Chicago and all of its people,” Cunningham said in an email.

But how many Valentines did Daley send? Did he only mail them to women? Is Daley trying to overcome a gender gap, or are women a hidden source of his political strength?

“Just something Bill wanted to do to mark the holiday,” Cunningham responded.

Yeah, I’ll bet.

Did Bill Daley want to “mark the holiday” by taking his wife for a Valentine’s Day tea at the Drake Hotel last weekend like I did?

Did he sit through an excruciating hour of harp music while eating fussy little finger sandwiches with the crusts removed and drinking enough oolong tea to keep him awake half the night? Without a single TV to watch the Blackhawks pound the Red Wings?

Bottom line, Bill, until you’ve walked in another man’s slippers, watch it with the Valentine’s cards.

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