EXTRA: Did Joyce just have most-significant electoral accomplishment?

Jerry Joyce is the mayoral candidate whose most significant personal fact about himself is that he is from a family that has long been associated politically with the Daley family.

JOYCE: Number One (for a day)

Joyce’s father, Jeremiah, in fact was one of those behind-the-scenes guys who served as a significant adviser to Mayors Daley – both the elder and the younger.

THERE ISN’T MUCH else to say about him – other than the fact that he’s going to have his name atop the list of mayoral candidates on the ballot for the Feb. 26 election.

Joyce won the lottery, which gives him the ballot spot in the prime place. There are those who say some people are clueless enough they merely vote for the first name they see – and could get some 1 or 1 percent of the votes for that reason alone.

In a campaign where even after candidates get kicked off the ballot for insufficient support, there are still doing to be at least a dozen or so candidates in the running. Any advantage in gaining votes could mean something.

Except that it might turn out that Joyce is just too obscure politically to be able to take full advantage of this political perk.

LEARNING THIS WEEK of Joyce getting the top ballot spot actually reminded me of a past election cycle – as in the Democratic primary for governor in 1994.

That election cycle saw state Attorney General Roland Burris, Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch and Cook County Board President Richard Phelan challenge each other for governor – yet the top ballot spot went by lottery to Jim Gierach – a suburban Palos Park attorney who has spent much of his public life campaigning for less-draconian laws related to drugs.

I remember being a reporter-type person speaking with Gierach that day; knowing there was a good chance it would be the last time I’d give his campaign for governor any significant attention. Is that the same for Joyce for mayor this week?

GIERACH: Won 'No. 1' slot in '94

Then again, I also remember the Netsch campaign’s response, which gained the Second ballot spot from the lottery. They contended that voters would ignore the little-known “Gierach” name on top and look to the second slot.

IT’S LIKE THEY really won the ballot lottery. Or at least that’s the political “spin” they put on the issue.

Would that make one-time Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas the big winner; since he is the one who gained the second ballot slot out of the list of 21 candidates who currently are in the running for mayor?

Putting him ahead of Number three Willie Wilson and Number four Toni Preckwinkle? Or is this all a batch of political hooey intended to try to get us to think something significant is happening – when in reality we’re still just over two months away from Election Day.

And some four months from the likely run-off election April 2 that will actually decide who will be taking the oath of office as Chicago’s new mayor come the city’s Inauguration Day in May.

THERE IS ONE part of the Joyce campaign, however, that continues to intrigue me. For it seems that the alleged Daley family ally is actually the guy who filed the legal challenge to the mayoral nominating petitions of William Daley.

DALEY: Tense times with Joyce?

Could Joyce think that, if only, he could get a Daley name off the ballot, he might actually have a chance of achieving political victory? For many of the challenges that have been filed have been done with the “logic” of kicking off the candidate who most closely resembles one’s own (such as Preckwinkle allies being behind the effort to remove Susana Mendoza from the mayoral running).

“Mayor Joyce?” I don’t know how much of a ring it has to it. Would the type of Chicagoans who think the “Daley” name is synonymous with City Hall be willing to accept it? Will the Christmas holiday greetings between the two political families be particularly tense this season?

Or could all of this merely be evidence of how inane our political procedures are capable of being?

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Who’re dose guys?

I’m writing this particular commentary for my brother, Chris, who recently asked me, “Is there anybody else running” for president.

STEIN: A suburban Chicago native



He’s not impressed with the incumbent, but also doesn’t think that Mitt Romney is worthy of a vote.

MY BROTHER PLANS to cast his ballot on Election Day, and I don’t have a clue as to who he will go for when it comes to making his mark for U.S. president.

Would he go for a third party candidate just to express his contempt for the incumbent? Which might well be a popular move this election cycle – for which we have one more week to cast our votes early, or else wait for Nov. 6 proper to do so.

