Quinn gets chance to create one last political headache for his critics

Pat Quinn has just over one month left in his time as governor, yet he’s going to create such a political firestorm. There’s just no way he could leave on a quiet note.

It is because of the death early Wednesday of Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka – one month before she was to be sworn in for her second term as head of the post that cuts the checks to pay the state’s bills.

BECAUSE OF THE fact that she’s in charge of the office that keeps state government running financially (the state treasurer oversees the state’s investments), there needs to be a comptroller to ensure the government keeps running.

So to those people who, for politically partisan reasons, want Quinn to sit back and do nothing and defer to Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner until he takes office Jan. 12, that ain’t a gonna happen.

Quinn gets to pick a new state comptroller to finish out the remainder of the term to which Topinka was elected to in 2010. None other than the Illinois Constitution gives him that authority.

Although ideologues usually don’t care what some stinkin’ piece of paper has to say – they’re going to rant and rage that Quinn has no right picking anybody because of his electoral loss in last month’s elections.

I ALREADY HAVE read assorted commentary about how, if Quinn does get to sign off on a “Comptroller for a Month” position, he ought to defer to whatever Rauner wants to do. Even though when then-Gov. James R. Thompson had a secretary of state appointment to fill in 1981 when Alan Dixon moved up to the U.S. Senate, he picked fellow Republican Jim Edgar for the post rather than respecting the fact that voters picked a Democrat for the post.

Which means the idea of respect for party politics isn’t going to happen. It’s ridiculous to presume it will happen.

You’d think the fact that Quinn’s appointment will only run through mid-January and that Rauner himself will take office with a major appointment to fill (who gets to be comptroller for the four-year term running through early 2019 that Topinka was just elected to) would please those people.

But it won’t. Some people, particularly those who are trying to rewrite state law to call for a special election, are just way too eager to pick issues to complain about.

I’M NOT ABOUT to predict here who’s going to become the new state comptroller – not for the next month, nor for the next four years.

I’ve heard the political wisecracks about how Quinn likely won’t pick Sheila Simon to fill the post that she ran for, and lost, last month. After all, her refusal to continue to serve as Quinn’s lieutenant governor was a fairly prominent snub – perhaps the biggest of the now-complete campaign season.

I’ve also heard the names of “Tom Cross,” “Dan Rutherford” and “Evelyn Sanguinetti” all tossed about as possible picks by Rauner, along with the possibility of putting Topinka's chief of staff in the constitutional post.

The idea being that Cross came so close to winning state election (running for treasurer) that he ought to get some sort of post, while Rutherford serving as state treasurer has some sense of what the state’s financial situation truly is.

THE IDEA OF Lt. Gov.-elect Sanguinetti as comptroller is the most amusing to me – one person suggests that it would save the state some money in salary because Rauner could then go without a lieutenant governor during his gubernatorial term.

Of course, if that happened and Rauner wound up being unable to finish his term in office, that would make state Attorney General Lisa Madigan next in line to become governor without having to be elected. A thought that I’m sure would make the ideologues wretch in disgust.

Personally, I'd rather have someone as inexperienced as Sanguinetti in a do-nothing position like lieutenant governor, than being in charge of making sure bills get paid close to being on time. But maybe that's just me.

It will be intriguing to see who Quinn picks for the “Comptroller for a Month” post. Somebody will get to be a state constitutional officer for 31 (or so) days.

SIMILAR TO THOSE people who remember the week-long stint that David Orr once served as Chicago mayor in between the death of Harold Washington and the appointment of Eugene Sawyer.

Which was only significant in that it makes him the answer to a trivia question for political geeks.

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EXTRA: Treasurer-elect Mike Frerichs

It seems we finally have a new state treasurer. And no, we didn’t have to endure a lengthy legal fight along the lines of the Gore v. Bush battle of 2000.

It was Wednesday morning that Republican nominee Tom Cross decided to concede defeat to Democrat Mike Frerichs in the Nov. 4 elections. Even Illinois Republican Chairman Tim Schneider went along and issued a statement along those lines, although he seemed more interested in praising Cross than admitting GOP defeat.

