Sawyer and Stroger set precedent for Obama

At a time when Barack Obama is running very close with Hillary Clinton in their electoral fight for the Democratic nomination for president, it is important to remember some of the people whose presence and struggles made it possible for us to seriously contemplate the notion of an African-American male in political office.

Former Mayor Eugene Sawyer and retired Cook County Board President John Stroger both succumbed to physical ailments in recent days. Sawyer, 73, and Stroger, 78, both had suffered strokes and died Saturday and Friday respectively due to complications.

Both men were among the millions of African-American people (Negroes, to use the terminology accepted back then) who fled from the segregated way of life in the South (Alabama for Sawyer, Arkansas for Stroger) in the first half of the 20th century – boosting Chicago’s black population from about 40,000 in 1910 to over 1 million today.

After being educated at southern colleges (Alabama State University for Sawyer, Xavier University in New Orleans for Stroger), the two men turned to Chicago to give them opportunities to get ahead in life.

Invariably, both men turned to electoral politics. Neither was a maverick. Both made their accommodations with the regular Democratic organization (the “machine” to its critics), and both rose to the top posts in the respective branches of government in which they chose to serve.

Sawyer was the long-time alderman of Chicago’s 6th ward in 1987 when the city’s first African-American mayor, Harold Washington, died. Following a raucous, late-night City Council meeting that will never be forgotten by political junkies, Sawyer was chosen to serve as mayor until a special election could be held early in 1989.

Sawyer tried to use his low-key personality (his critics labeled him “Mayor Mumbles”) to maintain calm and keep the Washington political agenda going. But his time in political life came to an end when he was defeated in the Democratic primary of that special election by Richard M. Daley – who has now held the post for nearly 19 years and still counting.

Stroger had lived in Chicago for 15 years when he first got involved in politics. He was named Democratic committeeman of the city’s 8th ward in 1968, and used the post to get himself elected to the Cook County Board two years later.

He served on that board for more than three decades, and in 1990 was chosen to be county board president. His son, Todd, succeeded him after it became apparent that a stroke John suffered early in 2006 would prevent him from handling his duties during another term.

When it comes to African-American people in Chicago politics, Harold Washington gets all the attention on account of being the first black man to serve as Chicago mayor. Perhaps the attention is deserved, on account of all the racially-motivated grief he had to put up with during his five-year stint as mayor during the mid-1980s.

Past black politicos in Chicago were men more in line with long-time U.S. Rep. William L. Dawson, D-Ill., whose district covered the Black Belt (a.k.a., Bronzeville). His top concern was political power for himself. He was willing to make accommodations with the white power structure and accept a smaller share of the political pie than his community should have received – provided that white politicos allowed him total control over dividing up that share of the pie among black people.

Dawson also gained a taint of shadiness to some people because of his willingness to allow the policy rackets to operate openly in his neighborhoods. It was illegal then, although the fact that we now have a completely legitimate Illinois State Lottery makes us wonder how much should Dawson’s legacy be frowned upon.

Sawyer and Stroger were different.

Sawyer as a second black mayor and Stroger as a long-time county board member made it possible for many people to see through their prejudices and realize that African-American politicians were not just tools for people like New York civil rights activist Al Sharpton or engaging in borderline illegal activity.

They were just as capable of working with the establishment as other politicos for the good of their neighborhoods. Also, when looking at the collection of Chicago aldermen and other city officials who have been prosecuted for various crimes involving government corruption, we see there is a mix of politicos of all races. There really is no “better” or “worse” when it comes to politics and racial categories.

It is due to the example set by Sawyer and Stroger and many other politicos like them that Chicagoans were able to start looking past race – giving Carol Moseley Braun solid majorities of support when she ran for U.S. Senate in 1992 and 1996 and giving solid backing to the 2004 Senate bid of Obama.

On Monday, it is very likely that Obama and other politicos will use a brief moment of their campaign activity to pay tribute to the memory of the slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In Obama’s case, he also ought to give a moment of reflection for Stroger and Sawyer – two other men who adopted Chicago over their childhood homes in search of a better life. We all need to remember that their example played a partial role in the way people view his candidacy seriously today.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For those who want to know more about the lives of Sawyer and Stroger, check here (http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=399&category=civicMakers) and here (http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/biography.asp?bioindex=666)

Slow-pitch Softball - What's the Point?