Here in Illinois, Barack Obama warrants the top ballot spot, with Mitt Romney right behind him. Which then brings up the candidacy of Gary Johnson of Santa Fe, N.M., who is the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee – with Newport Beach, Calif., resident James P. Gray as his running mate.

There’s also Jill Stein of the Green Party, who although she now lives in that very historic burg of Lexington, Mass., was born in Chicago and raised in suburban Highland Park.

BUT THAT’S ABOUT it.

A look at the records of the Illinois State Board of Elections shows that candidates of the Socialist USA Party, the Constitution Party and the Together Enhancing America Party, along with several political independents, tried to get on the Illinois general election ballot – only to get knocked off by one means or another.

Some voters in this country may get the chance to cast their gag vote for socialist Stewart Alexander, but we in Illinois won’t.

JOHNSON: President Veto?



Personally, I think the biggest “loss” when it comes to candidates who couldn’t remain on the ballot were a pair of Illinois residents who tried to run for president and V-P.

WE COULD HAVE had the chance to vote for favorite son candidates in the form of Lex Green of Bloomington and Edward Rutledge of suburban Lemont, if only they had not dropped out voluntarily back in July.

I’m not saying that Green or Rutledge were at all qualified to hold higher office. I suspect they just have too much free time on their hands, which makes me wonder about that old saying, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

But it’s always a kick to be able to cast a ballot for somebody who actually knows your own home turf firsthand, rather than having read about it in a briefing report written by some campaign aide who probably cribbed two-thirds of it from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

So what do we in Illinois get to pick from, should we absolutely decide that neither Obama nor Romney is worthy of our little green checkmark on those touch-screen ballots we’re all now supposed to use nowadays (but which many people still seem uncomfortable – if the cautious and clumsy activity I witnessed at an early voting center when I cast my ballot is any evidence)?

JOHNSON OF THE Libertarians is a one-time New Mexico governor who was among the many people who gave thought to trying to get the Republican nomination for president in this year’s cycle.

But when he couldn’t elevate himself ahead of a field that included such people as Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, he converted to libertarianism.

The one-time “Gov. Veto” (he used his power 200 times during his first six months as governor) would like to go to work in the District of Columbia.

Which is more than Stein could offer, although she has run for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010 and has the endorsements of Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader in her presidential bid this year.

ALTHOUGH BY CAREER, she’s a doctor (and a Harvard Medical School graduate) with a serious interest in the way government takes actions meant to protect the health of the public.

GIERACH: They wouldn't let him in either



Which may sound noble. But about the only attention she has received this campaign cycle is when she got arrested Oct. 16 when she tried to crash the town hall-type debate between Obama and Romney held at Hofstra University.

Perhaps she should have tried the same tactic as would-be Illinois gubernatorial candidate James Gierach in 1994. He brought his own chair to Democratic primary debates and tried to set it up on stage with the so-called “official” candidates. He wasn’t invited to participate in debates either.

Which seems to be what our election cycles have devolved to these days – a club to which only certain people can work their way onstage for us to choose from.

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How much attention do “fringe” political candidates deserve to receive?

Every election cycle brings the no-name candidates – the people who managed to come up with enough valid signatures of support on their nominating petitions that they can be on the Election Day ballot.

But because of a lack of experience or a lack of funding (or sometimes a lack of charisma), their campaigns never kick off. The end result usually is that news coverage of the elections usually focus on the so-called “legitimate” candidates, and ignore outright the fact that there are other people in the race.

IT IS NOT the least bit unusual for some voters to show up at the polls on Election Day and to not realize that these people exist – until that moment when they look at the ballot and are confronted with names they have never seen or heard before.

It usually takes something serious for any of those candidates to gain any attention. Others spend their campaigns ranting and raging about the lack of attention, which is ignored on the grounds that the people involved aren’t significant enough to deserve having their complaints listened to.

What will probably be the most significant example of this “syndrome” in this election cycle will fall into the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, where most people think that Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, former Chicago city inspector general David Hoffman and former Chicago Urban League head Cheryle Jackson are the extent of the candidates.

