EXTRA: Why special lxn was a dud

Why was it such a done-deal and so incredibly boring and uneventful that Robin Kelly would get elected to Congress to replace Jesse Jackson, Jr.?

KELLY: Now Rep.-elect

It’s all a matter of numbers.

THE COOK COUNTY clerk’s office reported Tuesday night that with only about five precincts left (and 47,715 votes cast), Kelly of south suburban Matteson had 79 percent of the vote.

And in the Far South Side neighborhoods of Chicago that are in the Illinois Second Congressional District, Kelly took 92 percent of the 13,190 votes that were cast, according to the Chicago Board of Election commissioners.

That was an anticipated outcome. Which means that all of Republican challenger Paul McKinley’s rants and rages about the “corrupt Chicago machine” were nothing more than comic relief – before he withers away into the ranks of no-name candidates that the GOP put up to filling a ballot spot for Chicago-area elections.

The Will and Kankakee county portions of that congressional district just had so few people that they couldn’t overcome the urban lead.

SO THE FACT that McKinley “won” Will County? Irrelevant! Forty-three percent of only 8,315 votes isn’t much, particularly when Kelly herself got all of 42 percent for herself from the land around Crete, Monee and Peotone.

And now, Kelly can go to Capitol Hill – where she will become the most worthless form of political person in existence. A freshman congressman in the minority party.

All that rhetoric she spouted about pushing for strict gun control measures (and emphasized Tuesday by having the family of deceased teenage girl Hadiya Pendleton with her at her Election Night celebration)?

It will fall on the deaf ears of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and his political allies in Congress.

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The bulk of you are lazy goofs who deserve whatever abuse government gives you during the next four years

I cast my ballot a couple of weeks ago – in the morning hours of Good Friday, to be exact.

I used one of the early voting centers so that I could get it out of the way and have my Tuesday free on the off-chance that I wind up spending the day as a reporter-type person trying to figure out how other people are voting.

YET THE HONEST truth is that the people I will be focusing on are NOT the bulk of our society.

For most of us are going to sit on our duffs and do nothing. If anything, the bulk of us will get irritated at the presence of elections, and act as though they ought not to take place at all.

Now I have made this argument before – and I suspect I will make it repeatedly for as long as I live. Those people who don’t vote are allowing government to run roughshod over them.

A good part of the reason I insist on casting a ballot (even in an election cycle like this one where the posts up for grabs were of no interest to anyone who didn’t live in my immediate community) is that I believe I am ensuring my right to complain for the next four years.

PEOPLE WHO CAN’T be bothered to cast a ballot really have no right to gripe!

So for the at least 80 percent of people who don’t bother to vote on Tuesday (the estimates are that, at best, 20 percent of the electorate will cast ballots), I don’t really want to hear your complaints.

You have your chance on Tuesday to have a say over how those local officials will spend your local tax dollars, and how all those local school districts and park boards and sanitary districts and other entities will operate – and you chose to remain silent!

Now having said that, I do realize that for many people, there isn’t much of a choice come this particular Election Day.

THE REALITY IS that in too many of those suburban communities, there is a local political establishment that tries to operate in as much anonymity as possible – and there isn’t any opposition.

In some cases, no one else could be bothered to challenge the incumbents. Not because of any real satisfaction, but because of apathy.

While in other places, local officials know how to game the electoral process to eliminate anyone who had the “gall” (in the incumbents’ opinion) to challenge them.

Is this what it takes to get people to vote?

And within Chicago proper, this is the election cycle where nothing is at stake – with the exception of those who live in the Far South Side and will be picking a replacement for Jesse Jackson, Jr., to represent them in Congress.

EVEN THERE, THE real election cycle came back in the special primary election held in February. Tuesday is likely the night that one-time state Rep. and Cook County CAO Robin Kelly gets rubber-stamped to go to Washington.

We can speculate all we want about the possibility of a long-shot victory for Republican Paul McKinley or Green Party-type LeAlan Ford – yet the key to a long-shot upset electoral victory is candidate interest.