I’m about to commit a serious Chicago infraction, one that might actually get my city identity citizenship revoked. Heaven forbid, I might have to start identifying myself as a native of some god-awful generic, touristy city like Las Vegas, Nev., or Orlando, Fla.

I don’t like the game of 16-inch softball. I have never understood the point in playing the slow-pitch game. I’d sooner slather ketchup all over my Vienna Beef hot dog.

Now as a Chicagoan by birth, I know there are people who think the slow-pitch version of softball is something special, just one of many aspects along with deep dish pizza and blues music that gives the Second City its unique character.

But I can remember being a kid playing the slow-pitch version in gym class, thinking to myself that I was wasting my time playing a cheap, inferior knockoff of baseball – which is a game I love to watch but have become too old and slow to play any longer without making a fool of myself.

So I must admit to being in shock to learn that the Chicago 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame not only exists, but is holding its latest round of induction ceremonies this coming week.

Twenty-three individuals who played, managed or umpired the game in the amateur leagues that have flourished in Chicago for decades are being honored, along with three intact teams who are being honored for their lifetime accomplishments.

Personally, my interest in the old school journalists who chronicled the activities of Chicago caused me to notice that one of the inductee teams is the ball club that consisted of reporters, editors and pressmen who worked for the now-defunct Chicago Daily News back in the 1960s and 1970s.

I also couldn’t help but notice that the Hall of Fame’s lifetime achievement award is named for the legendary Chicago mayor, Richard J. Daley, who in his youth played for softball teams in his home neighborhood of Bridgeport and on occasion as mayor would pitch to a hitter or two in games, albeit usually fully dressed in his political attire of dress jacket, tie and dress shoes.

If the outfit didn’t intimidate the hitter, the knowledge that the mayor could cost him a city job if he made the mayor look too ridiculous probably did.

I understand how ingrained the slow-pitch version of the game is in Chicago. Personally, I have never in my life played fast-pitch softball. It was never an option in the Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs where I grew up.

In fact, as a kid I always presumed the slow-pitch game WAS softball, which differs from the fast-pitch game in that a larger, mushier ball is used in the Chicago game compared to the 12-inch ball used by men who play competitive fast-pitch softball (an 11-inch ball is used by women who play).

By comparison, a baseball is 9 inches in circumference.

What I have always enjoyed the most about baseball is that each at-bat is a battle between a pitcher and a hitter. A good pitcher doesn’t need to throw balls 95 miles an hour past a hitter to get people out. Anybody who remembers former Chicago White Sox pitcher Shingo Takatsu getting American League hitters out a few years ago with breaking pitches that moved at about 60 miles an hour knows what I am talking about.

Slow-pitch softball takes away that entire element. The pitcher is lobbing the ball up to a hitter so that he can smack it. Outs in softball are recorded by the defense fielding ground balls and throwing out base runners. A good infield, particularly at shortstop, is all-important.

Smacking the ball around might be okay for a few guys wanting to whittle away a few hours in a public park. But for someone who wants to play a competitive athletic event, it can get a bit dull – especially when one takes into account the portly nature of some aging softball players.

Now having made such a disparaging remark about slow-pitch softball players, I have to concede that one of the greatest major league baseball players to come out of Chicago got his ball playing start by playing the 16-inch game in the Second City’s amateur leagues.

Bill “Moose" Skowron, the star slugging first baseman for the New York Yankees back in the early 1960s who later returned home to play for the White Sox, didn’t actually play competitive baseball until he got to Purdue University, where he was recruited to play Big Ten football.

The prep football star at Weber High School has said he learned to hit a pitched ball by smacking base hits while playing for a slow-pitch softball team sponsored by Koolvent Awnings, sometimes in games at Thillens Stadium on Chicago’s far northwest side.

He must have learned something right, because it was Skowron’s power-hitting threat that forced American League pitchers to have to confront both Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris during that season of 1961 when both challenged the single-season home run record then held by Babe Ruth.

But on the whole, the un-athletic nature of slow-pitch softball is why I can’t help but laugh whenever the Chicago game’s proponents argue they are playing a superior sport because they do not use fielder’s gloves.