That has Jacob Meister, a Chicago attorney, upset.

HE’S THE GUY who filed a complaint this week with the Federal Communications Commission against WTTW-TV because that station, on its “Chicago Tonight” program, had a candidate forum for Giannoulias, Hoffman and Jackson.

They left Meister out, and it wasn’t an accident on their part.

WTTW used the “standard” that is often talked about this time of year, requiring that candidates receive at least a certain percentage level of support in various polls as evidence that they are really significant.

Meister didn’t matter, so now Meister is trying to get back at the public television station by filing a complaint that claims they violated federal regulations that relate to giving candidates equal time. He also complains that the polls referred to by the television station are so old as to be worthless by now – which may be his one legitimate complaint.

I’M NOT SURE if Meister and his attorneys seriously expect some sort of sanctions against WTTW. What this complaint seems more about (in my opinion, at least) is doing something that forces the candidate to be included in news coverage of the campaign.

It could easily turn out that the stories written in recent days about Meister’s campaign will be the only coverage he gets during the primary election cycle.

This kind of thing happens often.

I still remember 1994 and the Illinois gubernatorial primary for the Democrats – the one in which then Illinois Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch defeated then-Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris and then-Cook County Board President Richard Phelan for the right to get beaten by then-Gov. Jim Edgar in the general election that year.

OF COURSE, THERE was a fourth candidate – James Gierach. In fact, he actually won the ballot “lottery” that gave him the top ballot spot. But despite the fact that his name came first, the only reason he got covered that year was when he showed up uninvited at the gubernatorial debate and refused to leave. Officials wound up deciding to postpone the debate, rather than deign to include Gierach.

Meister, who hints that his non-inclusion is due in part to being gay, comes off as the 2010 equivalent of Gierach – who was the candidate who tried campaigning on a platform that said the state’s drug policy was in serious need of reform.

It was (and still is), but nobody wanted to talk about it.

Now I know people in the news business who will defend almost to the death their right to exclude people from the coverage. I once had a political reporter-type for a central Illinois-based television station tell me with a straight face that trying to acknowledge every single name on the ballot would be “too confusing.”

PERSONALLY, I THINK every candidate who manages to get (and keep) his or her name on the Election Day ballot deserves some mention – even if a fringe candidate’s coverage is nothing more than an explanation of why this person does NOT deserve to be taken as serious as other candidates.

So it is with that in mind that I point out an e-mail message I received earlier this week from Tom Castillo, an electrician from Elmhurst who got onto the Democratic primary ballot for lieutenant governor – challenging four state legislators and a businessman (he owns a cleaning products company and the family pawn shop) for the right to be sitting pretty politically should something happen to a future Gov. Quinn/Hynes.

I wrote a commentary late last year about the campaign of Scott Lee Cohen (the businessman candidate), and Castillo this week objected to not being mentioned.

As he wrote to me, “You keep referring to Cohen as the only ‘outside candidate’ in the Lt. Governor’s race. I, too, am an outsider. I just don’t have the big bank account.”

BUT THE POINT of that particular commentary was to point out the influence, both positive and negative, that self-funded candidates can have on election cycles. It may not be fair, but it is life. The fact that Cohen can afford to pay for the kind of campaign that forces itself into the public eye means that eye should be critical.

With no prior government experience to provide a record of sorts that can be studied and no attention being paid otherwise, those will be the reasons that Castillo is likely to finish sixth in a six-candidate field come the night of Feb. 2.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Jacob Meister is one of the few people who thinks of the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate from Illinois (http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/political-fix/political-fix/2010/01/illinois-senate-candidate-fighting-for-place-in-tonights-debate/) as a fully-legitimate four-way campaign.

This could wind up being Thomas Castillo’s only mention (http://www.tom4ltgov.com/) by the Chicago Argus. Here is “equal time” (http://www.meisterforsenate.com/) for Jacob Meister.

This is what can become (http://www.leap.cc/cms/index.php?name=Blogs&file=display&id=418) of fringe candidates.