Will ‘da Judge’ buy “Fast Eddie” claim his witnesses are too old to remember?

I understand that Edward R. Vrdolyak has no desire to go to prison.

VRDOLYAK: Trying to get charges dismissed

The one-time Cook County Democratic chairman and City Council member who led the vocal opposition to then-Mayor Harold Washington has already done one stint as a “guest” of the government, and sure doesn’t want to go back there ever again.

BUT I FIND myself intrigued by the line of defense that Vrdolyak is trying to put up for himself.

Vrdolyak spent the bulk of 2011 in a federal prison work camp in Terre Haute, Ind., following his conviction on charges related to real estate transactions in the Gold Coast neighborhood.

Two years ago, he was hit with another round of indictments – for his involvement in the settlement of a national lawsuit against the tobacco industry back in the 1990s. It resulted in a $9.2 billion payout by “Big Tobacco,” and Vrdolyak managed to enrich himself significantly.

So much so that federal prosecutors say he did too well, to the point of being criminal. They use the word “unauthorized” to describe it.

BUT VRDOLYAK CONTENDS he didn’t do anything illegal, and in fact had the blessing of political people (including then-Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan) for his conduct.

WASHINGTON: Eddie's legacy exceed Harold

He’s trying to get a judge to dismiss the charges, with his own attorneys filing motions claiming that the people who could testify under oath that Vrdolyak’s legal activities were truly legitimate aren’t capable of doing so.

They point out one person who was fully aware of Vrdolyak is now dead, while another suffers from severe dementia. A third would be Jim Ryan himself, although the one-time Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate suffers from his own ailments that would make it impossible for him to be called upon to testify.

All this may be true. But I will be amazed if any judge out there would be inclined to dismiss the case on these grounds.

BECAUSE IT WOULD truly create a circumstance where someone could escape the legal system and “justice” because of the passage of time.

RYAN: Could Jim 'clear' Vrdolyak?

And when it comes to Vrdolyak, I’m sure the kind of people most eager to see him obtain another criminal conviction and prison term (one most likely long enough that the 80-year-old would die in prison) will not want to allow for any reason to come up that would let him escape justice.

For the politico known as “Fast Eddie” is the man who will forevermore be remembered for the way he openly led a resistance to Washington’s election in 1983 as the city’s first black mayor.

That was something some people would want forevermore celebrated. The fact that Vrdolyak was able to tie up in knots just about everything Washington tried to accomplish during the first few years of his mayoral term is something they will forevermore be bitter about.

TO THEM, THE only true justice will be if Vrdolyak gains as his political legacy a record of recidivism. To become one of the few people in Chicago political people who wind up with multiple convictions and prison terms would be the only true justice to those individuals.

Seriously, most people with political corruption convictions wind up withering away into nothingness. It would be Vrdolyak and someone like one-time alderman Ambrosio Medrano who would have records of returns to prison.

MEDRANO: In Vrdolyak's league?

But a part of me can’t help but wonder if Vrdolyak’s attorneys have a point about the 20-year delay between the actions and the bringing of an indictment “dramatically, and even fatally hindering (Vrdolyak) from establishing that fact to the jury.”

All of which makes me think no matter how a judge ultimately rules, this is going to be a criminal case that will leave some people seriously p-o’ed about its outcome and complaining for life about the lack of justice.

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The un-prediction

I don’t know who is going to win come Tuesday’s primary elections in Illinois. Anybody who claims to know is lying to you.

I look at the same polls everybody else does, takes in the same comments from the candidates and tries to make some judgments based on people I actually come into contact with. While it is clear that everybody is angry with the current state of the economy, it seems to me that most people think it’s somebody else’s fault.

IF ONLY ALL people could think just like they do, then everything would be fine.

If it reads like I’m saying that there isn’t much rationality behind the thought process being put into deciding who to vote for come Election Day, you’d be correct.

Which is why I don’t have a clue how things will turn out Tuesday night (or perhaps even the early hours of Wednesday).

Take the campaigns for governor – both of which seem to be tied up. The Chicago Tribune polls show incumbent Pat Quinn with a slight lead, while a poll conducted by Raleigh, N.C.-based Public Policy Polling shows opponent Dan Hynes leading that primary. Of course, both of those leads are so slim that they fall within the margin of error – which is what the political professionals like to call a statistical tie.

CONSIDERING THE ADVANTAGES that Quinn had over Hynes a month ago, the fact that the Illinois comptroller has even been able to make this a competitive political fight is something that Quinn ought to be ashamed of.

