Is our long Ill. nightmare finally over?

The word came out Thursday, first from Republican leaders of the Illinois General Assembly, then from the Democrats who hold the majority power – we have an agreement on the way the state will fund public education.

RAUNER: Has he lost?

That issue has been tied up for nearly the past two months – ever since state government passed a budget for the current fiscal year despite Gov. Rauner’s objections. Rauner, feeling the need for a political victory over urban Democratic interests, continued to fight on with this issue – even though it created a potential situation where schools might not have the money on hand to open on time.

PERSONALLY, WHEN I first heard the Republican legislative talk, my suspicion is that this was some sort of political talk by which GOP interests claimed a deal that didn’t really exist – then would try to blame Democrats for failure when nothing wound up happening.

You might think I’m being politically paranoid, but I’m not alone in being suspicious.

Several education administrators I have spoken to have said they’re equally suspicious – saying they’re not going to believe a deal is in place until they actually see the governor sign something into law.

One school board president I know went so far as to say that while he was convinced Republican and Democratic legislators were in agreement, there still is the issue of Bruce Rauner.

“WE’LL SEE IF his people (Republican legislators) can talk him into going along with this,” that official said.

For the record, legislators aren’t really willing to say what their deal is – other than that much of the funding that was to be provided to Chicago Public Schools to cover pensions for retired teachers will be restored. That despite Rauner’s efforts to use his amendatory veto powers to remove it from the education funding bill that was passed by the Legislature back during the spring.

For what it’s worth, Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he is pleased with the deal, as it provides the city school system with what it desired. “That, and more,” he told reporter-type people.

MADIGAN: Can he complete deal this weekend?

Whereas Rauner said in his prepared statement he “applauds” legislators for working together. Although the Chicago Sun-Times wrote in its report that the legislative agreement did not include any of the collective bargaining changes that are supposedly the reason why the governor has been so ridiculously stubborn with regards to the budget and education funding.

SO IS IT possible that Rauner, who has never made a secret of the fact that he desires changes in state government structure to undermine the influence of labor unions, really will wind up coming out the big loser – with legislators feeling the need to keep state government functioning and the public schools open more than they need the financial support he’ll be providing to GOP officials in next year’s election cycle.

The key will be to see what happens on Sunday. For while legislators have met just about every day this week to discuss the issue, we’re now at the point where their staffers (the government geeks who actually know how to write legislation) are taking the grand concepts of the agreement and turning them into the legal language of a bill.

Things could still fall apart between now and then. But officials say that if a bill is crafted without anyone feeling like the other side is trying to pull a last-minute, double-cross (that’s really the way political people think!), then a vote could come Monday.

Our long state nightmare could finally be over. Or maybe?

BECAUSE WE’LL STILL have to go through the upcoming 15 months before the 2018 general election, and I don’t doubt that at this point, Rauner is desperately searching for a publicity team to replace the ideologue twits he recently fired to help him figure out the proper spin for his actions.

Nixon 'nightmare' over, is Ill. budget one too?

Rauner is likely to go into a re-election campaign being unable to say he accomplished much of anything, and was actually the cause of much of the “state nightmare” that may well be an Illinois equivalent of the “long national nightmare” that then-President Gerald Ford alluded to upon the resignation of Richard Nixon.

We’re likely to see a governor who overplays the regionalism card (urban vs. rural voters) and who banks his re-election chances on one gamble.

That the Democratic Party gubernatorial candidates wind up bungling their efforts so badly that they hand a second term at the Statehouse to Rauner, all gift-wrapped. Which isn’t completely out of the question, if you want to be honest.

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Illinois no longer a bellwether state; Chicago too dominant for that to be true

The Washington Post let it be known Wednesday that when it comes to the Great Lakes states, they’re going to be paying attention to Ohio. The Land of Lincoln and its likely Election Day results just won’t be of enough intrigue.

Illinois would have had "President Hughes' in '16

Which is interesting in its own right, because it wasn’t all that long ago that Illinois was considered to be a state totally in line with the mood of the nation.

AS IN ONE could get a good sense of how a national election (actually, a collection of 50 state elections for national office) would turn out by paying attention to Illinois.

Just as political observers now say that a Republican can’t win if he can’t take the state of Ohio, it used to be that a presidential candidate can’t win if he can’t take Illinois.

Literally during the 20^th Century, Illinois and its Electoral College representatives were almost always aligned with the person who actually won the presidential election.

The sole exceptions were in 1916 when Illinoisans preferred the idea of Republican Charles Hughes over that of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. And then again in 1976 when Illinois voters would just as soon have legitimized the idea of “President Gerald Ford” by giving him his own full term, rather than letting Democrat Jimmy Carter in office.

IN SHORT, ILLINOIS used to have a legitimate Republican Party. While Chicago was controlled by Democratic Party politicians, the rest of the state was significant enough to put up an Election Day fight!

And in cases where Chicago Democrats just couldn’t get all that enthused, the rest of the state could deliver Illinois to the Republican candidate.

Or in cases such as 1972 when Democrat George McGovern was just so incapable of capturing the nation’s mood that even Cook County went Republican and Richard Nixon won re-election with 59 percent of Illinois’ vote.

 

... and would never have had 'President Carter' in '76

None of this is capable of happening any longer, and it is a large part of why Election Days just don’t have the same thrill from a local perspective in this state.

