Quinn picking Vallas not really a shock

I’ll confess to being surprised when I heard Friday morning that it was the name “Paul Vallas” that would wind up appearing on the ballot for Democratic lieutenant governor nominee in next year’s state election cycle.

VALLAS: A political comeback?

Not that I should have been. Vallas, the one-time head of the Chicago Public Schools, has always been good for tossing out hints he’d like to be part of the local political system – even though he’s never held electoral office and was the guy who got beat by Rod Blagojevich back in the 2002 Democratic primary for governor.

SO THE IDEA that Vallas would be willing to move back to metro Chicago (he’s a native of suburban Crestwood, and still has family living in the area) isn’t odd.

There’s also the fact that Quinn doesn’t seem capable of getting any conventional choices to run along with him come 2014.

The BIG names that have been tossed about are state Sen. Kwame Raoul, D-Chicago, and city Treasurer Stephanie Neely – both of whom have said they’re not interested. The general theory amongst political observers was that Quinn would want a black person paired up with him to appeal to the city’s and south suburban significant African-American vote.

But it honestly would not surprise me to learn that NOBODY of any significance currently in the city’s political structure wanted to be paired up with Quinn.

NOT SO MUCH because nobody wants their name associated too closely with Quinn. But because the post itself is one with no real duties – other than what Quinn wants done with it.

And it is the post that has a small circle of people who are outspoken in their belief that it should be abolished – just let the state attorney general be promoted to governor in the event that succession is needed!

QUINN: Does mid-90s CPS glory bolster gov?

So Quinn was going to have to come up with a politically oddball choice. Vallas probably is amongst the most conventional oddball he could possibly find.

What should we think?

I’M SURE SOME people are going to try to attack Vallas (and Quinn, by association) on the grounds that he doesn’t live in Illinois any longer. State law does say a candidate for statewide office must have lived in the state at least three years prior to the election in question.

And Vallas has made a national name for himself for the number of public school districts he has tried to reform – including Philadelphia and New Orleans, but most recently Bridgeport, Conn. Although that school board is loaded with people who are looking for excuses to dump him.

Which may mean Vallas is soon unemployed – and in need of a new job. Lieutenant governor, anyone?

The critics in Illinois will bash Vallas’ residency by claiming he doesn’t live here anymore. But it seems he never gave up his voter registration (and he does still have family living in the area).

HE ACTUALLY CAST ballots in the last two election cycles, as he kept a voter registration in suburban Palos Heights. Which won’t be enough to appease the ideologues. It makes me wonder if they’re already trying to hire election law expert Burt Odelson to represent their case in court. Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner is already saying Quinn is “running scared” by picking Paul.

But just as Odelson’s legal battle against Mayor Rahm Emanuel ultimately failed because the election residency laws are not as firm as some want to think, it may turn out to be the same for Vallas.

He gets to stay an Illinois resident for political purposes because he never gave up his registration. Now if someone could show he also was voting in other states’ elections, it would be a different issue. But I haven’t heard anyone make that allegation.

Although the Capitol Fax newsletter reported that Illinois State Board of Elections officials were saying the change in law that makes governors pick a running mate prior to the primary means everything may change. “There’s no way to determine an outcome of a scenario” like that, board Chairman Rupert Borgsmiller told the newsletter.

I DON’T KNOW how much Vallas really helps Quinn – he couldn’t even beat Blagojevich, who supposedly was the candidate in that 11-year-old election cycle who appealed to Democrats who lived outside of Chicago.

Vallas was regarded as “too Chicago” for Illinois to accept. Then again, Quinn gets hit with the same claim. If anything, this may bolster the Quinn/Vallas Chicago support to the point where it overcomes the vote from the rural parts of Illinois that definitely will favor a Republican challenger.

Which means Quinn has nothing to lose. And Vallas has everything to gain if the Democratic “top of the ticket” winds up prevailing against whichever candidate the Republicans pick to go for governor – an office they used to “own” (for 26 years, from James R. Thompson through George Ryan) until 2002.

