Is Chicago’s political “Machine” dead? Evidence leans in both directions

“The ‘Machine’ is dead!” Or is it, “Long live the ‘Machine’!”

BERRIOS: Off to political retirement?

For those people who like to rant about Chicago politics and the dreaded “Machine” (a.k.a., the regular Democratic Party organization) that runs it, there was superficial evidence from Tuesday’s primary election to indicate both stances.

IT’S HARD TO say the “Machine” is alive and thriving when the Cook County Democratic Party chairman can’t even get himself re-elected to his own government post.

Sure enough, Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios is out – having lost his primary bid to a political amateur. Albeit one with University of Chicago academia experience. Although in many ways, that qualifies as the ultimate “nobody nobody sent” that the old school says is completely undesirable.

Of course, Berrios had so many people singling him out for a political demise. He had built up throughout the years a massive list of people who had nothing but contempt for his political existence. He was counting on the Democratic organization to turn out the votes to lead to his electoral success.

What is it that made Berrios so many electoral enemies? The fact he liked to have family members on his government office payroll didn’t help his image. Nor did the perception that he was using his office to give significant property tax breaks to business interests who contributed financially to his campaign fund.

HENCE, WE HAD a lot of voters who went to their polling place Tuesday (or an Early Voting center during previous weeks) with two goals in mind – a choice for governor, and ANYBODY except Berrios!

Which is why we now have Fritz Kaegi as the Democratic nominee, and likely the eventual Assessor for the next four years.

Unless Andrea Raila, a third candidate whose campaign got seriously hemmed in by Kaegi-backer antics to keep her off the ballot, succeeds in forcing the election results to be tossed out and a special election to be held.

LIPINSKI: Returning to D.C.

If the ‘Machine’ still had significant life, that might be a possibility. But since there aren’t “re-dos” in electoral politics (just as “there’s no crying in baseball), we’re likely stuck with Tuesday night’s election results.

BUT BEFORE WE say the ‘Machine’ is a relic of the past, keep in mind the apparent victory of Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill.

He’s the Congressman from Southwest Side Chicago and surrounding suburbs whose Democratic partisan leanings are due to his support for organized labor and unions. On many of the social issues that a new generation of Democrats think are all important, he’s hostile – particularly abortion.

Lipinski, the son of Bill Lipinski who also served in the City Council and later in Congress back when the ‘Machine’ was a reality of political life, always gets people claiming he’s “too conservative” to be a Chicago congressman. But this election cycle, he got a challenger in the form of Marie Newman and the many national Democratic support groups willing to prop up her campaign financially.

But according to the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, the 56.58 percent of votes Lipinski got in the city portion of the congressional district far exceeded the 51.59 percent support the Cook County Clerk’s office says Newman got in the suburbs.

THE DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATION can be said to have done its part to send Lipinski back to Capitol Hill and ensure that the Democratic caucus has people representing various points of view on issues within its membership. Although the people who always make this argument don’t seem the least bit concerned that the Republican caucus is overwhelmingly dominated by conservative ideologues.

But back to Berrios for a bit. I suspect there are some people whose objections include a tinge of ethnic hostility. I remember when his daughter, Toni, lost her re-election bid to an Illinois House seat in 2014, with some voters saying they didn’t want Latino political representation for an area with a gentrifying population.

BURKE: 

But before anybody thinks I’m saying Joe Berrios was picked upon for his ethnic origins (he’s Puerto Rican), I’d have to acknowledge the political victory the very same night for Aaron Ortiz – who defeated Dan Burke for his Illinois House seat.

Burke most definitely would have won yet another term (he’s been at the Statehouse since 1991) if the ‘Machine’ were truly thriving. Now, he’s probably wondering what’s the world come to when Ed Burke, the City Council’s long-time Finance chairman, can’t even get his own brother re-elected to office.

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It’s going to get ugly – as in the ’14 campaign cycle for Illinois governor!

RAUNER: Can he take a punch?

