Freshman senator already declares candidacy for an Illinois top pol spot

I remember a time some two decades ago at the Statehouse in Springfield interviewing a legislator – Nancy Kaszak from Chicago’s Northwest Side.

STAVA-MURRAY: A freshman playing like powerhouse

What sticks in my mind about this interview was now unproductive it was. She wasn’t able to say much, ultimately explaining her ignorance on the issue by saying, “I’m a freshman” and that leadership hadn’t kept her fully appraised of this particular issue.

I COULDN’T HELP but think back to Kaszak when I heard this week about Anne Stava-Murray – a newly-elected Illinois House member from suburban Naperville. She hasn’t even taken office yet, but already has declared her political intentions for the 2020 election cycle.

She’s am ambitious sort, I’ll give her that. She’s going to run for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois that will be open next year. That, of course, is the seat currently held (and has been since 1996) by Richard Durbin.

Of course, the presumption is that Durbin will be seeking re-election. If he were going to try moving to another political post, the obvious shift would be to try becoming Illinois’ governor.

DURBIN: Does he have credible opponent?

But that would have entailed him being willing to give up his current Senate seat in order to run in last year’s election cycle – instead of becoming one of J.B. Pritzker’s political supporters. He wasn’t willing to risk his seat – and it may well be he enjoys being one of the Senate’s elder statesmen, with hopes his name will someday be held in the same regard as Everett McKinley Dirksen, who served in D.C. from 1933 until his death in 1969.

THE LONG-AGO Republican from Pekin who became among the GOP elder statemen with a reputation for being willing to work in a bipartisan political manner. A legend, of sorts, in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Except to people like Stava-Murray, who claims that if Durbin were serious, he’d have already formally declared his candidacy. Although I suspect he already has the beginnings of a re-election bid up and running in a low-key manner.

MADIGAN: Her 'real' opponent?

She’s already setting her sights on Durbin, which will have one political benefit for her.

It will help her erase the stink of being just a freshman representative in the Illinois House – one that she was definitely going to face because she has openly talked of the need to dump long-time (a full half-century) Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, from his political post.

SHE WAS IN full agreement with those Republican ideologues who tried running campaigns last year on the grounds that we need to “Dump Madigan!” and she publicly refused to take the aid that Madigan usually provides to Democrats to support his own Illinois House majority.

It’s not likely she’d have a lengthy future as a representative, since I don’t doubt the Madigan operation is already seeking someone more politically sympathetic to “Mr. Speaker” to challenge Stava-Murray come 2020.

DIRKSEN: Most definitely of the past

But by doing this, she’ll shift the story from her being a renegade legislator to her being one of Illinois’ top politicos (along with Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Gov.-elect Pritzker and whichever of the assorted characters manages to win the mayoral elections to be held next month and in April).

I don’t doubt that Democratic operatives will go out of their way to undermine Stava-Murray and try to ensure she returns to being a political nobody after next year.

BUT I HAVE to wonder what goes through her mindset – if she really thinks she’s the beneficiary of a revolutionary “movement” against Madigan, instead of someone who won because of the intense level of contempt many of us feel for Donald Trump!

TRUMP: His critics led Stava-Murray to win

To me, the explanation is that she’s from Naperville – which once was a part of the great DuPage County Republican organization that was among the strengths of the GOP nationwide.

There once would have been a time when Stava-Murray would have been a Republican aspirant for political office – except that the Republicans have gone so far overboard to become the political party of rural America that I suspect if she had tried to run in the Republican primary last year, she’d have lost. They wouldn't want her. She's a Democrat by default!

It may well be that Stava-Murray is showing off her political ignorance and doesn’t fully realize “which side” she’s on. For her sake, she’s going to have to figure things out and “pick a side,” or else it could turn into a bloody two years for her.