If anything, the fact that Vallas contemplated in 2010 a Cook County Board president run as a Republican might hurt him more. Or at least make him look ridiculous. Although the fact that he never actually ran makes it like more of a tawdry rumor than anything else.

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Vallas to the GOP is likely to fail

I’m starting to feel a little less awkward about having voted back in 2002 for Rod Blagojevich to be governor over Paul Vallas.

The Democratic primary that year was actually a three-way fight, but former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris was irrelevant outside of select neighborhoods on the South and West sides.

VALLAS WAS THE political star who had managed to implement significant changes to the culture that ran the Chicago Public Schools, and he tried to go for governor – only to lose to Blagojevich, who took the bulk of Democratic votes cast outside of Chicago.

Now I know some people who were among those North Side types who would have preferred Vallas for governor will try claiming now they knew all along something was wrong with Milorod.

But they’d be lying.

In fact, Vallas’ alleged actions of recent days have me convinced that the career educator likely would have been the wrong choice for governor back then. And they also have me convinced he likely never will become president of the Cook County Board. He’s one of those experts in a specific area who mistakenly thinks that makes him qualified to talk about lots of things.

PROMINENT CHICAGO JOURNALIST Carol Marin used her ties to the Chicago Sun-Times this week to report that Vallas has decided to go for the top post in county government, hoping he can take advantage of discontent with incumbent President Todd Stroger and run against him.

That means the Democrat Vallas is willing to go over to “the dark side” and become a Republican (hey, I was born in the South Chicago neighborhood. If I were from West Chicago in suburban DuPage County, I’d think the Dems were evil incarnate).

I can’t help but think that the moderate to liberal Vallas is going to find that many of the GOP faithful aren’t going to be willing to accept him – no matter how desperately they’d like to dump on Stroger come 2010.

To certain elements of the Republican Party, Vallas will always be some guy who sees something worthwhile in the large public school systems in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans. Those are usually the systems that GOP people demonize so as to tout the benefits of parochial schools in the city or the public school systems of higher-income suburbs that can usually afford to do nicer things because they don’t have as many students to worry about.

MEANWHILE, BY EVEN thinking of switching parties, Vallas is going to burn whatever bridges he still had to the Chicago political establishment. He’s going to find that a lot of his former allies will turn on him, and the accompanying GOP gain just won’t make up for it.

I say that even though Illinois House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego, is on record as saying he thinks Vallas would fit in well with the Illinois Republican Party. What else is he going to say?

On a certain level, Republican operatives are enjoying the spectacle of seeing a now nationally prominent Democrat show disenchantment with the party.

Besides, to people who have been paying attention, Vallas’ desire to go elsewhere has been apparent for some time. He turned down a chance to speak at the Democratic National Convention held last year in Denver. He could have been on stage with the Barack Obama show, and taken his share of credit for helping to bolster the public schools in Obama’s hometown.

INSTEAD, HE REFUSED to participate, because he knew the Democrats there would remember it, and it would undermine his attempt to use the one-time Party of Lincoln to bolster his political career.

Besides, the whole history of political party-switchers usually only benefits those people whose social beliefs are so conservative that they can’t take being part of a moderate-to-liberal party such as the Democrats. (Think Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond, who had such lengthy careers after switching parties that it almost sounds like a lame gag to imply they were ever Democrats).

If anything, Edward R. Vrdolyak is more typical of what happens to people who switch parties.

The one-time Cook County Democratic Chairman and alderman of the far Southeast Side’s 10th Ward gave up his ties to the party of JFK and FDR when it became apparent in the mid-1980s that Mayor Harold Washington had won the political fights between the two that are now remembered as “Council Wars.”

BUT VRDOLYAK never won elective office as a Republican, even though he tried a couple of times. And the Republicans on a national level were never really comfortable with having Vrdolyak in their ranks.