THEN AGAIN, I don’t think Frerichs – a state senator from Champaign -- cares, so long as the record shows he got more votes than did Cross – a state representative from Oswego and former Illinois House Republican leader.

For the record, it seems that Frerichs got about 9,400 more votes than did Cross – taking barely over 48 percent of the vote to Cross’ just under 48 percent. The remainder of the ballots actually cast went to Libertarian nominee Matthew Skopek.

There are those who are ranting that Chicago and suburban Cook County “stole” the election – mostly from people who truly do not comprehend how small their rural counties are compared to the inner part of the Chicago metropolitan area.

Although for those who were going out of their way during the past two weeks to see daily updates about the vote (as assorted mail-in and provisional ballots continued to be counted) noticed that Frerichs crept into the lead earlier this week and managed to hold it BEFORE the final Chicago/suburb totals were in.

FOR THOSE WHO want to think Chicago rammed a Democrat through as state treasurer against their will, it would seem that what the Chicago-area vote did was bolstered the margin of victory.

Instead of winning by a few hundred votes, Frerichs becomes treasurer-elect by a figure just low-enough that it can’t be rounded off to 10,000.

Which is still a close result for a statewide election in which about 3 million people cast ballots. If anything, it may be some of those outer counties that kept Cross from the office that way too many political observers wanted to believe he was going to win.

Frerichs actually won Will County with 58.5 percent of the vote, and also took north suburban Lake County. And his suburban Cook percent was only 53.67 percent.

WHICH COULD WELL be why Cross chose not to get involved in any kind of demand for a recount – which is not something Illinois law allows for on an automatic basis.

He saves himself significant legal expenses, leaves open the option of a political future (by not being a sore loser), and only manages to offend the hard-core Republican partisans who can’t get over the fact that having a gubernatorial nominee who took 101 of 102 counties does NOT mean a political wipeout of the opposition.

As for those who are going to rant about “stolen” elections, I don’t think the rest of us should be too concerned. Those people were going to be offended no matter what happened – and they’ll probably revert back to ranting about Kennedy/Nixon of 1960 before long.

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How Dem are we?

We Ask America is coming out with more polls, trying to document how the electorate may have shifted in recent weeks leading up to Election Day.


If those polls are at all reliable (the only real poll that matters is Election Day proper), it would seem that Illinois is coming back to its roots.


AFTER HAVING SPENT a summer engaged in a fling with Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Rauner, it would seem that we're returning to Mr. Democrat instead. The trend across several races seems to be that Democratic candidates for state and federal offices in Illinois are taking leads, or getting dangerously close to the GOPers who were counting on many Dem voters breaking away from our usual leanings.


Perhaps they think the electorate is the equivalent of a hussy engaging in an affair. But all affairs come to an end, and it seems that Mr. Democrat will be forgiving of his electorate spouse for flirting, so to speak, with the enemy.


That We Ask America poll for the governor's election shows Pat Quinn with a 4-percentage point lead over Rauner -- which is about as big a lead as anyone has had Quinn with (unless you believed that 11-point lead the Chicago Tribune poll gave Quinn a few weeks ago).


Their poll for the U.S. Senate race showed Richard Durbin with a 13-point lead over Republican James Oberweis -- even though the ice cream millionaire seems content to live off the memory of that one poll over a month ago that had him lingering only 6 points behind Durbin.


THERE ALSO WAS the poll for Illinois treasurer, which shows Republican Tom Cross only 1 percent ahead of Democrat Michael Frehrichs -- a state legislator from Champaign and one of the few Dems from outside of Chicago metro to get any attention this election cycle.


One percent for a Chicago no-name is bad. It's within the margin of error. Theoretically, Frehrichs may be leading in reality, but it's too close to show up in the polls. Or maybe he's not.


For Frehrichs to defeat a former leader in the Illinois House of Representatives would truly be sad. This ought to be one of the races in which Republicans actually hold on to what they have (let's not forget the current Treasurer is Dan Rutherford).


