What's an endorsement worth? Or, bringing ethnicity, race into campaign!

It will be interesting to hear the rancid rhetoric that will be spewed in coming days in reaction to the two major candidates seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for Illinois governor.
 

GUTIERREZ: A Pritzker person

Both of them got endorsements from members of the state’s congressional delegation that are going to be viewed as strategically significant, yet their detractors will be eager to put their own negative spin on the support.

FOR IT SEEMS that Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., is backing J.B. Pritzker for governor, while Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., is a supporter of Chris Kennedy’s campaign.

 

RUSH: Backing Bobby's son

Or, as some people are already putting the spin on it, Kennedy has the backing of the militant, radical one-time member of the Black Panther Party. A real-life radical of the type that the conservative ideologues always wanted to believe that Barack Obama was.

While Pritzker has the backing of a Puerto Rican radical who has been a vocal supporter of the independence movement for the U.S. commonwealth and of the many FALN members who have turned to violence in support of that independence ideal!

KENNEDY: Trying to play catch-up

Or, if you don’t really know anything about Puerto Rico  (do you even know what FALN stands for? Or was?) and don’t want to be bothered finding out, perhaps you’d rather think of Pritzker as just an extension of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

FOR IT SEEMS that when people gathered at a Pilsen neighborhood Methodist church for the Pritzker endorsement, the backers of Gov. Bruce Rauner arranged for a man wearing a Blagojevich mask to stand outside carrying a sign reading, “Luis endorsed ME too.”

PRITZKER: Trying to bolster lead

In short, it seems that for every potential positive vote that these endorsements create for their respective candidates, there is someone who wants to create a negative perception. As though they hope the "nasty" overcomes the "positive."

In fact, that is what most captivated me about the word of these electoral announcements that were made to start off the new week.

RAUNER: Sticking his nose into Monday's antics

It would seem that some people want to think of any non-Anglo support as somehow being a negative – as though this will be the election won by the support of white people who don’t think of themselves in terms of (and, in fact, may not have any real comprehension about) their ethnic origins.

AS IN I found one website comment (anonymous, of course) that said such endorsements, “cancel one another out.” While another suggested we, “will ask JB about Oscar Lopez, right after we ask Chris about the Black Panthers.”

Some people are prepared to smudge up anything and everything, which may well be the problem with the political process – even moreso than all the millions of dollars that will be spent this election cycle by the major candidates to further spread these semi-noxious messages.

I say “semi-,” because a part of me actually thinks they’re too stupid to take seriously. The Black Panther movement of old is so far in our past I wonder how many have a clue what it ever was.

BISS: Lonely at the bottom of political pile?

While Lopez is a more recent phenomenon – Gutierrez actually offered up his support for the bid for clemency that got the FALN activist who served longer in federal prison than any other his freedom from prison in Terre Haute, Ind., back in February – and release from house arrest May 17.

BUT TO BE honest, it would be absurd to expect Gutierrez (who himself lived a part of his life on the Puerto Rican island and in his college days protested peacefully for independence) to have no opinion – or past – on this issue.

If he were truly as blank a slate as the conservative ideologues would claim he should be, then he wouldn’t be representing the constituents of his heavily-Latino district (which includes several Puerto Rican-based neighborhoods on the city’s Northwest Side).

To be honest, trying to bring up these issues into the governor’s race is absurd. It is the mentality of a campaign that can’t explain why we should possibly vote for their candidate, so they want to spend time bad-mouthing the others.

Although I will express some sympathy for whomever the schmoe was that got stuck showing up at the Pritzker event in the Blagojevich costume (which consisted of a mask and stereotypical orange prison get-up). It must have been hot and sweaty and miserable for the person spewing political garbage – which serves them right!

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