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| How many candidates have official state portrait? |
HE’S
THE KIND of guy who attracts the money of some hard-core political lightweights
– the kind of people who might make $20 donations. Piece enough of them
together, and you might get a dollar figure of some size.
Then
again, one prominent donor or special-interest group can easily cough up the
same amount of cash with one contribution check.
The
Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday about the amount of money the candidates for
attorney general have raised. It shouldn’t be surprising that the guy who’s
likely the frontrunner (state Sen. Kwame Raoul of the Hyde Park neighborhood)
has the most money.
He
had $406,000 already, and managed to raise another $540,000 during the past
three months.
BY
COMPARISON, QUINN added some $81,000 to the $232,000 he already had in an
existing campaign fund.
How
pathetic is that? According to the Tribune report, about the only Democratic
dreamer for attorney general doing worse is Aaron Goldstein, who reported
having $194,000 in contributions – of which about $185,000 is money he donated
to himself.
Candidates
such as state Rep. Scott Drury, D-Highwood, Chicago Park District President
Jesse Ruiz and Highland Park mayor Nancy Rotering all have raised more than the
former governor.
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| RAOUL: The 'big bucks" AG candidate |
HE
HAS ALWAYS managed to achieve whatever success he has gained on the Illinois
political scene by swaying voters that he’s somehow different from the
standard-issue government official.
Whether
that can continue to work for him remains to be seen. Standard lines of logic
would indicate that Quinn’s time has passed. He’s a political has-been who
should come to his senses and drop out – be a retired pol who can claim to have
achieved the rank of Illinois governor.
Of
course, standard lines of logic would indicate that Quinn’s time had passed
after his one term as Illinois treasurer. The one that ended after his 1994
defeat for Illinois secretary of state.
Between
that electoral loss and his victory paired up with Rod Blagojevich in 2002 as
his lieutenant governor running mate, Quinn ran for U.S. Senate seats and the
lieutenant governor post on his own and continually lost. Largely because his
campaigns were as poorly funded as this campaign appears to be.
BUT
QUINN IS the type not easily discouraged. All those losses of the mid-1990s to
the early 2000s didn’t discourage him from running again. Just as his 2014 loss
to Bruce Rauner and his millions of dollars in personal wealth that he pumped
into his campaign doesn’t seem to have discouraged him from trying yet again to
be a part of state government.
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| Anybody can outspend Quinn, not just Rauner |
I
don’t know if Quinn can actually win. Perhaps he figures there’s so many people
on the ballot (eight candidates on the Democratic side) that he figures he
could get a quarter of the vote and the other seven could split up the majority
into small-enough chunks he could still win.
As
for those others, all of them have limited name recognition outside of their
home regions. Whether any one of them could catch on with the masses has yet to
be determined.
And
even if Quinn loses the primary come March 20, I wouldn’t be surprised to see
him try running yet again for political office – maybe he’ll go for Illinois
comptroller and be able to say he ran for all the statewide constitutional posts.
He may be 69 (his birthday was in mid-December) and getting up there in years,
but I suspect Quinn is exactly the kind of guy who won’t quit trying to be a
part of public policy until the day he passes on.
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