With a big bloated ball that can turn to mush during the course of a game, one does not need a fielder’s glove to catch it. Also for me, baseball was more interesting to play because one can get a firm grip on the smaller ball and throw it with more accuracy. I think that results in a better-played, more interesting game.

For those who really want to have a bat and ball alternative to baseball, one ought to seriously look at fast-pitch softball.

I am always amazed at how hard pitchers like Jennie Finch of the Chicago Bandits can throw underhand. Also, Jennie, who has an Olympic gold medal among her possessions, is more of an athlete than any of the pudgy people who take the field to toss around a Clincher, particularly if their primary motivation for playing is the keg of beer available after the game.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago 16-inch Softball Hall of Fame will induct these people (http://www.ad-hoc-news.de/CorporateNews/en/15053596/Chicago+16”+Softball+Hall+of+Fame+Induction+Dinner+to+be) during ceremonies to be held Saturday, Jan. 26 in Cicero.

For those who need a quickie lesson as to what 16-inch softball is, check here. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1163.html. If you can handle some more details, read here. http://www.16inchsoftballhof.com/.

Some advice as to the proper way to do a Vienna Beef hot dog can be found here. http://www.viennabeef.com/culture/chicagostyle.asp

Blagojevich's mass transit 'stunt' irks Illinoisans

Rod Blagojevich is not a popular person in many parts of Illinois these days.

A “bumbling boob” who “use(s) immature tactics” are among the nicer comments I have read recently about Illinois’ governor. It’s a good thing for Blagojevich that Illinois has never succumbed to the concept of recall elections, or else a vocal minority would be eager to try to dump him.

Photograph provided by Illinois governor's office

The governor’s latest offense is the way in which state government handled a measure to provide desperately needed financial aid to mass transit programs in Chicago.

The Illinois General Assembly on Thursday went along with changes Blagojevich made to their bailout bill; changes whose sole purpose was to allow the governor to spin the story so that he becomes a hero to Chicago commuters and to senior citizens across Illinois.

Without the additional money provided by a 0.25 percent hike in Chicago-area sales taxes, the Chicago Transit Authority would have had to eliminate about 80 bus lines, reduce its elevated train service and lay off nearly 2,000 CTA workers.

Those cuts would have become a reality next week, had the Legislature not acted by Sunday.

Of course, Rod got a perk – forcing the General Assembly to give in to the governor’s demand that senior citizens now be allowed to ride mass transit systems for free.

From now on, Blagojevich will tout the mass transit bailout and senior citizen freebies as accomplishments of his. He will blame the Legislature for the fact that a plan was not approved until mid-January, even though the problem lingered since last spring.

Anybody who points out that mass transit programs will now have to raise fares overall to replace money lost from senior citizen fares (or that most transit programs already were giving senior citizens discounted rides) is going to be denounced as a cold-hearted trouble-maker who hates elderly people and is biased against the governor.

Now as someone who in the past relied regularly on CTA train and bus services to get from one place to another and who likes the idea that the option is still available in an emergency, I realize some people are totally dependent on mass transit.

I understand just how much service cuts would have devastated the city.

So did a majority of state legislators, which is why they gritted their teeth and voted to give in to Blagojevich’s ego. But that doesn’t mean they’re happy. Some Democrats privately wish there was a way they could remove Rod from office.

That is on top of the anger felt by many Illinois residents, particularly those who live outside the Chicago area whose political partisanship makes them natural enemies of any governor from the Democratic Party.

Sadly for those people, Blagojevich has not done anything that would even come close to warranting impeachment (an over-bloated sense of self-importance is not good enough), and Illinois is among the states rational enough not to have a recall provision in the state Constitution.

If there was one, I have no doubt that a vocal minority of Illinoisans would get the public worked up into a rush to dump Rod.

We’d probably put on a spectacle that would be even more ridiculous than what happened in California in 2003. Voters there got rid of Grey Davis and picked Arnold Schwarzenegger to be their head of state from among 135 candidates who ran in a special recall election.

Think that couldn’t happen here? I could easily picture a rush of clowns doing everything they could to look for loopholes that would allow them to establish Illinois residency and try to gain control of the Illinois governorship.