Privately, they may have been sympathetic to some of the acts he did in opposition to Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor. But they didn’t really want to be tainted by him. And there was the fact that he was then, and remains today, an urban creature.

His home neighborhood of the East Side is a place where people think of the old days when the nearby steel mills (a bit of disclosure, my grandfathers worked in those steel mills) were running at full capacity and they had decent-paying jobs.

Likewise, Aurelia Pucinski tried running for office as a Republican, only to become a Democrat again when she realized her Northwest Side Polish ethnic roots were too much for many Republicans to take. Vallas will find that he is equally out of place in those GOP circles - he's a guy who’s not about to denigrate the urban school experience the way many Republicans like to do.

IN THE END, Vallas may turn out to be an intelligent guy with much knowledge about management and education, but no common sense when it comes to politics. He seems to have forgotten one of the primary rules of remembering who your friends really are.

As the late Texas pundit Molly Ivins once titled one of her books of commentary, “You got to dance with them what brung you.”

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Paul Vallas is one of those guys who is an expert in one specific area (http://blogs.suntimes.com/marin/2009/02/exclusive_paul_vallas_will_run.html) who thinks that qualifies him to do everything equally well.

Could Vallas’ presence help the Republican Party attract more of Illinois’ non-white (http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/02/can-the-gop-attract-more-people-of-color-with-a-black-rnc-chairman.html) population come the next countywide Election Day?

Vallas has some unfinished business to tend to with his current employer, the New Orleans public school system system, before he can start scheduling the moving van to (http://www.bayoubuzz.com/News/Louisiana/Government/Louisiana_Recovery_School_Vallas_Talks_Departure_Plans__8329.asp) bring his belongings back to Chicago.

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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Vallas re-run would be a mistake

Al Hofeld. Al Salvi. And on a national scale, H. Ross Perot.

All three men have one thing in common. They ran for a large-scale political office and came so close to winning that they thought they had found their future – only to learn that their near-victory was just a fluke.

COULD WE SOMEDAY be adding the name of Paul Vallas to that list?

It’s a possibility, since Vallas seems to have dreams of becoming Illinois governor, even though he lost the Democratic primary for that office in 2002.

Vallas, for those with short memories, is the former Chicago Public Schools chief who – after losing the primary to now-Gov. Rod Blagojevich – left the Second City to become head of the school system in Philadelphia, and now is trying to rebuild a school system in New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

But Vallas made some high-profile appearances in Chicago on Monday, where he did all the “wink, winking” and “nudge, nudging” possible to let people here know he’d like to move back to the Chicago area once his contract in New Orleans expires (he has one more year to go in Louisiana).

HE SPOKE TO a City Club of Chicago luncheon, then appeared at an evening program at Northwestern University’s school of continuing studies where he talked about the problems that confront public education – not just in New Orleans, but in Chicago and just about everywhere else in the country.

It allowed him to appear to be a more authoritative figure in his field of specialty than Blagojevich ever appears to be as governor of Illinois. It stirs up the thoughts of those people who voted for Vallas in ’02 that he could run in ’10 and could provide a sense of re-writing history so that the Blagojevich years “never happened.”

What stirs up those people is the fact that Vallas actually got more votes than Blagojevich in Chicago proper. It was only because of a large vote margin in the rural parts of Illinois that Blagojevich was able to win the primary, and even then by only a 21,000 vote margin statewide (which is the size of about half a ward in Chicago, or a small suburb).

Now of course, Vallas is being diplomatic at this point. After all, it is still two more years until the next gubernatorial primary. But he says his reading of the news clippings coming out of Chicago makes him see political people who are “frustrated and angered” with Blagojevich.

“I COULD HAVE made a difference, I would have gotten along with the Legislature a lot better,” Vallas told the gathering at the City Club.

