A woman? As party chairman! Only the GOP could think this was a radical step

It has been known for quite a while that Illinois Republican Chairman Pat Brady would wind up stepping down from his post on account of the fact that his thoughts about gay marriage (“accept it,” he says) have offended a segment of the GOP faithful.

BRADY: Will anyone take his advice?

So when he tendered his resignation on Tuesday, the fact that he’s gone wasn’t really news. What caught my attention was the fact that Brady made a point of saying he thinks he should be replaced by a woman.

“I REALLY THINK we need a different face than an old white guy,” WBBM-TV reported Brady as saying. “I think it’s time for a woman.”

Not that it would be a first. Let’s not forget that Judy Baar Topinka held the post about a decade ago – only to manage to offend the same ideologues who were determined to dump Brady; one way or another.

Which means I’m sure that the people who wanted Brady out aren’t going to be the least bit interested in who he thinks should succeed him. This whole fight over leadership of the Republican Party in this state is ideologically-inspired.

At a time when some elements are trying to tell the Republican Party to moderate their views more in line with the bulk of society, there is the other element tightening its grasp to ensure that the party stays totally in line with the way they want to view the world.

AFTER ALL, THAT’S why they became Republican Party members in the first place.

Personally, I don’t place faith in any government institution to “do right” 100 percent of the time. I also realize that the concept of “compromise” means that I’m never going to get absolutely what I want all of the time.

Although I suspect that the ideologues who are behind this GOP leadership battle are more interested in seeing to it that their opponents NEVER get what they want Which is another reason I have trouble sympathizing with them.

TOPINKA: Who remembers 1st woman chair?

So it will be intriguing to see which direction the party leadership goes. Which faction of Republican partisans will prevail?

I DON’T SEE a return to the days of old when a life-long Chicagoan like James R. Thompson could get elected to a record-setting consecutive number of terms as governor.

Personally, I always thought that Thompson’s electoral success was due to the fact that Chicagoans found him acceptable enough that they could focus their attention on supporting Democratic politicians running for offices they were more concerned about.

Now, that very acceptability would probably cause the GOPers from rural parts of the state to revolt against “Big Jim” – or anybody like him!

DONOVAN: The 'radical' pick?

Which is part of the reason why I find it amusing that – for the time being – the Illinois Republican Party is being led by a woman from Chicago.

CAROL DONOVAN IS the current vice-chairman of the Illinois GOP. She will be in charge until party officials figure out who they want to put in charge for the long-haul.

Nobody expects Donovan to get the actual pick. She’s the equivalent of David Orr when one runs through a list of people who have served as mayor of Chicago – or have you forgotten his week-long stint 26 years ago as the “Man on Five?”

But a part of me thinks she would be the radical pick who would appease the ideologues. After all, anybody who lives in Chicago (even if she is a Champaign native) yet persists in working for the GOP is obviously in it as an act of the heart. Because with the way the Democratic Party dominates the local scene, she obviously doesn’t get anything in the way of a job or any other political perks from her party duties.

 A Chicago Republican? How much more hard-core can you get!

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Gay marriage “statement” to be made (maybe) this weekend in SW suburbs

It will be intriguing to see how intense the ideological rhetoric will be Saturday when the state’s Republican Party is supposed to meet to consider whether to dump party Chairman Pat Brady.

BRADY: Fate on the line?

For there are those of a certain conservative bent who are disgusted not only with the fact that they are being pressured into consider a measure to make marriage amongst gay couples legitimate, but that their own party chairman isn’t backing them.

THESE ARE THE same people who liked it when, nearly two decades ago, the Illinois General Assembly and then-Gov. Jim Edgar made their own statement to change state laws to clarify that marriage in Illinois could never be legal between same-gender couples.

Now that such a thought is blatantly offensive (although honestly, it was just as tacky in 1996), they want to complain.

The party delegates are scheduled to meet Saturday at the convention center in southwest suburban Tinley Park located just off Interstate 80 – which makes it fairly easy for all to get to.

Although I’m wondering how many people who are party delegates are going to be reluctant enough to want to get involved in this issue that they will decide to skip this session.

I’M SURE SOME delegates will show up and will get all vehement in their talk. They are the hard-core who are prepared to go on a crusade for their “cause” – which has less to do with the sanctity of the family and our society and more about their “need” to demonize anyone who isn’t exactly like themselves.

I can’t help but notice that the person who seems to be at the forefront of leading this effort to dump Pat Brady is none other than James Oberweis – whose family business may make high-quality dairy products (the ice cream in particular is outstanding) but has become something of a political joke.

OBERWEIS: Trying to "make" his bones?

