Scheme is inarguably a more elegant language than CL (for the most part: dynamic variables are an ugly hack). However, CL has tremendous practical benefits: The condition system, the large language, and so on.
CLers usually push the elegance and the cleanness of their language as a major benefit. And it is: a clean language makes programming easier. but Scheme is far cleaner than CL. And thus where CL beats Scheme is practicality, which most CL advocates don't discuss.
OTOH, this article discusses some of the features of CL that make it immediately practical: a type system that lets you specify sizes if you want to, so that you can do low-level bit hacking if necessary, a standard lowlevel macro system (not as nice as synclos, but what can you do...), and a wealth of useful libraries. This is something that, as of yet, Scheme cannot match, and may never.