I’m sure that Bruce Rauner, the venture capitalist-turned-political rookie, is feeling pretty cocky these days.

With just one week to go before people can start casting their ballots (through Early Voting measures), the polls show him with a solid lead.

NONE OF HIS challengers has the kind of financing to close the gap. And probably the only way that Rauner blows the Republican primary is if EVERY SINGLE UNDECIDED VOTER were to unite behind one challenger AND if another candidate were to drop out.

It’s an unlikely combination.

There’s just one thing that ought to keep Rauner backers (who really are just those who have become so malcontent with the past decade of Democratic Party influence over state government that they’ll vote for anyone with an “R” after his name) from getting too giddy these days.

The reality of the Republican primary is that it consists of Rauner’s personal cash allowing him to buy public attention against two past gubernatorial losers AND a guy whose statewide profile was so low that he can be taken down with all the cheap talk going about these days about “sexual” harassment.

RAUNER ISN’T EXACTLY beating a top quality field of candidates in his primary. They might be more reputable than Gov. Pat Quinn’s lone challenger in the Democratic Party primary, but not by much!

If anybody thinks that the Rauner campaign can coast on the momentum it seems to be building now, they’re misguided.

It’s not that I think Pat Quinn is some overly-tough persona. He can be as mealy-mouthed as any other political person, particularly when he tries to lay on the populist rhetoric that claims he’s a man of the people and everybody else is the political "hack."

QUINN: Lacing up the gloves

But I got my share of amusement from learning Saturday that Quinn has hired for his campaign Bill Hyers, a political operative whose most recent accomplishment was getting Bill DiBlasio elected as mayor of New York.

ALONG WITH PAST victories that helped get Barack Obama elected as president – particularly running the Pennsylvania for Obama effort of 2012 that ensured the president had enough of the Electoral College votes to actually win. And yes, he's an Illinois native -- albeit not one of Chicago.

Quinn is putting his political future in the hands of people who know what a competitive campaign is and how to win them. There won’t be any talk about “fighting the good fight” in a noble defeat.

It’s fortunate for him that Rauner has a significant personal financial wealth, because he’s probably going to have to go through a lot of his own money just to keep up with the attacks he’s now going to get.

In fact, I wonder if Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis summarized the theme last week when she criticized Rauner as “egotistical and rich.”

SO AS TO differentiate him from herself. It could be the line whose essence gets repeated over and over until by November we’re so sick of hearing about the pompous boob that we vote against him just to be rid of him.

It doesn’t help that Rauner seems overly touchy to criticism; such as the instance involving campaign ads by the Illinois Freedom PAC. Rauner’s is the campaign that sent intimidating-reading “cease and desist” letters to area television stations carrying the commercials.

Personally, I think WLS-TV should be commented for immediately having their attorneys send Rauner’s campaign a letter refusing to give in to his request.

It makes me wonder how intensely Rauner will blow up once the Quinn people start smacking him about in ways that his Republican challengers never had the kind of campaign cash to dream of doing themselves.

COMBINED WITH THE fact that for many of the people backing the other three candidates in the GOP primary, Rauner is the absolute last guy they want to see get their political party’s nomination.

Even if he is the one who has the kind of finances on his own to deliver political blows – which will come across as the usual partisan tripe – to the incumbent governor.

He is perceived as being way-too Chicago oriented (a friend of Rahm Emanuel, and he willingly had his daughter attend a school in Chicago). Much of the desire to dump Democrat Quinn of Chicago’s West Side comes from those whose focus is on rural Illinois.

The fight for Illinois governor in the Nov. 4 general election could easily be perceived as the Chicago battle – which Quinn wins easily because Rauner won’t take enough votes from the governor in the city, and all those downstate GOPers just won’t be able to get excited about to cast enough ballots for him to win!

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Will anybody vote for Buddy? And no, I don’t mean Kristy McNichol character

I have to confess my ignorance. Until just a couple of days ago, I had no clue that former Louisiana Gov. Charles “Buddy” Roemer had his own fantasies about becoming U.S. president.