Maybe Gary Coleman would move to Chicago, claim residency, and run for Illinois governor the same way he tried to become California governor in that state’s recall nearly five years ago.

If you think my suggestion is silly, consider this. It is no more absurd than when Alan Keyes, the conservative pundit and perennial fringe candidate from Maryland, temporarily became a resident of my childhood hometown of Calumet City to try to run for one of our state’s U.S. Senate seats in 2004. Who knows, maybe Keyes will give Illinois another try.

After all, the job does come with salary in the low six figures and a very nice, four-story house in downtown Springfield – even if that is a perk the current governor has never taken advantage of.

For better or worse, a majority of Illinoisans (including myself) voted for Blagojevich in 2002 and 2006. What is the rhetoric always used by social conservatives about accepting responsibilities for your mistakes?

Well, we’re stuck with our majority’s choice for governor for another three years. We will have to put up with Blagojevich’s grandstanding ways at least until early in 2011, and we will get our chance to consider replacing him in the 2010 elections.

The real question is whether Blagojevich will get a free ride and be unchallenged in the Democratic primary that year, or will Democrats go for a political fight and try to dump Rod?

The latter idea is not unheard of in Illinois political history. In 1976, then-Gov. Dan Walker was so unpopular with then-Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the regular Democratic organization that they put up a political fight in the primary elections, and they beat him.

Of course, the Democratic nominee, then-Illinois Secretary of State Michael Howlett, wound up as a weakened candidate who was easily beaten by Republican James R. Thompson.

That was the start of what turned out to be a 26-year string of Illinois governors from the GOP, ending only when Blagojevich managed to defeat then-Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan in 2002.

Fear of repeating history and giving up control of the governor’s post to a Republican is about the only reason that Democrats these days would be inclined to let Blagojevich have a third term in office.

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Blagojevich doesn't have a serious challenger, yet

Photograph provided by Illinois attorney general's office

When it comes to politicians who could challenge Gov. Rod Blagojevich in 2010, the name most often touted is that of Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

The daughter of long-time Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan, D-Chicago, is a credible candidate in her own right who has developed a respectable record overseeing the office that serves as a lawyer for Illinois government agencies.

She also has an intellect and ambitions of her own that are big enough to warrant advancement some day. Lisa Madigan is destined for bigger and better things than the attorney general’s office.

The only real question is whether she has the taste for the political brawl that is guaranteed to ensue if she dared to take on a two-term incumbent governor – even one whose popularity among Illinoisans is as challenged as Blagojevich.

Insofar as Republicans are concerned, I have no clue as to who will take on Blagojevich when he tries to run for a third term as Illinois governor. The lack of support that Judy Baar Topinka received from GOP organizations in 2006 across the state is bound to scare off any credible prospects for the top post in Illinois government.

Some have speculated that Jim Oberweis, the suburban Chicago dairy owner who currently is running for a seat in Congress, is merely using that post to build up a record to make a future run for governor.

Personally, the most interesting proposal I have heard about a Blagojevich successor comes from a Chicago Tribune reader who was complaining about the incumbent governor on the newspaper’s web site.

That reader would like to see the loser of the Clinton/Obama presidential primary fight return to Illinois and challenge Blagojevich come 2010.

It won’t happen, even though Obama’s current term in the U.S. Senate expires that same year. Obama is on a political career path that definitely is meant for bigger and better things than dealing with the Springpatch crowd.

And if Hillary Clinton seriously tried to re-establish herself as an Illinoisan (she’s a Park Ridge native) after going to the trouble of becoming a New Yorker to run for U.S. Senate, she’d be opening herself up to intense charges of being a “political carpetbagger.”

You have to admit, though, both would be seriously qualified for the post, thereby making it a unique proposal.

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Obama/Clinton "race" fight is a tea party compared to "Beirut by the Lake"

Perhaps it’s because I remember the meaning of the phrases “Vrdolyak 29” and “Beirut by the Lake,” but the so-called racially inspired sniping between Democratic presidential dreamers Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in recent days struck me as a whole lot of fuss about nothing.

It was lame having to listen to professional political pontificators go on and on as to whether Hillary was a closet bigot or Barack was trying to play the part of a professional victim.