But it could be that the large Democratic victory margins of voters coming out of Chicago, along with slightly smaller margins from suburban Cook County (which account for about 45 percent of the state's population) could wind up overcoming all the notions that political operatives have tried to put into our heads that everybody is anxious to try the Republican brand this year, and that Democrats ought to be quaking in their pants.


I'M NOT SURE what we should think of what will happen when the polls close the evening of Nov. 4. It's going to be several close races -- including the fight for governor where Rauner has kicked in tens of millions of dollars of his own money into an effort to buy the political post.


It makes me wonder how irrelevant his campaign would be if he were not so wealthy that he could afford to spend his own money, and actually had to raise it from political supporters like other candidates do.


This is going to remain a Democrat-leaning government for Illinois, regardless of what happens in the top political post (even though technically the top spot on the ballot is the U.S. Senate race).


In fact, it makes me wonder if the person who ought to be concerned is state Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, who could get caught up in the mess of people going out of their way to vote straight Democrat. Sheila Simon's campaign could wind up getting voter support from people who could care less about her personally.


THEN AGAIN, JUDY was always the "crazy aunt" of Republican politics in that she got along with Democrats too, and lived in suburban Riverside. Which makes her yet another Cook Connty resident.


It always made certain Republicans a little queasy about dealing with her, as if they thought she wasn't truly one of them.


But it also makes her one of the few Republicans that Cook County residents are comfortable voting for. That, and the way Simon dissed Quinn for not wanting to continue as his lieutenant governor running mate, probably will be the reason Judy survives the Illinois political scene, even though for many of us she's the "wrong" political party.


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The issue that won’t wither away

I know there are those people who want to view the whole debate concerning marriage between gay couples as over and done with.

CROSS: Will he move up to treasurer?

Heck, the Washington Post last week cited the elections in Illinois as evidence that people have become comfortable with the issue and that the hard-ball politicking is over.

WHAT WITH THE fact that state representatives Ed Sullivan, R-Mundelein, and Ron Sandack, R-Downers Grove, won their bids for re-nomination, even though they had seriously-funded opposition.

Then there was the fact that state Rep. Tom Cross of Oswego was successful in his bid to get the Republican nomination for state treasurer.

What Cross, Sandack and Sullivan all had in common was that they were the few Republicans who were willing to vote “aye” when the issue of gay marriage becoming legal came up for debate and a vote in the Illinois House of Representatives.

There were those who were convinced that the conservative voting bases in their legislative districts (all in the outer suburbs of the Chicago area, although Cross comes from an area where it is debatable whether he’s a suburban or rural legislator) would be so repulsed that they would easily lose.

THEIR VOTE IN favor of gay marriage being legitimate would haunt them. They would pay for it. Except that they didn’t.

Admittedly, Sandack had what was the closest campaign vote total of any in Illinois on Tuesday. But he won. Sullivan and Cross achieved victory by greater margins.

I have no doubt there are individuals who live (and vote) in those particular rural districts who are repulsed that they couldn’t defeat ANY of the three. Although I’m also inclined to believe that the real truth of the matter is that people are ready to move on.

SULLIVAN: Vote not an issue

They’re not interested in re-fighting this political battle over and over.

NOT HERE IN Illinois, or probably anywhere else in the nation.

Yet the same mentality of political people who are going to try to repeal federal healthcare reform initiatives so long as they live (because they don’t like just who it is who will get credit for its successes) also exist on this issue.

Take the situation in Michigan, where there are now more than 300 gay couples who got themselves a marriage license in recent days, only to be told on Saturday they can’t use it right away.

SANDACK: Oh, so close!

For those who rushed right away to get married, they now have to know that they may have wasted their time and don’t have any more legal legitimacy than they had all along.

IT WAS ON Friday that a federal judge in Detroit issued an order saying that Michigan’s law (passed in 2004 with 59 percent support of voters) that specified gay marriage was illegal IS in-and-of itself unconstitutional.

But Saturday afternoon, a federal Court of Appeals judge in Cincinnati put a stay on that order – on that will remain in effect at least through Wednesday. It was the state Attorney General’s office who asked for the stay.