ROEMER: The 'protest' vote?



I first realized the existence of his campaign on Friday when I saw that he, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich had their Illinois “backers” file the necessary paperwork to get those candidates on our state’s ballot for the March 20 primary.

FOR WHAT IT’S worth, President Barack Obama of the Hyde Park neighborhood also submitted his paperwork for a ballot spot – making it official that Democrats in Illinois have no one to pick from but him.

But the Republicans officially (as of now, someone could always get knocked off the ballot) have six candidates to choose from in their primary, as Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Perry also filed their ballot-slot paperwork last week.

So now I have to seriously wonder to myself how many Illinoisans are delusional enough to want to cast a ballot for Buddy Roemer. Could there be some people who are ABM to the degree that their vote for Anybody But Mitt includes casting a ballot for Buddy?

Because I sure don’t sense any “Roemer for president” movement in Illinois, or anywhere in this country. In large part because his national political battle against one-time Klansman and still a white supremacist David Duke was some two decades ago. Who remembers the name “Buddy Roemer” anymore? How many people this weekend stumbled across his name on the Internet because they were searching for word about Kristy McNichol publicly saying she is a lesbian?

THEN AGAIN, PERHAPS Buddy (as in Roemer) sees the fact that at various points, now-former candidate Michele Bachmann and current flavor-of-the-month Rick Santorum were at the head of the pack.

Perhaps he thinks it is just a matter of waiting his “turn” to become the darling of the GOP – even though he’s a Democrat-turned-Republican who once vetoed a Louisiana Legislature attempt to impose severe restrictions on abortion for purely ideological reasons (which federal appeals courts ultimately ruled was the right thing to do – the attempt at state law violated Roe vs. Wade).

Roemer may like to talk “tough” and “law and order” now. But about the only hope he has of getting any serious support is if our society suddenly gets hit with a serious bout of stupid.

Then again, it always is a mistake to over-estimate the intelligence of the electorate. So who knows what to think?

IT AMUSES ME that I didn’t realize Roemer was in the race for the presidency until he filed those papers, which was a few days AFTER he got his clock cleaned (I’m full of clichés today) in Iowa.

Only 31 people who took the time to attend a caucus event across Iowa last week publicly were willing to say they think it would be good for Buddy Roemer to be president.

Nearly twice as many publicly backed now-former candidate Herman Cain, and more than four times as many people (135, to be exact) went to a caucus, publicly stood up, and said they had “no preference” for president.

Which is a concept I don’t comprehend. If I didn’t have a preference, I probably wouldn’t show up at all. Then again, the fact that the “I can’t make up my mind” kind of people were four times larger than the “Buddy for president” people ought to be a factor that would make him hang his head in shame. Except that political people often have no shame.

IF I GOT whomped on as badly as Buddy did in Iowa, I’d be thinking about going into hiding with the groundhog who will stick his head out of the ground in a few more weeks. I doubt I’d be filing more nominating petitions to set myself up for another blow-out in Illinois.

Yet I’m realistic enough to know that it probably does not matter. The upcoming weeks will see primary elections (beginning Tuesday in New Hampshire) that will go a long way toward determining who is seriously in the running.

I doubt there will be six viable Republican presidential campaigns in operation by the time of the Illinois primary elections.

At best, Illinois will be the state whose Republicans provide the crowning blow to whichever GOP partisan gets the chance to take on Obama come the Nov. 6 general elections.

WHICH MEANS BUDDY Roemer may wind up serving the same purpose that Bill Bradley served for me in the 2000 Democratic primary.

I voted for him because his name was on the ballot – even though his campaign had already closed up shop by the time of the Illinois elections – out of a sense of expressing my apathy toward the party establishment’s preference of Al Gore.

Maybe the couple of dozen people across Illinois who cast votes for Roemer will be of a like mindset?

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