I was as glad as anybody when I heard the two candidates use a “black and brown issues” debate this week in Las Vegas to say they would work together to quit trying to make race an issue in this primary campaign.

Now it is true that this campaign has created a mental quandary for those Democrats of a liberal persuasion. They have to literally choose which “first” is more important (a woman or an African-American in the White House) when they go to cast their ballots in upcoming weeks.

People like long-time feminist activist Gloria Steinem used a New York Times commentary to argue that women are the more oppressed, whereas I have known many African-American people who will argue equally vehemently that white women have experienced the biggest gains from measures intended to benefit black people.

But Clinton and Obama both have records that show they are supportive of measures meant to benefit minorities and women. Hillary and her husband have been sympathetic to African-Americans and their concerns throughout the years, while Obama is of a younger generation that finds it absurd that women were ever in a politically subservient position.

Regardless of whether Clinton or Obama wins the presidential nomination, women and black people (minorities in general) are going to have a sympathetic ear at the top of the Democratic ticket come Nov. 4.

For a real political race war, there has to be actual disgust bordering on hatred on both sides of the equation.

That is the situation that existed in 1980s-era Chicago, when the Second City’s politics were elevated to a racial tension that may be more embarrassing to Chicago’s image than the St. Valentine’s Day massacre or police conduct during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

I’d like to think it impossible to believe that anybody ever wore the buttons depicting a red slash through a slice of watermelon as their way of expressing opposition to the 1983 election of Harold Washington as mayor.

But the ignorance level was very real. I still remember the day after the ’83 primary election in Chicago. I was in my last year of high school when I saw a group of teenage white boys in the cafeteria get upset at a group of teenage black girls who were giggling.

I never did find out what the girls were giggling about. It was probably nothing significant. But I will always remember the white boys response. “They’re celebrating the election of their f---ing mayor,” one quipped aloud, to grunts of approval from his buddies.

For the next three years, a majority coalition of white aldermen (most of whom had strong ethnic ties) used their political power to stymie Washington on everything from appointments to budgets, being willing to suffer short-term losses in government perks out of a belief that they were preventing an undeserving mayor from inflicting long-term damage to Chicago.

Of course, much of that “long-term damage” was nothing more than a redistribution of city services so that people living in the city’s majority African-American neighborhoods were merely getting fair share, rather than suffering from the decades of neglect that City Hall had inflicted on them in the past.

The racially partisan spats came to be known as “Council Wars,” a play on the Star Wars film franchise that was still new and fresh back then. Comedian Aaron Freeman did his “Council Wars” sketches depicting Harold Skytalker doing battle with, and vanquishing, evil leader Darth Vrdolyak.

Vrdolyak, of course, was Edward R. Vrdolyak, the alderman of the city’s 10th ward that bordered Indiana. His leadership put together the majority coalition of 29 aldermen who opposed Washington so vehemently.

Now I have no doubt that Vrdolyak was doing his job, in a sense. He WAS representing the interests of his constituents, many of whom were Eastern European and Mexican immigrants who had lost jobs in the steel mills and saw black people as some alien force.

I still recall one resident of the Hegewisch neighborhood who told me that Vrdolyak was a “hero” to the people of the 10th ward because he “kept the n----rs out of our neighborhood.” This particular person was of Mexican descent and was actually darker than some of the African-American people who lived in surrounding neighborhoods.

Personally, I find it interesting that Alton Miller, in his memoir of working as Washington’s press secretary, quotes his former boss as saying that Vrdolyak was not a racist, but was, “a bully. He’ll use race. Hell, he’ll use anything. He’ll use his own grandmother to get what he wants.”

The battles between the Harold Washington forces and the Vrdolyak 29 grew to be so ugly that the Wall Street Journal, in one of its trademark lengthy stories of interpretive reporting, gave Chicago its lasting label of “Beirut by the Lake.”

It ultimately took the courts intervening on Washington’s behalf to break the majority opposition in the City Council, and the election in 1989 of Richard M. Daley as mayor before the city’s racial tensions quit impacting its politics so much.

Leo Melamed, former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, wrote in a commentary in the Chicago Sun-Times that Daley’s election, “signaled a rejection of the age of foolishness and a return to the age of wisdom.”

