So I finally got around to looking at the GOP candidates for Governor in Illinois. The situation isn’t quite as dire as I had previously thought.
We’ve got Bruce Rauner — the usual gazillionaire “buy the election” type. He doesn’t have much to offer than the standard “I’m going to run Illinois like a business.” Guess what? Government isn’t a business, much less a private equity firm. If anything, it’s more like GM, where part of the required skill set is negotiation — negotiation with unions, with the regulators, with any number of other parties.
We’ve got Brady. Can’t remember his first name. He won the primary last time around because the other three candidates split the Chicagoland vote, and he got all the downstate vote. And maybe this’ll happen again — but, I’m sorry, a Quinn-Brady re-match is not going to end in Brady’s favor.
We’ve got Kirk Dillard. Former chief of staff for Edgar (the governor prior to Ryan and Blago, and actually not convicted of any crimes), and State Senator since then. Biggest claim to fame that I can tell: according to Wikipedia, “in June 2007, he appeared in an Iowa TV ad touting his former state senate colleague, Barack Obama.”
And then there’s Dan Rutherford, who’s currently the Illinois Treasurer. This alone makes him more credible than the other guys. But here’s something icky about him: his platform consists entirely of fiscal responsibility. There’s a link to a “survey of issues” — which is a literal survey asking where site visitors stand on social issues and giving one the impression that he’ll announce his position on those issues only after some more poll testing.
Any Republican governor will be hamstrung by Mike Madigan, the all-powerful Speaker of the House, and by the unions. Not long ago, the papers reported that Quinn had contracted with an outside group to weed out Medicaid recipients who were ineligible, but the unions fought back and demanded that they be able to do the work, and a court agreed. Do you really believe they’ll be as effective as the outside company?
And any Repubican candidate won’t make it as far as the governor’s office in the first place if they can’t speak forthrightly about their views on social issues, or on economic issues that are more divisive than “cut waste and fraud.” If they aggressively position themselves as moderates, they’ll lose votes from their own party, who won’t see a reason to differentiate between the GOP and the Democrates. If they have taken more conservative stands in the past and try to “hide” them with the expectation that it’s necessary to get elected in Illinois, the Democrats’ PACs will run the attack ads anyway.
See why I’m irritated with the Illinois GOP?
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