Should Hynes be able to get the Democratic nomination, how willing will Democrats be to unite behind him? Could this turn out to be the repeat of ’76, when establishment Dems fought hard to dump incumbent Dan Walker and succeeded in the primary – only to have a candidate weakened by the fight so that he lost to GOPer Jim Thompson (beginning that 26-year streak of Republican governors that some Illinois Republicans thought the office was their party’s birthright).

Will it turn out that the real winner of the Democratic primary for governor will be Lisa Madigan, who reportedly wanted to run for the post but did not want to sully up her reputation with a nasty fight against an incumbent political ally?

Of course, the Democratic nominee’s chances of winning the November general election will depend heavily upon who the Republican nominee turns out to be. That primary is an even bigger mess than the Democrats – and the more ideological types who make up a significant part of the GOP base are exactly the types to have a tantrum by refusing to vote if their preferred candidate doesn’t get the nomination.

ANY TIME YOU have candidates claiming they are doing well because polls show them getting close to 20 percent support, you know it’s a log-jam.

It would appear that former state Attorney General Jim Ryan is no longer the front-runner. Of course, that early status was due to the fact that most people hadn’t paid much attention to the campaigns, and his was one of the few familiar names.

It’s just like all of the most recent campaigns of another former state attorney general. Now U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill., ran campaigns before for the U.S. Senate and for Illinois governor and usually had the lead in the early polls, only to wind up finishing far behind the pack as would-be voters realized they wanted somebody (anybody) else.

Of course, that same poll showing the Democratic gubernatorial campaign as a virtual tie favoring Hynes shows Ryan lagging only six percentage points behind the so-called frontrunner, fellow DuPage County resident Kirk Dillard.

THIS IS THE bizarre primary from my perspective, since Dillard appears to be the favorite of those Republicans of the Chicago suburbs (there aren’t enough devoted GOPers in the city proper to amount to much), while opponent Pat Brady is the preference of those Republicans who live outside the Chicago area and would prefer to have a candidate with no urban ties whatsoever.

With the Chicago area accounting for two-thirds of Illinois’ population, that normally would make Dillard the favorite, except that he loses a chunk of that support to Andrew McKenna, who has some establishment Republicans favoring him and other GOP supporters detesting him because they remember his stint as chairman of the state Republican Party (he didn’t make any headway in terms of winning elections, which is why Illinois has a government that is controlled entirely by Democratic Party members).

To me, that Republican side seems like a mess – one that has the potential to create a lot of dissention come Election Day in November.

The U.S. Senate campaigns seem less confusing. Public Policy Polling’s latest study released Monday of that campaign seems to show the candidates who were thought of as frontrunners before the campaigns maintaining solid leads.

SO IT COULD become Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias running against U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., for the right to represent all of Illinois in the Senate. Kirk backers are making much of the fact that this poll shows Kirk leading with 42 percent support, while none of his half-dozen challengers has more than 10 percent.

But I couldn’t help but notice the truel second-place finisher is not Patrick Hughes (9 percent). It is “undecided” at 39 percent. Having that many partisans this close to Election Day unable to commit makes me wonder if the Kirk campaign has the potential to stir up apathy and resentment – similar to what Democrats experienced in 1998 when then-Congressman Glenn Poshard of Southern Illinois won the nomination for governor and many Democrats from the Chicago area never got over that fact.

Which makes me wonder if Giannoulias is destined to follow the fate (thus far) of his one-time basketball buddy, Barack Obama, who won his presidential campaign in part because of apathy among conservatives toward Republican challenger John McCain – only to have those same conservatives now watching Obama’s every move and doing whatever they can to thwart him.

Will the day come that Giannoulias will wish he had stayed in the Illinois treasurer’s office for another term or two?

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The cliché is most definitely accurate this time around – the only “poll” that matters is the one (http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_Ill_126.pdf) taken on Election Day.

Tax rhetoric not only blatantly partisan, but also reminiscent of the political past

Andrew McKenna, the newly-minted gubernatorial favorite of the Chicago Tribune, went on the attack against primary opponent Jim Ryan this week with a statement that sounded all too familiar.

McKenna had his campaign issue a statement that was a re-issue of the Americans for Tax Reform group, which has a problem with the fact that candidate Jim Ryan refuses to sign their “Taxpayer Reform Pledge.”

THE GROUP PORTRAYS its pledge as a simple demand – politicians promise not to support tax increases if they get elected to federal office.

