Newman for Congress – trying to get a head start? Or an act of desperation?

We’re almost a full year away from the 2020 election cycle primaries. We haven’t even inaugurated the new mayor that a third of Chicagoans voted into office.

NEWMAN: Will her 'time' finally arrive in 2020?

Yet Marie Newman is already thinking in terms of wanting to be like Mr. Smith and go to Washington – where her goal remains the same as it was in 2018. She wants to dump decade-long incumbent Dan Lipinski from his post on Capitol Hill.

NEWMAN, WHO LOST to Lipinski by a narrow margin last year, has already begun her active campaigning for office on the grounds that Lipinski is far too ideologically conservative to represent a part of Chicago and surrounding suburbs in Congress.

It was the same strategy she tried employing the last election cycle – only to have it fall short as long-time Chicagoans who remember back when Lipinski’s father, Bill, was their representation in Congress stood fast and firm behind the Family Lipinski.

He won, no matter how much Newman reminded us over and over how Dan was amongst the most conservative of Democrats in Congress. An abortion opponent, not a backer of measures meant to reduce gun violence by restricting firearms access, and the kind of guy inclined to think that focusing attention on protecting the rights of gay people is a waste of everybody’s time.

About the only thing that makes Lipinski line up with Democrats, rather than just switch political party alliances, is that he can side with much of organized labor and unions – at least up to the point when they start getting all floofy on social issues.

IT’S OBVIOUS THAT Newman plans to run her same campaign strategy, while hoping she can make up the few votes she would have needed in the 2018 Democratic primary so as to put her ahead – where she likely would have walloped Republican (alleged, that is) Art Jones just as bad as Lipinski did in last year’s general election.

Hence, the fact that Newman felt compelled to inform us Monday of all the endorsements her second-chance campaign of 2020 has received.

EMILY’S List (female candidates), Move On, NARAL (abortion), Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. It’s almost like an All Star team of sorts of political activists who’d be inclined to oppose anything ideologically conservative.

LIPINSKI: Is the 'old' Chicago alive?

For all I know, this puts the Newman campaign on an enemies’ list put together by those people inclined to support this Age of Trump our society is now in. But also on the side of those people who were in the majority who voted against Trump in 2016 but could not generate enough of the Electoral College vote to defeat him.

BUT UNLIKE THE presidency, there is no Electoral College for members of Congress. Newman will have to gain a majority of the vote in the Illinois 3^rd Congressional District come March of 2020 – if she’s to prevail at having a shot at the Congressional seat.

And seeing her endorsement activity, she’s certainly hoping that getting such an early campaign start well before anybody is seriously thinking about the congressional seats will give her the electoral advantage towards victory.

There is just one thing – some people are inclined to think that Newman was a “sore loser” when she was defeated by Lipinski. Or else they’re the ones ideologically inclined to think that Danny is a remnant of the old days of the “Chicago Machine” that made sense to their way of thinking.

Will Newman give us material for 21st Century sequel?

Will the thought of all these endorsements with liberal leaning (take Move On, a group created in the wake of the Bill Clinton impeachment efforts by those who opposed that political exercise), it makes me wonder how many people will now regard a vote against Newman as a vote for political sanity!

CAN LIPINSKI CONVINCE a majority of the congressional district’s electorate that he’s still more aligned with their views – that he’s not too extreme to call himself a Chicago congressman (even though he lives in suburban Western Springs)?

Or has even the Chicago Sout’ Side that still worships the memory of Hizzoner himself Mayor Daley (the elder) progressed enough on social issues that Newman’s “time” has come for “Mrs. Newman goes to Washington” to become a reality!

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We’re frustrated w/ Rubio “frustration”

I comprehend the idea that Marco Rubio, the junior senator from Florida with presidential dreams, is “frustrated.”

RUBIO: Frustrated? Or stubborn?

We, the American people, are all frustrated, if now downright repulsed, by the fact that we have a Congress so bogged down in political partisanship that nothing gets done.

LARGELY BECAUSE OF the segment of the Republican caucus that believes the way our government ought to work is that they dictate their ideological desires to us – and we just shut up and do what we’re told.

A very un-American way of thinking, to my mindset. One that Rubio is often guilty of participating in himself.

We’re in an era in which the partisan mindsets are engaged in battle with each other – and it is likely that what the Obama presidency ultimately will be remembered for is the way in which its desires got tangled up in the ideological hang-ups of Congress.

But back to Rubio, who tells the Washington Post how his dislike for Congress is so intense that he doesn’t want to run for re-election when his six-year term ends next year.

IT MEANS THAT Rubio is throwing his political future into getting elected as president come next year. If he doesn’t get picked to replace Barack Obama in January 2017, he’ll be politically finished.

Like many political people, Rubio went to Capitol Hill with a touch of “Mr. Smith” in him, hoping to become a real-life version of James Stewart’s famed character – only perhaps a little bit schmaltzy.

Does Rubio see himself as the Cubano sequel?

There was a time when Rubio, a Cuban-American whose parents came to the United States just before the Castro revolution that chased many people away from the Caribbean island nation, thought he was going to be the Republican who could persuade his GOP colleagues to realize that Latinos weren’t necessarily “the enemy” who needed to be put down.

That there could be some serious reform to the nation’s immigration policy – which people with sense realize has always been necessary.

BUT IT DIDN’T quite work out that way. Those Republicans who led their ideology dictate everything stood in the way, just like those with the ultimate misnomer of the “Freedom Caucus” have killed off GOP House speakers who aren’t ideologically hardline enough for them.

 

OBAMA: A Rubio role-model?

Rubio’s allies aren’t all that friendly. But it’s not like Democrats have been any better toward him. They were more than willing to kill off his AGREE Act that was billed as a job-creation plan and was regarded as about as non-partisan as anything get these days.

This is a Congress where it could be argued that one of the few things Rubio sponsored that actually got passed was a resolution praising the Miami Heat for winning one of their National Basketball Association championships.

Considering how many basketball fans were repulsed by that whole stretch of winning that took place in Miami due to LeBron James and his friends that could be held against him.

YET THIS ATTITUDE of frustration is also what is wrong with our government – which by its very definition is designed to encourage compromise. Rubio saying he doesn’t want to be in the Senate any longer because it won’t do what he tells them to do comes across as a political whiner.

Personally, I think he’d be showing himself to be more potentially presidential if he’d learn to work with the opposition – and quit worrying about those hard-liners who are beyond redemption.

BENTSEN: Remembering comparison

Although I’m sure that, to Rubio’s mindset, he’s thinking that Obama was only 47 when he was elected president in 2008 – compared to Marco who will be 45 on Election Day next year. But the differing attitudes toward compromise (Obama is such a compromiser to the point where some Democrats wonder if he gives up too much) and Rubio’s stubborn streak are the real story.

Where it almost makes me want to paraphrase one-time VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen against Dan Quayle in telling Rubio, “Senator, you’re no Barack Obama.”

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