Will ideologues ruin Preckwinkle reputation the way they did Ogilvie?

Presuming that Cook County Commissioner John Daley and three others who indicated last week they changed their minds about the pop tax keep to their word, it would seem the tax meant to ensure the county can cover its financial obligations for health care services and other expenses will wither away.

If signs like this really stirred up anti-pop tax attitudes, will their hostility carry over to hurt Toni Preckwinkle come 2018 Election Day? Photograph by Gregory Tejeda

It creates the potential vote by the Cook County Board later this week of 12-5 (or maybe 13-4) in favor of an ordinance to rescind the penny-per-ounce on pop and other sweetened beverages. Which county board President Toni Preckwinkle will veto – but is a strong-enough vote to over-ride her – if it holds fast.

NOW SOME PEOPLE are not considering this sufficient suffering for Preckwinkle. They’re determined to stir up resentment at the polling place – getting enough people to vote against her re-election bid next year because she had the nerve to realize that the county has financial obligations that must be met.

PRECKWINKLE: Remains firm on pop tax

People in the real world don’t get to tell bill collectors we don’t have the money so we’re not paying. In reality, we have to come up with the finances to meet our obligations. We need to pay up!

Which is why I have consistently thought (and still believe) that this pop tax that adds about 20 cents to the bottle of Coca-Cola I occasionally buy is something we all have to pay – if we really need to have those carbonated beverages in supply.

It also is why I’m not terribly sympathetic to the lobbying efforts of the American Beverage Association – which represents the pop manufacturers who probably don’t want anyone else managing to get a larger cut of the money paid by people when they feel the need to buy pop.

THEY WANT IT for themselves. Understandably, but not a high-minded cause by any means.

OGILVIE: Insisted Ill. needed income tax

The trick is to see how, in coming months, this issue plays out. Will people really hold a grudge against Preckwinkle – and carry out their revenge on Nov. 6, 2018 by voting ABP?

The one thing that Toni has going in her favor is that as of now, the Anybody But Preckwinkle vote literally has nobody else to pick. People who were contemplating seeking the Democratic nomination for Cook County Board president have decided not to do so. As for the Republicans, their political party may get bogged down in the mass of anti-Trump and anti-Rauner rhetoric to put up a serious challenger.

But there are those people who can manage to get worked up at the “T” word just as much as many ideologue-minded Republicans will get worked up at the “A” word tying the governor to abortion.

Is there a 'Dan Walker' type for county?

I’M SURE THERE are those looking back to the 1972 election cycle – the one in which incumbent Gov. Dick Ogilvie lost to Democrat Dan Walker; in large part because one of the major accomplishments of Ogilvie’s one term in office was that Illinois implemented its original state tax on residents’ incomes.

Ogilvie (himself a former Cook County Board president who used that post as a springboard to the Statehouse Scene) argued that the state’s finances had become so unstable that the tax was necessary. Financial experts will argue that the tax turned out to be essential.

Yet there were enough people who voted against Ogilvie because of that tax that he wound up losing re-election.

Could governmental history repeat itself by stirring up enough people p-o’ed by the thought of paying a few more pennies each time they buy pop (which is expected to add up to a few million dollars to balance out the county budget)?

Daley name still influences our government

OGILVIE WASN’T HELPED by the fact that Dan Walker and his walk across Illinois caught the imagination of many as a viable alternative (although I know many of the same ideologues who still denounce Ogilvie’s income tax view Walker as an even worse choice).

As I already stated, as of yet, there is not really a credible challenger to Preckwinkle – although it’s always possible that there’s somebody currently out there passing about nominating petitions to try to get on the ballot for the March 20 primary.

But could she wind up going into our local political history as the woman who pushed for a tax to ensure that Cook County met its expenses – only to be penalized at the polling place?

In a world that could seriously elect Donald J. Trump as president with only 46 percent voter support, anything is possible.

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Call it another Quinn Sunday special. Will anyone listen to pension study?

It seems Gov. Pat Quinn hasn’t forgotten his past tactics to gain attention for himself.

QUINN: An attention jolt?



Quinn, when he held past political posts, was the master of the Sunday press conference. He’d find some issue to get worked up over, then take a stand on Sunday.

BECAUSE OF THE lack of other news activity (except in those occasional weekends where a dozen or so murders would take place in a single two-day time span), he’d make it onto various television newscasts and would get decent play in the Monday morning newspapers.

So Quinn, who is desperate to create the appearance that there’s a chance of resolving the pension funding programs that confront Illinois state government, came out with his own study on Sunday – sending copies all over the state.

One that says the underfunding is so drastic that Illinois will be spending more on pensions by the year 2016 than it will on public education programs – a concept that is offensive if you think about it, and should greatly bother us.

Perhaps that is the strategy. Get the people all worked up so that they start making those telephone calls to their local legislator, so that they feel compelled to do something when the General Assembly returns to Springfield for the one-day session in which they’re supposed to take action to resolve the problem.

BECAUSE IF THAT does not happen, it will be all too likely that the legislators won’t feel the least bit compelled to do anything – other than the Illinois House members who have another bit of business to deal with that day.

Aug. 17 is more likely to be the day that state Rep. Derrick Smith, D-Chicago, got expelled from the Legislature on account of the federal charges he faces for alleged acts of bribery, than it is to be the date on which the pension program was resolved.

Heck, it may be more likely that on Nov. 6, Smith will get re-elected to the Illinois House (he remains on the ballot as the Democratic nominee from a West Side-based legislative district) and there STILL won’t be a solution to the pension program.

So a part of me kind of admires Quinn for trying to jump-start some action on this issue. His Office of Management & Budget put together the study that says required state pension contributions will rise to just over $6 billion, which the governor says would have to come from education funds.

BUT I’D TAKE it more seriously if I thought there were any serious negotiations taking place to come up with a solution that could be voted on by the individual legislators when they show up at the Statehouse the end of next week.

There is speculation that Quinn may ask legislators to vote on a partial reform plan – one that would ignore the problems caused by the pension programs that cover educators and the legislators themselves.

The latter, of course, was always the one pension program that was best funded by state government. Legislators looking out for themselves?

Some may argue that a partial solution is better than nothing. I’d argue that ignoring the most seriously flawed parts of the problem amounts to doing nothing. Particularly when it comes to those schoolteachers.

FOR ALL THOSE school boards across the state are insisting that they’re going to be irrevocably harmed if they have to assume the funding for a portion. At this point, their hollering and screaming has the attention of state legislators much more than the governor.

It is why despite all the rhetoric last spring about how a solution had to be found now or else great harm would be inflicted upon Illinois, nothing happened.

Our legislators don’t feel any real sense of urgency. Theoretically, they know there is a serious problem. But the will to do anything about it just doesn’t exist.

OGILVIE: Setting an example?



Because if there is a political person whose image is coming to their minds these days, it is that of the former Gov. Dick Ogilvie.

HE IS THE governor who in the early 1970s pushed for Illinois’ first state income tax, which ticked off so many voters that it was blamed for his 1972 defeat to Dan Walker.

Ogilvie got punished politically for doing the right thing. None of the incumbent legislators wants to suffer the same fate.

Of course, I’m sure they’d vote for it in an instant if they could be assured that it would be Quinn himself who would draw any potential political fallout come 2014!

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