Legal officials said they granted it so that the people who want to keep marriage for gay couples strictly verboten can have time to put together, “a more reasoned consideration” of the issue.

Except that so much of the reasoning on this issue is based on emotion and the need of some people to have the law uphold their own personal hang-ups. Adding four days, or making the wait indefinite, isn’t going to change anything about the debate.

SCHUETTE: Carrying on the fight

NOW I SORT of comprehend the difference between Illinois and Michigan. Our state had the Legislature and Gov. Pat Quinn impose the change in policy (and yes, back in the mid-1990s days of a Republican-dominated state government, Illinois passed its own law that specified gay marriage was NOT appropriate).

Whereas in Michigan, it was a court forcing the change in state policy. It would be nice if the legislative geeks who convene in Lansing, Mich., could reach a similar consensus. Perhaps they will, someday.

But I also suspect there are some places that are prepared to take a perverse level of pride in being able to say they were the last place to accept the concept of marriage for all. Or that they only did it under duress from a court.

Which means that court rulings similar to what came out of Michigan on Friday are going to be needed for this issue to truly become over and done with.

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“State of the …” speeches become nothing more than partisan rhetoric?

There are those people who are blasting Gov. Pat Quinn these days for having the gall to use his official State of the State speech to the General Assembly for political purposes. How dare he want to get re-elected!?!

OBAMA: Ignoring opposition?

Just as there are those who are trashing President Barack Obama for giving a State of the Union address where he basically expressed his intent to take action on select issues without the approval of Congress. So that his presidency doesn't end in two years with nothing more being accomplished.

IT IS DIFFICULT, if not impossible, for me to take these people seriously, however, because of their own political motivations.

Tuning in to the television news on Wednesday and seeing Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, lambasting Obama for not being willing to work with Congress? Ted, Shut up!!!

The same goes for those people who are upset that Quinn basically used his annual address to legislators to talk about things he’d like to do – but likely won’t be able to – because his political opponents won’t want him to have government policy victories right in the heart of the current electoral cycle.

I think this makes the Republicans at both the federal and state levels look incredibly petty to engage in such rhetoric. I comprehend the concept of the opposition political party making a statement.

AND I DON’T expect the opposition to come out and say what a wonderful guy the president/governor truly is.

But the degree to which partisanship has overtaken the process of a government chief executive making a statement about where things stand and where they will go in the future has truly become appalling.

QUINN: Electioneering?

We’re at the point where I was repulsed by the congressional opposition complaining that Obama wants to exclude them – even though in both actions and statements they have made it clear they have little to no interest in working with the president on much of anything.

If anything, the reason some people are losing faith in an Obama presidency is the perception that he’s too weak to stand up to his opposition – that he’s merely willing to let himself get smacked around.

THE STATE OF the Union address may be evidence that Obama has finally come to his senses. He realizes the people (or at least the ones who aren’t determined to believe their ideologue minority is the only one that deserves to be listened to) expect some action.

CRUZ: Blasting Obama for ignoring him

A year of inaction on immigration reform? No action whatsoever on issues such as the minimum wage or long-term unemployment insurance? The people are disgusted that there has been nothing from government – we definitely do not want more of the same!

And for those people who try arguing that Obama is exaggerating the opposition he gets from Republican congressional members, I’d only remind them of the ridiculous levels of hostility that have been directed toward health care reform – an issue that truly needs to be addressed.

Except for those ideologues who are desperate to believe that people lacking in adequate health insurance are somehow unworthy of it. As though they brought that condition upon themselves.

THE SAME GOES for Republicans who even before Quinn gave his address to the General Assembly were trashing him for wanting to use a speech to make himself look good. How else to explain former Illinois House Minority Leader Tom Cross, R-Oswego, saying he wanted Quinn to only make "detailed and responsible" statements during the address -- as though he gets to define those terms.

In short, they don't want Quinn to use the advantages of incumbency while running against assorted Republicans and a Democrat – all of whom were present for the address.