Maybe he would have. Of course, Vallas would have run into the initial opposition that Blagojevich got – he is the first Democrat in 26 years to serve as Illinois governor, and rural Republicans had come to see the Executive Mansion in Springfield as their political domain.

But he might have been able to build up a stronger Chicago support in the Legislature, which would mean that the Statehouse Scene would really have become an “urban vs. rural” brawl.

But what is more important is to realize that we will never know what Vallas would have accomplished in a term or two as governor. He didn’t win the primary.

FOR THAT MATTER, he didn’t even win the vote majority in Chicago. The large African-American population in the city gave its support to Roland Burris’ gubernatorial primary, resulting in him winning the city as a whole. It was the white ethnic parts of Chicago that wanted Vallas (who is of Greek descent) over Blagojevich (a Serbian-American).

Those feelings would not automatically transfer through an eight-year time period. Too much time has passed, and Vallas is just another failed candidate.

Names such as Madigan (as in Lisa), Hynes and Jackson (as in Jesse Jr.) are the more credible considerations for the Democratic nomination for governor in 2010 – provided, that is, that Blagojevich were to change his mind and decide not to seek a third term of running Illinois government from his home office in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago.

My gut feeling says a Vallas ’10 campaign would turn to be a let-down, as he would never capture the sentiment that nearly saw him win the Democratic primary in ’02. The sooner he realizes that he had his chance, it didn’t happen, and he needs to move on with his life, the better off we Illinoisans all will be.

THAT’S WHY I bring up the names of Hofeld, Salvi and Perot. I suppose one could also throw Al Gore’s name into the mix, but thus far he has had the sense not to talk about running yet another campaign for president in this year’s elections.

Hofeld was the Chicago attorney with no prior electoral experience who ran for U.S. Senate in 1992 against incumbent Alan Dixon. He lost, but took enough support away from Dixon that Carol Moseley-Braun won that primary, and went on to win a six-year term in the Senate.

He took that notion of stealing support away from Dixon as evidence that he was qualified for political office and he got the Democratic nomination for Illinois attorney general – where he got beaten so badly by Republican Jim Ryan that he ended his dreams of winning electoral office.

Salvi got the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 1996 and was at the top of the ticket for Illinois Republican voters. Unfortunately for him, opponent Richard Durbin successfully tagged him as some sort of right wing nut, and his presence on the ballot helped Illinois Republicans recover from the devastating losses of 1994 – when the GOP took control of the Legislature and all six state constitutional offices.

SALVI TRIED AGAIN in 1998, and wound up losing the Illinois secretary of state race to Jesse White. He has kept his own political ambitions in check, although his wife made a bid for a seat in the Illinois House of Representatives.

Then, there’s Perot, whose campaign for president in 1992 caught the imagination of people who didn’t want George Bush the elder but whose conservative beliefs would keep them from ever casting ballots for a Democrat.

He didn’t win any electoral votes, but took 19 percent of the vote overall – a tremendous figure for a third-party campaign. His follow-up bid for president in 1996 didn’t even come close to that level – and political people haven’t heard much from H. Ross since then.

THERE IS ONE thing Salvi, Hofeld and Perot had in common – they all had significant personal wealth. They were able to pump significant amounts of cash into their own campaigns so as to ensure they could run competitively against opponents who were preferred by the party establishment.

That is one characteristic Vallas does not share. He had to struggle to pay off the debt from his 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and while he is earning a nice salary from his professional positions with various school boards, he is somebody who has to work for a living.

He doesn’t have the kind of money to pay for a credible campaign without outside donations. That could be the factor that spares us from adding to the list of political failures the name of “Vallas.”

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Paul Vallas wants (http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=29198) to come back home.

How good a job is Paul Vallas doing in Louisiana? The New Orleans-based Times Picayune (http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1209360005313340.xml&coll=1) offers its perspective.

Al Hofeld’s campaign activities these days are limited (http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php?type=name&lname=Hofeld&fname=Al) to writing out checks for political donations.