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Former Rahm challenger still opposes him

KASZAK: A Chico backer

Nancy Kaszak has kept herself fairly quiet during this election cycle. Until Sunday, when she joined a group of assorted political people in giving their endorsements to mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel’s most significant challenger – Gery Chico.

Kaszak, of course, is the former Park District legal counsel and state representative from the Northwest Side (although those with good memories might also remember her as one of the leaders of the ultimately unsuccessful 1980s effort to keep the Chicago Cubs from erecting lights at Wrigley Field) who twice had her dreams of serving in Congress crushed. The latter time was in 2002 when she took on Emanuel in the Democratic primary that year.

SHE GOT SIGNIFICANT financial support from women’s activists, including the EMILY’s List group, along with Polish activists, and tried making an appeal that Emanuel was an outsider, while she was just a good Polish girl from the neighborhood.

The campaign spending in that election cycle was so intense that it set records for money spent on a political post in a primary – although looking at its totals compared to the most recent political record setters is amusing in the same way we think it cute that one-time star baseball pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter was once considered a “big-money” ballplayer for having a contract totaling $3.75 million over a five-year period.

She got respectable voter support, but not enough to win. Now, the legislator who was a fairly dependable member of the progressive faction of the state Legislature when she served there in the mid-1990s is aligned with one of the most establishment-oriented officials in Chicago government.

None other than Edward Burke, the Southwest Side alderman who is one of Chico’s biggest backers and whom some people will forevermore be convinced helped to orchestrate that Illinois appellate court ruling that actually knocked Emanuel off the mayoral ballot for about 24 hours last week.

IT SEEMS KASZAK is still using the neighborhood appeal in trying to make Emanuel out to be an outsider who isn’t really a part of the Northwest Side – regardless of how his home ownership and voter registration status complies with the relevant laws on the issue.

“Gery Chico is clearly the most eminently qualified candidate to lead this city,” she said, during a campaign rally held Sunday in Eckhart Park near the Wicker Park neighborhood. “Gery never lost touch with the community and the people he served in public life.

“Every time Gery accomplished big things for Chicagoans, he always made the community part of the process,” she said. “This distinguishes him from his opponents.”

For what it’s worth, Burke himself made the trip up from his 14^th Ward to the 27^th Ward – where local Alderman Walter Burnett is among the officials who had an interest in having a coalition candidate to help an African-American person get elected as mayor, although the park where the Chico backers converged lies just outside of the 1^st Ward, where Alderman Joe Moreno is a solid Chico backer.

I SUSPECT BURKE thought the trip up to an alien (to him, at least) part of Chicago was to see that the collection of characters put together to endorse Chico did so by sticking to the script and without saying anything that could be misconstrued as truly interesting/newsworthy.

By all accounts, Kaszak played her part in Sunday’s Burke mayoral sermon perfectly.

Which means city voters can now go forth beginning Monday and show up at the early voting centers that will be open through Feb. 17 – for those who just can’t wait until Feb. 22 to cast their ballots for the new mayor of Chicago.

And as for those suburban Chicago residents who don’t have any municipal elections three weeks from Tuesday, I wonder if they’re going to make the mistake of assuming that means there aren’t any elections at all for them. Could it further depress their voter turnout when suburban municipal elections are held April 5?

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TRANSITION TIDBITS: Both sides’ hard-liners spew nonsense political talk

During the now-complete presidential campaign season, I lost count of the number of times that Republican partisans tried to link President-elect Barack Obama to leaders of foreign countries with interests hostile to those of the United States.

They took the fact that Obama said during a debate in Austin, Texas, that he’d be willing to meet with Cuba’s leadership in hopes of achieving a normalization of relations as evidence that he was naïve and would be duped by those foreign leaders.

EVENTUALLY, IT BECAME an “unholy trio” of leaders who allegedly would sucker a President Obama – Raul Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and the topper of the bunch, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

But now, the tables appear to be turned. It seems that the hard-liners of Iran are fearful that their president is falling for Obamamania and could wind up getting suckered into some agreement by “the Great Satan” otherwise known as the United States of America.