CROSS: Define 'responsible'

State Sens. Kirk Dillard, R-Hinsdale, and William Brady, R-Bloomington, along with state Treasurer Dan Rutherford, were among the officials expected to be there, while his Democratic challenger, Tio Hardiman and venture capitalist Bruce Rauner were likely sitting in the gallery watching the annual event – while fantasizing how they will be giving the same speech next year.

Quinn hinted before giving the address that he’s interested in bolstering the concerns of the middle class. Just like anyone else would say – except then they wouldn’t be so eager to pile on with the criticism.

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Election cycle (ugh!) is now underway

With the Labor Day holiday now past us, we’re technically in the time period in which candidates for electoral office can be campaigning without appearing to be tacky or self-serving.

TRACY: Vote for her, Dillard comes along

We’re 155 days away from the March primary (less if you choose to use early voting). It’s time for the candidates to start circulating the nominating petitions that actually get them on the ballots for March 18.

WE’RE GOING TO learn who the candidates for governor will choose to have as running mates – although two of them have already let their choices out of the bag of secrets, so to speak.

Kirk Dillard of Hinsdale has chosen a state representative from Quincy – following the concept of some sort of regional balance (suburbs and western Illinois) – to be the Top of the Ticket for the Republicans.

Unless the voters decide to choose the Dan Rutherford option. The Illinois treasurer has let it be known that he wants Steven Kim, the would-be politico who four years ago ran unsuccessfully for state attorney general.

Rutherford is touting the idea of an ethnic balance, since Kim would be the first person of Korean (or Asian, in general) ethnic background to get elected to a statewide office – if the Rutherford/Kim ticket were to prevail in the primary AND in the Nov. 4 general election.

NONE OF THE other gubernatorial dreamers have come up with running mates – although they are likely to do so in the near future. After all, if they’re going to run as a pair, they have to submit nominating petitions identifying them as a pair.

And if they’re starting to circulate them in coming days, they need to know in coming days who they’re being paired up with.

I’ve hinted before that this could be a significant factor in the gubernatorial race because the actual candidates themselves aren’t the kind of people who can inspire people to want to turn out and vote for them.



Steve Kim (left) is going from a failed attorney general bid to a gubernatorial running-mate slot. No word on whether anyone thinks failed secretary of state candidate Robert Enriquez is beneficial to the GOP in 2014. Photograph provided by Steven Kim for Attorney General 2010

 

There aren’t any “Barack Obama-like” candidates running for office in Illinois next year.

I REALLY DO believe this will be an election cycle in which (particularly for governor) people will be voting against people. They’re going to make their pick based on who they detest the least!

Voters will walk into the booths at their polling place, see a batch of names whose very existence annoys them to no end, and will cast their vote for whoever happens to be left.

And while I’ll be the first to admit that having an incumbent governor who has generated approval ratings as low as 26 percent doesn’t make things look good, I see all the other declared candidates for governor as having significant segments of the populace who can’t stand the thought of them, either!

That is why I go into this election cycle being completely unsure who should be thought of as the favorite. Each of them will have their hard-core followers – along with people who would symbolically slash their wrists at the very thought of that person becoming the resident of the Executive Mansion in Springfield.

THIS ELECTION CYCLE might be less annoying if there were another office up for grabs that would have serious competition. But Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., is going for his fourth term in the U.S. Senate being challenged by Doug Truax and Chad Koppie.

FRERICHS: Wants to replace Rutherford

Truax has a military background, and is likely to try to appeal to the hard-core ideologues of Illinois. Which might be a problem since those are the same people that Koppie usually tries to appeal to during his perennial bids (all unsuccessful) for elective office.

Which is typical of all the other statewide offices within Illinois government that are up for grabs in 2014 – the most competitive will be for Illinois treasurer, where state Rep. Tom Cross, R-Oswego, and Bob Grogan of suburban DuPage County both want to challenge state Sen. Michael Frerichs, D-Champaign, for the right to replace Rutherford.

They might all be hardworking, earnest public officials. But let’s be honest – none of them are going to inspire Illinois to want to turn out to vote on March 18.

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