Yet only a complete simpleton believes the issue of taxes and government funding is that simple. Ryan, who served eight years as state attorney general and previously ran for Illinois governor, knows better. That’s why he’s not about to commit himself to the group’s politically partisan stunt.

He went so far as to tell the Daily Herald newspaper of Arlington Heights that the group’s pledge is “phony.” So they’re trashing Ryan, and McKenna is more than willing to pass along that attack – hoping that it gets the ideologues of the GOP worked up enough to consider voting for him in numbers significant enough to overcome the Ryan lead in early polls that was as much past name recognition as anything else.

To further reinforce this message, McKenna’s campaign is taking out radio advertisements that trash both Ryan and Kirk Dillard (who on Friday bercame the GOP gubernatorial favorite of the Chicago Sun-Times).

ILLINOIS: OVERSPENT, NEARLY broke. Yet Jim Ryan and Kirk Dillard won’t rule out tax hikes, the radio spot goes.

What is my problem with this? I have noticed that many Republican candidates are going out of their way to sign the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, in hopes that this stunt gains their campaigns some attention.

Because that ultimately is all this is. Some cheap rhetoric that is totally unrealistic, but meant to provide a punch line for voters when looking for someone to back on Election Day.

Why do I call it a punch line? Because the joke will be on those voters who seriously think that someone can automatically think “no” whenever the issue of taxes or revenue comes up for government.

THE REALITY OF the situation is that the Americans for Tax Reform is a misnomer. The group headed by long-time anti-tax activist Grover Norquist is a conservative organization that has its problems with many government programs, and figures the best way to eliminate those functions for which it has ideological objections is to reduce the amount of money the federal government has to the point where it can no longer afford to do anything.

Norquist is the man who once literally said he wants to reduce the federal government down to a size, “where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Unfortunately, government has obligations that must be met for the protection (if not the betterment) of society. Which means that people who automatically want to say “no” without giving the issue or circumstances any thought are absurd, if not downright irresponsible.

Personally, I think anybody who signs this pledge and gives it any legitimacy ought to be someone we specifically cross off our lists of candidates we would consider voting for.

IF I WERE inclined to pick up a Republican ballot come Feb. 2, Dillard is a candidate I would consider backing. Although I have to admit, I may have gained a little bit of respect for Ryan after learning of McKenna’s attempt at an attack.

I also have to admit the whole issue reminds me of 1994 in one aspect.

That was the year that Republicans were able to play off rural objections to the Clintons and their attempt at health care reform to win an exhorbitant number of Congressional elections – thereby giving them Congressional control that pretty much thwarted any serious governing that the Clinton Administration was capable of doing.

That was the year of the “Contract with America,” which consisted of a series of goals that a GOP-dominated government would use its partisan muscle to impose on the nation. As a political agenda, it went far beyond the Taxpayer Reform Pledge.

BUT MANY POLITICAL people running that year on the GOP side of the equation were eager to use the contract’s rhetoric to campaign with.

Yet I remember one official who didn’t.

Ray LaHood, who at the time was chief of staff to House Minority Leader Robert Michel, R-Ill., was running to replace his boss in representing the Peoria area in Congress. As someone who had been a state legislator before going on a congressional staff, he was more aware of the daily realities of managing a government that lives up to its responsibilities to the people.

I can remember he specifically refused to sign the “Contract with America” even though he admitted there were parts of its rhetoric he agreed with and that could have been useful to his campaigning.

ADMITTEDLY, THERE WERE some people who never forgave him. There was always a subsect of the Republican Party in Illinois that didn’t trust LaHood. For all I know, the fact that he now serves under a Democratic president as Secretary of Transportation probably reinforces their mistrust.

All I know, however, is that LaHood won that election, and wound up getting re-elected to serve 14 years in all in Congress. In the end, it didn’t seem to hurt him.

Could it be that this latest round of cheap rhetoric about Ryan and Dillard is just the same, coming from someone who’s counting on an ideological minority of our state’s population to exceed its influence and somehow magically elect him to office?

I’d have an easier time believing that the Tribune endorsement is going to sway a significant number of voters to McKenna’s side – and I fully realize how impotent individual newspaper endorsements have become in terms of turning out the vote on Election Day.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: You figure whether the Americans for Tax Reform rhetoric is worth anything more (http://www.atr.org/taxpayer-protection-pledge-a2882) than empty rhetoric.