Specifically, leaders of the parliament in Iran are upset that Ahmadinejad sent a letter last week to Obama, congratulating him on his electoral victory and urging him to be a “good president,” without specifying what constitutes “good.”

It turns out that no Iranian leader has made such a goodwill gesture to a U.S. leader literally since the days of the Shah back in the 1970s. The hard-liners of the Iranian government aren’t sure what to make of such a gesture, similar to how the hard-liners of the U.S. government want to somehow believe that trying to establish contact with foreign leaders is a suspicious concept in and of itself.

NOW I’M NOT trying to defend Ahmadinejad or his record in office. There definitely is reason for the two countries to remain suspicious of each other.

But this affair ought to be used as evidence of how ridiculous campaign rhetoric can be. Every single person (http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/11/10/Iranian_parliament_to_probe_Obama_letter/UPI-97261226335088/) who was spewing this line of “logic” was also touting the idea that Obama was a socialist. Is it possible that both arguments are ridiculous?

Besides, the recent history of both the United States and Iran contains incidents that make the other distrustful – “they” seized control of “our” embassy and took embassy employees hostage for nearly a year-and-a-half, while “we” threw our support behind Saddam Hussein when he decided to wage war against Iran.

What else is notable about the events of recent days as this country tries to prepare itself for a City Hall takeover of the District of Columbia?

PRIVATE SCHOOL FOLLIES: I’m waiting to see how long it takes for some conservative pundit to turn the Obamas’ choice of education for their two daughters into a reason to bash him.

While most of the attention at the White House was paid Monday to the president-elect meeting with President George Bush, what caught my attention was that he got to come back to Chicago Monday night while future first lady Michelle Obama (a.k.a., Renaissance) remained in the District of Columbia.

She plans to spend some time Tuesday touring schools to figure out just where Malia and Sasha will transfer to when the family Obama moves to Washington in January.

What makes it a conservative issue is the fact that she planned to look at private schools (just like every other presidential kid in recent years). How long until we hear that the Obamas are liberal hypocrites for not putting their kids in public schools? Just because the campaign’s over does not mean the trash talk ends. It is the responsibility of every person in this country to see such silliness for what it really is – and then ignore it.

SHE’S AT IT AGAIN: With Rahm Emanuel becoming the White House chief of staff, that creates an opening in the Illinois congressional delegation. And unlike the U.S. Senate vacancy to be filled by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the House seat from Chicago’s Northwest Side will be filled by special election.

Various reports have as many as 10 people with delusions that they can move up to Congress – including the daughter of Alderman Dick Mell (and sister-in-law of the governor) who has yet to serve one day in the Illinois House seat she won in last week’s elections.

The name that caught my attention was that of Nancy Kaszak, a former state legislator and attorney for the Chicago Park District. She twice has run for the congressional seat – only to lose to Rod Blagojevich in 1996 and Emanuel in 2002.

I still remember how Kaszak’s ’02 campaign became the darling of the “good government” types who were disgusted that a political player like Emanuel would represent them. Could this year be THE YEAR that she finally gets to be the female equivalent of Mr. Smith?

WHAT DO SANTA CLAUS AND JOE BIDEN HAVE IN COMMON?: Philadelphia sports fans don’t like either one of them.

The incoming vice president from Delaware was at the Philadelphia Eagles/New York Giants game on Sunday, and when a video screen in the stadium showed Joe Biden among the crowd, the fans boo-ed. This (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/10/biden-booed-at-eagles-giants-game/) despite the fact that the Obama/Biden ticket took Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes with strong support in Philadelphia.

Some observers noted that GOP VP dreamer Sarah Palin got similar treatment when she appeared at a Philadelphia Flyers hockey game during the campaign. But this is literally the city that once boo-ed (and threw snowballs at) a Santa Claus figure that rode his “sleigh” across the field in mid-game.

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