THE FACT IS that Chicago metro (as opposed to the city proper) now dominates about two-thirds of the state’s population. Meaning the rural parts are just too small a segment for the Republican candidate to get anything from Illinois.

Democratic partisans may boast and say the reason Donald Trump’s presidential bid hasn’t spent more time in this state is because he’s scared – after all, he tried coming to Chicago back in May only to have his loud, obnoxious followers shouted down by the real majority.

The reality is we’re not seeing Trump because it’s not worth his time and effort to campaign much here. This state will give its 20 Electoral College votes to Hillary Clinton come the date in December when they formalize the results of the Nov. 8 elections.

Which also means that no one talks anymore about how Illinois is symbolic of the national mood when it comes to political concerns. Now, all we’ll hear about is speculation about Ohio, and how a Trump victory there means he may well be just strong enough to actually win the general election.

IF ANYTHING, WE’RE the one Great Lakes state that is a shoo-in (unless you regard Indiana as a GOP lock, although Democrats in the Hoosier State have their delusions of winning come November).

The rest of the country will not care much about watching us here. There’s no political suspense.

Unless, by chance there was a Trump victory in Illinois, which would mean possibly that the Aztecs were off by four years when they predicted the End of the World come Dec. 21, 2012.

Or maybe the world really did end, and the fact that we’re now taking people like Trump with his boorish behavior seriously is evidence of that fact!

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Does Trot mean more than Richard? Is Milhous merely a Simpsons character?

It has been 40 years since the date that Richard M. Nixon became the only U.S. president to voluntarily leave office – resigning the term that should have run through January 1977 so as to reduce the chance of criminal prosecution.

Because for those whose memories are too short (or who believe nothing occurred prior to Bill Clinton), the mood of the nation toward “Watergate” was ugly enough that Nixon likely would have been impeached by the House of Representatives, then convicted by the Senate.

HE BEAT THE partisans who were out for blood (and who would have loved nothing more than the sight of Nixon serving time in a federal correctional facility), then was spared the possibility of prosecution when – a month later – he was pardoned for anything he might have done by his successor.

But the passage of time, along with the ideologue atmosphere we now live in, makes me wonder if anybody comprehends what we went through back then.

I’ll be the first to admit not fully understanding the happenings back when they occurred. Although I was only 8 years old (6 back when the actual burglary at the Watergate building in Washington actually occurred).

My memory of 40 years ago today was the encyclopedia salesman who showed up at our home that night and made his pitch to my parents – with one of his selling points being that the book was so up-to-date that it included mention of Gerald R. Ford as our new president – which actually didn’t occur until the following day.

I ALSO HAVE memories of going to college (mid-1980s) with people who considered themselves politically-aware who were taught that the whole “Watergate” affair was little more than a plot by “liberals” to discredit a worthy president – with the actual actions not amounting to much!

Since then, we have had many more generations of young people come along. I wonder how many of them think of Cynthia (“Miranda” from “Sex and the City”) or Trot (of the Boston Red Sox) first when they hear the name “Nixon.”

And as for “Milhous,” wasn’t that Bart Simpson’s animated friend?

I wonder how many people are reading all the 40-year anniversary pieces about Nixon’s resignation and are viewing it as more evidence of old farts who can’t move on with their lives. Perhaps they think a real story with lingering interest is whether or not Tupac Shakur is really dead?

IF THEY THINK of Gordon Liddy at all, he’s that bald guy who goes around saying things like President Barack Obama is an “illegal alien born in Kenya” (he really said that on MSNBC). Not as the one-time FBI agent who wound up doing the most prison time of anyone for his Watergate involvement.

The simple fact is that “Watergate” (as in the burglary and attempt to install an illegal wiretap at the Democratic National Headquarters located back then in the Watergate building in southwestern D.C.) was a stupid incident that should have been a one-day story – if not for the fact that the Nixon administration’s reaction to the embarrassment they would have felt for being involved in such an act was to plot the cover-up – with the president personally getting involved.

It created an administration that believed it could break the law for its own benefit.

For those who go about these days screeching “Impeachment” in connection with Obama and who rant about his talk of executive orders to get certain things done (seriously, I have a distant cousin who at a recent family gathering couldn’t shut up about all the “illegal executive orders” that Obama was allegedly issuing), it’s not even close.

NOT JUST BECAUSE the Obama talk is a reaction to the refusal of Republican partisans in Congress to do anything. The difference between wanting to admit refugee children from Latin American nations into the United States and wanting illegal wiretaps so as to listen in on the political opposition is just so grand.

As for Nixon himself, I’ll be the first to concede great actions such as the normalization of relations with China and creation of federal regulations in areas such as the environment – actions that the ideologues would love to dismantle, if given the chance.

But he’s also the man whose “Southern Strategy” of the 1968 campaign cycle (so soon after the Civil Rights Act of 1964) made it clear that some political people were more than willing to work with the segregationists of old.

And as for the break-in that resulted in Nixon’s televised resignation speech 40 years ago today (Chicago Cubs fans probably think it more important that 26 years ago, they tried to play the first night game at Wrigley Field, only to have it cancelled due to inclement weather), the pettiness of the act shows that the nation probably did need to get beyond the “Nixon years” sooner, rather than later.

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