He finally got elected last year to a seat in the Illinois state Senate, and is amongst the rank-and-file of the legislators now in Springfield. But considering this was a man with aspirations to run for the U.S. Senate or Illinois governor, being nothing more than a freshman senator from Sugar Grove (out near Aurora) must be demeaning to his ego.

He probably envisions that deposing Brady will make him a party leader – or at least leader of the conservative ideologue faction that is probably the only group of people he wants to have to pay any attention to.

WHICH IS WHY I think that people of sense ought to just skip the event! Particularly since I noticed the Capitol Fax newsletter is reporting that it is very possible that no binding vote could be taken on Saturday -- so it wouldn't matter what happens.

Let them leave Oberweis with a movement that goes nowhere due to a lack of a quorum. Or with so few people on hand that it becomes blatantly clear how limited the opposition to the whole gay marriage issue has become.

If anything, it would go a long way toward showing that Brady wasn’t wrong when he said the Republican opposition on this issue puts Illinois GOPers on the “wrong side of history.”

Just that certain people don’t want to accept it – making them as pathetic as those people who in the late 1970s and early 1980s were still ranting and raging about segregation and the fact that it was no longer written into the law!

ALTHOUGH I’M ALSO aware that there are many people who are going to disagree with Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka – who this week offered her praise for Brady and went so far as to say that gay marriage is actually a conservative concept. No wonder why some GOPers think of her as the "crazy aunt" whom they try to hide in their figurative closet!

TOPINKA: What will she say next?

After all, these couples want to be married and in monogamous relationships just like any other heterosexual couple, is what Topinka says.

True enough, but I suspect many more agree with a person who wrote a recent letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune – claiming that bans on gay marriage are NOT discrimination because gay people are permitted to marry anyone of the other gender whom they might wish?!?

Maybe, just maybe, those members of the Illinois House who are wavering on the issue will see the Republican event this weekend and finally realize how isolated they’re going to make themselves if they don’t get with the program on this particular issue.

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Dumping the “Dump Madigan” people

I’m old enough to remember the two-year period in the mid-1990s when Republicans controlled everything about state government.

MADIGAN: We didn't dump him



From governor through all the state constitutional offices to the leadership of the General Assembly, the GOP had the muscle and they were more than willing to use it to push an ideological agenda – while also going out of their way to snub “Illinois House Minority Leader Michael Madigan, D-Chicago” every chance they could get.

WHICH IS WHY I find the upcoming political situation in Illinois to be hilarious – sort of!

Democratic Party officials have held control of state government since 2002 (even though we have a Republican for a state treasurer and Judy Baar Topinka as state comptroller these days), but their role has been strengthened in a sense.

The elections held Tuesday saw an increase in the number of Democrats who will serve in the General Assembly. For the next two years beginning in January, both the state Senate and Illinois House of Representatives will have three-fifths majorities of Democrats.

It means we’re in veto-proof territory for the Democrats. The legislative leaders, if they can keep their caucuses united, can do what they want.

AND IF GOV. Pat Quinn has the unmitigated gall (in their minds) to think he can use his veto power to reject things (such as a Chicago casino and other gambling expansion), they’ll ram it down his throat harder than the GOP used to dump on Democrats back in the old days two decades ago.

This all comes about despite the fact that the Illinois Republican Party conducted its campaigns these days with a common theme – Dump Madigan.

They tried to associate the name “Mike Madigan” with everything they think is wrong with Illinois these days. They tried to push the theme that voting for a Democrat to serve in the Legislature (not just the Illinois House) was really a vote for Madigan – because all Democrats do exactly what Madigan tells them!

The voters apparently didn’t buy into it, because we got more Democrats in the Legislature – although I’m sure the Republicans who did get elected are going to feel a sense of moral outrage and will yell and scream for the next two years about the great injustice of everything.

THERE’S ALREADY SOME political trash talk coming from within the GOP partisans that party Chairman Pat Brady ought to be dumped as a result, with some planning a big announcement on Friday to that effect.

“Tuesday’s election results prove that Brady is unfit for the job,” Republican activist William J. Kelly said. “He has been outmatched and outwitted by House Speaker Michael Madigan.”

In short, we have the surviving Republicans peeved, and the potential for Democratic infighting.

The very thought of it gives me a headache. Although I’m sure Democratic Party leadership is snickering, because all that yelling and screaming won’t stop a veto-proof majority from doing what it wants.

FOR HIS PART, Quinn is taking the opposite approach. He’s telling reporter-type people these days that he’s pleased with what ought to be solid support from the Legislature.

Except it isn’t!

This is a Legislature that is skeptical and distrusting of Quinn. I have heard long-time Democratic legislators tell me that the governor is someone who is erratic in his behavior and can’t be trusted to support them.