Yet even so, I still felt compelled to cast my ballot. Like I said, I like to be able to complain about the status quo. Which in this case constitutes a rant about the bulk of people who on Tuesday seemed to only have interest in ignoring the fact that it is Election Day.

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Some people should pipe down before they make fools of themselves

Let me state up-front that I’m not mocking Paul McKinley because he did time in prison.

McKINLEY: The GOP nominee

Personally, I can find something admirable about the man who, despite having done significant time in prison for burglary, armed robbery and aggravated battery convictions, has managed to win the Republican Party’s nomination for the Illinois Second Congressional District.

HE GOES ABOUT now trying to use himself as an example to young people of how NOT to behave. “Don’t be like me,” might as well be his motto. It is a noble goal. And I don’t doubt that some people are able to make something significant of themselves after enduring incarceration.

A criminal conviction ought not to be an automatic exclusion from a future life.

But I do get a thrill, a chuckle, a serious laugh from the thought of those conservative ideologues who like to bash and rant and rage and who were prepared to go through the next few weeks trashing Democratic congressional nominee Robin Kelly as a “corrupt Chicago Machine pol” replacing another pol who’s supposedly/probably/most likely on his way to prison.

Only to know that their preferred political party is the one that managed to come up with the convicted felon on the ballot; and one whose actual criminal activities debatably were worse than those of Mel Reynolds – whose own bid for political office/redemption ended in failure on Tuesday.

HECK, JESSE JACKSON, Jr.’s use of campaign money to buy himself a load of celebrity memorabilia to decorate his office comes across as petty by comparison to crimes that got decades of time in prison as punishment.

Supposedly, Kelly was going to be tarred and feathered with rhetoric related to the fact that after leaving the Illinois General Assembly, she was chief of staff to Illinois Treasurer Alexi Gianoulias – whose own bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010 got smeared with the fact that the Broadway Bank his father founded went under financially.

I even recall the speculation that the bank loaned money for real estate projects to a man with mob ties and criminal convictions, although Giannoulias claimed he had nothing to do with those loans and no one ever came up with evidence to the contrary.

Yet to the ideologues who don’t really care about fact to support their partisan rants, they will now lambaste anyone associated with Giannoulias as “corrupt.”

INCLUDING KELLY. TAKE the Chicago Daily Observer website – which never misses a chance to leave the partisan spin out of its efforts to tell us the “news” of the day.

They gave us the blurb Wednesday morning that read, “Robin Kelly, former Chief of Staff to failed bank owner Alexi Giannoulias, has continued the Democrat tradition of putting dicier members of the dicey Chicago political establishment in the 2^nd Congressional District.”

That was the extent of their morning-after Election Day report, other than to then take a couple of paragraphs from the Chicago Tribune to give us the fact that Kelly won the Democratic primary the night before.

To people who really want to perceive the world that way, they deserve to have to be associated with McKinley’s record (he was paroled in 1997, and the bulk of his arrests since then for misbehaving as part of political protests have resulted in dropped charges) – which will make any of their attempts to talk about political corruption sound cheap and tinny by comparison.

THIS ELECTION WILL be the political mismatch along the lines of when then-Mayor Richard M. Daley had to run against Ray Wardingley (a.k.a., Spanky the Clown).

Not that we won’t hear nonsense talk being spewed during the general election portion of this campaign cycle.

For McKinley is the candidate who is in love with the phrase “corrupt Chicago machine.” The appearances I saw him make at select campaign forums during the primary season literally devolved him into working that phrase into the answer he gave to just about every question.

What does he think of a proposed pipeline from Canada through the United States that would pass through western Illinois? “I’m convinced that the corruption of the city of Chicago will find a way to divert the pipeline and steal away every dime,” he retorted.

NOT EXACTLY A man who’s going to be bashful, or all that concerned with the truth. Although it will go far in explaining why voter turnout likely will stink even more for the April 9 elections than they did on Tuesday.

There’s only so much nonsense-talk our minds can consume before we all just tune it out!

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