It appears that the Chicago Tribune’s editorial page endorsement policies have reverted back to tradition (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/elections/chi-100108gop-endorse-link,0,3243757.story), which makes me wonder if the Sun-Times endorsement was more about being different (http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/endorsements/1980076,CST-EDT-edit08.article) than anything else.

A blast from the political past, does that spell L-o-s-e-r on Election Day?

The Republican Party’s field of candidates for Illinois governor is a mass of candidates of varying ideological thought processes, including a pair of candidates who are going to try to pass themselves off as The Man who can bring back the glory days of 1995 and ’96.

Those were the two years that the GOP’s candidates held all of the statewide constitutional offices, and controlled the entire General Assembly. If not for the state Supreme Court, all of Illinois would be Republican-dominated.

BACK THEN, KIRK Dillard was the chief of staff to Gov. Jim Edgar who went on to become a state senator from Hinsdale, while Jim Ryan was the Illinois attorney general.

Dillard has remained in that legislative post all these years, while Ryan has been in political retirement ever since he lost the 2002 gubernatorial campaign to Rod Blagojevich.

Now, he wants to come back by making another bid for governor – almost as though he thinks that if he wins, the history books will somehow be rewritten to where there was NEVER a Democrat as governor for the past eight years (Blagojevich and Pat Quinn).

That Ryan campaign in ’02 literally gave off an air of believing that people ought to vote for Jim because it was his turn. Thompson (as in Jim), followed by Edgar (as in Jim), followed by Ryan (as in George), followed by another Ryan.

OF COURSE, THAT campaign got bogged down in the partisan rhetoric from Democratic Party officials who were so desperate to win their first gubernatorial election in 26 years that they resorted to cheap shots against Jim Ryan.

Certain polls taken recently show that some people still can’t truly tell the difference between the one-time attorney general and Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate number 16627-424.

So Ryan may very well be too much of damaged goods to be taken seriously in this primary.

Yet Dillard may come off as too much of a staffer (rather than elected official) to be taken seriously as a candidate for statewide office. I’m also sure there are those people who are among the Republican hard-core who will hold it against him that he was friendly with Barack Obama back when the two were in the Illinois Senate.

THERE ARE SOME people who seriously will blame Dillard for the fact that he was an Obama poker-buddy in those after legislative hours.

Now in this political fight for a resurrection of the ‘90s, Dillard gained a plus – Edgar gave him his endorsement. I’d like to think that the Edgar endorsement would help advance his campaign to make him a front-runner.

But this is one of the most unpredictable election cycles I have ever seen.

The partisan rhetoric coming from the rest of the gubernatorial candidates to downplay the Edgar endorsement’s significance all centers around the theme that nobody cares much about what somebody from the ‘90s thinks.

THESE PEOPLE WANT to move forward, and they want to define what constitutes “forward” – even though one could argue that it was the “old school” way of doing things actually gave the Republican Party domination of Illinois government as strong as any that the Democrats have these days.

One could also argue that it was the move in the direction that these other candidates want to go that caused the Republicans to lose relevance in this state.

How else to explain the attitude of conservative pundit and candidate Dan Proft, who told the Chicago Tribune that Dillard was of a “failed go-along-to-get-along approach” to state government?

Only a true hard-core conservative believer could seriously believe that the 1990s were a “failed” era for the Republican Party.

HAVING ACTUAL POLITICAL power and influence (and domination for a couple of years) sounds like success, particularly compared to the modern era where Republicans are even more irrelevant than the Democrats were back in the spring of 1995.

I know there are political pundits who believe that Edgar has the ability to move polling numbers to the point where his endorsement will be the major factor in helping Dillard break out from the GOP gubernatorial pack to actually win the nomination.

But a part of me wonders if it is the kiss of death, in the same way that Jim Ryan will always be the one political person of Irish ethnic background who won’t be able to use his surname on the ballot as a plus.

Considering the mindset of the modern-day electorate, those who are devoted to the Republican Party in Illinois are most likely looking for an ideologue, which means their attention will center around all the candidates not named either “Dillard” or “Ryan.”

STATE SEN. BILL Brady, R-Bloomington, who is billing himself as the most politically experienced of the ideologues, may have expressed it best in his statement Monday when he said, “my campaign is about tomorrow, not yesterday.”

Yet it was “yesterday” that the GOP was relevant, which makes me wonder if the party faithful have lost sight of the fact that the key to achieving partisan goals is to actually win on Election Day.

Come Feb. 2, the groundhog may or may not see its shadow, but we will gain a strong sense of whether the Illinois Republican Party has any sense of wanting to win on the Election Day come November.

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