So they feel no compulsion to back him on anything.

THIS COULD TURN into a two-year battle between the governor and Madigan, paired with state Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, for who’s really in charge. It might not get as ugly as the days of Madigan versus then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich (that bordered on psychotic). But it won’t be pretty.

If anything, it probably shows the difference between the two parties. Democrats really aren’t capable of the kind of unified front that Republicans put on back in 1995 – they can’t “play nice” with each other on any level.

There won’t be any ideological agenda forced onto Illinois, no matter how much some people want to fear that it is inevitable.

If anything, Illinois voters rejected that concept when they had enough sense to take the whole “Dump Madigan” concept and treat it as a joke.

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Illinois GOP wants us to dump all over Lisa Madigan; what else is new?

MADIGAN: Doing her job!

Somebody needs to have a serious sit-down with Illinois Republican Chairman Pat Brady to explain to him the way in which lawyers and government work. Because it is clear from his rhetoric on Friday that he’s taking advantage of people who don’t have a clear concept – all so he can score some cheap political points.

Brady on Friday issued a statement that is meant to get the GOP faithful all worked up over the indictment this week of Cook County Board member Bill Beavers – who got hit on assorted tax charges.

DA FEDS. THE G. The I.R.S., to be specific. In short, the federal government is going after Beavers for the way in which he did not (allegedly) report his use of campaign contributions and county expense accounts for personal purposes.

In his statement, Brady wants to know why Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan didn’t catch Beavers first.

He says she has “not undertaken any significant public corruption investigations in her nine years in office,” and wants us to think of the highly-qualified daughter of the speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives as some sort of incompetent boob.

“It is mind-boggling that in a state where the last two governors stand convicted of corruption, that ranks as the third-most corrupt state in the country, and is home to Chicago, ranked as the most corrupt city in the country that our chief law enforcement officer has yet to undertake any significant public corruption investigations in her nearly 10 years in office,” Brady said.

NONSENSE, I REPLY.

Despite all the nonsensical uses of forms of the word “corrupt” in that last part of his statement, there is one thing that Brady states that is just flat-out wrong.

The Illinois attorney general is NOT the “chief law enforcement officer” in this state.

Her office does contain some functions that cause its collections of legal minds to get involved in criminal law on occasion. But the attorneys on the state payroll mostly deal in matters of civil law.

IF ANYTHING, LISA Madigan is the attorney for Illinois state government. When the state gets sued, she is the one who represents it. When the state’s agencies with some enforcement powers decide to take someone to court, it is Madigan’s staff of attorneys who handle the legal brawl.

It is probably most accurate to think of the Illinois attorney general’s office as the law firm used by state government – and Lisa Madigan as its administrator.

People who want to think that she’s packing a badge in her purse and is prepared to whip it out and start arresting people really are missing the point of what her authority is.

So the idea that Madigan would be finding a reason to investigate Beavers, or any of the other political hacks who have wound up finding themselves astray with the law, isn’t quite right.

THERE’S ALSO THE fact that the acts that Beavers (and, in fact, many of those who have been caught up in various government corruption probes) have done things that are explicit violations of federal law. That is particularly true of Beavers – whose actions to bolster his own pension and use his county expense account are completely legal, in and of themselves.

It is the fact that Beavers is alleged to have not acknowledged his use of the money as additional personal income, and may have filed his income tax returns in a way to try to cover up this use, that is the crime the feds say Beavers committed.

If Madigan’s aides had come across some sort of evidence that Beavers had done this, their proper course of action would have been to turn it over to the I.R.S. so their investigators could handle the matter.

It wouldn’t have been to take a show-boating stance on the matter to try to gain attention for herself. That would have been inappropriate – and the ideologues who Brady is trying to reach out to are usually the first to get upset about governments stepping on each other’s jurisdictions – but only if it is a Republican-leaning government that is being told what to do by someone else.

WHICH IS TO say that Brady’s rhetoric is nothing more than nonsense. He wants people who might not spend every waking hour studying the finer nuances of differing levels of government to think that something is being mishandled – when, in reality, nothing is.

I realize that Brady is a political operative whose “job” is to get people all worked up to the point where they would actually consider voting for Republican candidates for elective office.

But just because Pat feels the need to spew a line or two of trash-talk to try to gain himself some attention in the feeding frenzy that will take place with regards to the Bill Beavers story does NOT mean we, the people of Illinois, ought to feel the least bit obligated to take his talk the least bit seriously!

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Capitol Fax newsletter on Friday asked people to express their view on whether Pat Brady’s attack on Lisa Madigan was “fair.” The Illinois GOP used their Facebook site to direct people to the newsletter so that they could say it was.

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.