Regardless of who one blames, it is encouraging to see that Chicago has evolved in the past three decades. Chicago Democrats gave significant support to the successful political campaigns of Carol Moseley-Braun and Obama himself for U.S. Senate seats representing Illinois.

The other leader of the white ethnic movement, Chicago alderman Edward Burke, has offered public apologies for much of the racist rhetoric used by white politicos back then. In the City Council these days, black aldermen are just as likely as white ethnic ones to side with Daley so as to get their share of the government pie.

Now it is likely that an Obama candidacy in the general election this year will stir up racial feelings in parts of the country that are less urbane than Chicago. I have no doubt that some people seriously are more comfortable with the idea of a white man serving in the role of Leader of the Free World, and will feel some level of disgust with a woman or black man at the top of the Democratic ticket.

It is possible that the 2008 presidential campaign will go down in the books as one that challenged this country’s very real tensions that remain in our society with regard to racial or gender equality. But trying to take the rhetoric between Clinton and Obama and turn it into a race fight equal to serious race wars is a cheap attempt to trivialize those tensions.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For those in need of a quickie history lesson on “Council Wars,” check here. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/342.html

Aaron Freeman’s performing career has advanced far beyond “Council Wars.”
http://www.aaronfreeman.com/

GOP congressional hopefuls use immigrants for punching bag

“No!”

That was the one-word introduction used by Republican congressional hopefuls Chris Lauzen and Jim Oberweis when it came to questions concerning the growing immigrant population in the Chicago area and across the United States.

The two men took each other on during a debate held Tuesday night at Aurora University, and both made it clear they were not sympathetic to the concerns of newcomers to the United States.
Illustration provided by U.S. Census Bureau


Both of the men who dream of succeeding retiring House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., in Congress followed the same GOP political playbook being used elsewhere across the nation. Each tried to sound tougher than the other in promising to crack down on the growing ethnic population.

I lost count of the number of times Oberweis equated terrorism and illegal immigration as being not only the same problem, but the ultimate threat to the American Way of life.

Insofar as political rhetoric is concerned, Oberweis came off as the tougher guy of the two. Or the bigger half-wit, depending on how you perceive the ongoing debate taking place in this country these days with regards to immigration.

Both men said there are some people born in the United States whom they do not believe should have the right to regard themselves as “Estadunidenses” (it is Spanish for United Statesians and is actually more accurate, since the term “Americans” really refers to all the residents of two continents).

Lauzen said the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which defines who is a U.S. citizen, has been misinterpreted to justify giving citizenship to anyone actually born within the borders of the United States, even though anyone with sense realizes that all citizenship is nothing more than an accident of birthplace.

“It was only meant to bring an end to slavery in this country,” Lauzen said. “It (should have) nothing to do with the status of people now in this country illegally.”

Oberweis went further in being condescending to the interests of people born elsewhere and who, for reasons that sometimes are due to overly complex U.S. immigration procedures, do not have currently valid visas.

While conceding that some of the people now in the United States without current papers are doing significant work and performing important services, Oberweis said he would still prefer to have them leave the country.

“The people who are coming to this country for economic gain are among the finest people who would make up the middle class in their homelands, if given the opportunity in their own countries,” he said.

I’m willing to give Lauzen points for being more rational on this issue because he concedes the impassioned rhetoric coming from all sides is preventing anything from happening on the issue.

“We have reached a stalemate in this country between those people who favor sorts of amnesty for those in this country illegally now, and those who favor deportation measures to remove them,” he said. “We have a de-facto moratorium that is preventing the issue from being resolved.”

He realizes that some sort of rational negotiation is going to have to take place on all sides before a solution can be found. “Only after trust is restored will it be that people will listen to their government,” on immigration, Lauzen said.

Oberweis, however, wants to demagogue the issue.

During the hour-long debate, he managed to blame the immigration situation in the United States for problems with public education and healthcare, and repeatedly kept equating terrorists with immigrants, saying both were a threat to the country and went against both “basic Republican” and “basic Midwestern values.”

For the record, Lauzen takes pride in voting against a measure in the Illinois General Assembly that would have let the high school graduate children living in Illinois of parents who do not have valid visas to qualify for in-state tuition at state colleges.

Or, as Lauzen prefers to think of it, “I am proud to have voted against giving a two-thirds tuition discount for those children whose parents do not follow the law.”

