March 05--Evanston's mayor took to Twitter to stick up for her city's liberal credentials this week after The CBS drama "The Good Wife" portrayed it as a hot bed of conservatism.
Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl aimed her message at the writers of the program after Sunday's episode featured a plotline in which robocalls were being sent to Evanston phone numbers painting an opponent of character Alicia Florrick in the campaign for Cook County state's attorney as a supporter of gay rights. Florrick, played on the program by Julianna Margulies, surmises the ploy was set up without her knowledge to get conservative voters in Evanston to flock to the polls to support her.
Being the good wife, Florrick decries the dirty trick.
But as the top elected official in the left-leaning northern suburb, Tisdahl could not let that characterization stand without an online retort. "@GoodWifeWriters #Evanston is not the conservative place ref. in Sunday episode. We welcome all, even uninformed TV writers #TheGoodWife," her tweet reads.
It's not the first time the show, which borrows liberally from Illinois corruption cases for its storylines, has played fast and loose with political reality in its fictionalized version of Cook County.
Last season, an investigator trying to nail Florrick's husband, Gov. Peter Florrick, for voter fraud attempted to get the governor's former private attorney to flip on him. When the lawyer cited attorney-client privilege in refusing to do so, the investigator dragged out the Rod Blagojevich saga as his trump card while turning the screws on the lawyer.
"I can take my time, Mr. Gardner," the investigator said. "I was on the Blagojevich case. We always knew that sooner or later the lawyers would talk. They want to talk. They need to talk. They know that attorney-client privilege only gets them so far."
In fact, no Blagojevich lawyers testified against the former governor during either of his two corruption trials.