Oberweis, by comparison, has a laundry list of accomplishments he touts to gain favor with the social conservative element that likes to make a bigger issue out of immigration than it deserves to be.

That list includes erecting walls at the U.S./Mexico border, restricting social service program benefits, creating a special identification card that makes non-U.S.-born residents stand out more clearly, and support measures meant to make English the official language of this country.

Such a measure would be pursued even though there are parts of the southwestern U.S. where the Spanish are the founding fathers, and where in our very own Midwest, the French explorers were the first Europeans to interact with the American Indian tribes who were native to our area.


Why else would the name “Illinois” end in an “ois.” If the English had been the original European settlers, our state’s name either would have been spelled “Elinoy,” or more likely would have been named after some English place. How does the state of “New Liverpool” sound to you?

Now how could two men get away with such silly talk?

Their xenophobic chatter was allowed because they are running for a congressional seat from Illinois on the outer fringes of the Chicago area – the land where suburban sprawl has not yet completely overtaken farmland, and the actual immigrant population is confined largely to a select neighborhood or two in the town of Aurora.

Take Kendall County, which is the home of Hastert and is a focal point of the congressional district as a whole. The district has a white population of 92.1 percent (although 14.4 percent of those identified themselves as Hispanic) and only 5.3 percent born outside the United States.

It also helped that such talk was not unique to either Lauzen or Oberweis.

When I worked at the Statehouse in Springfield, political observers would describe Lauzen as being a bizarre combination of a soft-spoken, mild-mannered demeanor combined with a by-the-book conservative view of the world.

As one pundit (not me, I’m not clever enough to have come up with the line) put it, “he’s Mr. Rogers joining the John Birch Society.”

As for Oberweis, we expect him to put his foot in his mouth on an issue or two every campaign he runs.

The owner of a suburban Chicago dairy and chain of ice cream parlors used his personal wealth to fund unsuccessful bids for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004. He also tried to become Illinois governor in 2006.

He is the candidate who once equated Christian religious extremists with the terrorists who cite Muslim faith as justification for their violent actions, and will always be remembered in political circles for the campaign television ad showing him flying over Chicago’s Soldier Field while noting that the estimated number of people who slip across the U.S./Mexico border would equal a capacity crowd for a Chicago Bears game played every single day.

Yet this time, Oberweis could very well be the favorite. Hastert privately has said he would prefer the dairy owner to succeed him instead of Lauzen, a state senator since 1993 whose political rigidity has offended his GOP colleagues on occasions when a more compromising personality would have been easier to deal with.

Democrats in the Illinois 14th congressional district are such a weak organization that it is unlikely their candidate can mount a serious challenge.

Democrats are banking their chances of victory on Barack Obama becoming their party’s presidential nominee, believing that the U.S. senator from Illinois would boost the Democratic vote across the board and could just make their candidate competitive.

So perhaps that is a reason for conservatives in the Illinois 14th to root for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Her presence on the ballot just about clinches a GOP victory for the congressional seat come the Nov. 4 elections.

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CANDIDATE QUIPS: Lauzen scoops the ice cream man

Photographs provided by Jim Oberweis for Congress (above) and Illinois state Senate.

Illinois state Sen. Chris Lauzen, R-Aurora, also a Republican candidate for the Congressional seat being abandoned by retiring House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., gets the Chicago Argus’ “Quip of the Day” honors.

His attempt to use humor in taking a pot shot at GOP primary opponent Jim Oberweis gave us a chuckle. Lauzen was seriously trying to contrast the experience he gained in 15 years serving in the Illinois Senate, compared to Oberweis, who runs a dairy and chain of ice cream parlors – but has never held elective office.

Or, as Lauzen so “eloquently” put it while motioning with his right hand to Oberweis, “When we go for an ice cream cone, we go to someone with experience in doing it.”

By the way, the Oberweis people do make fine ice cream, which, by the way, has been declared officially to be kosher, according to the Chicago Rabbinical Council.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: For those who need to know more about the source of the Oberweis fortune that has allowed him to spend nearly $10 million of his own money on three failed political campaigns, and a fourth try for elective office, look here. http://www.oberweisdairy.com/web/icecream.asp