A suburban homemaker who purposely had picked a quiet, non-vacation day recently to visit the state Capitol was shocked to find thousands of people and a high school band gathered under the dome for a very loud campaign kickoff rally.
Republican George Ryan was announcing he would run for governor in 1998, and at least 3,000 people were fired up enough to come cheer him on.
Mary Clarke had a different reaction altogether.
“You’re kidding me, right?” Clarke said. “Didn’t we just get done with this a few months ago?”
Clarke may have been remembering the presidential election that resituated Bill Clinton in the White House only last January. Or perhaps she was thinking of her state representative or senator, sworn in at the same time. Maybe she is among the tiny percentage of eligible voters who showed up to elect their village board members last spring.
“I can’t put my finger on it,” she said. “I just have this vague feeling that I had taken care of it for a while.”
Clarke is experiencing the common symptoms of the Perpetual Campaign, a low-grade fever that Illinoisians live with practically all the time.
The cause? Illinois is virtually always in an election cycle, due to the fact that we have either a gubernatorial or a presidential election every two years, with a primary in the spring and general election in November. Scattered in the off-years are mayoral, aldermanic, school board, township and various other local elections–multiplied by two, in cases where there are primaries.
With campaigns that last no less than six months, the process pretty much never ends. Witness the fact that, fully 13 months before Illinois voters will choose a U.S. senator, a governor and a bunch of other representatives, the campaign machinery is already in high gear.
No wonder the side effects range from feelings of boredom to those of being overwhelmed.
There are, of course, practical reasons for campaigns to begin so early, as they did this month when Secretary of State Ryan launched his long-expected Republican candidacy and Democrats-for-governor and one wealthy Senate candidate began running television ads.
Candidates must raise money, and the more the better. They must gather thousands of signatures from supporters so they can meet a December deadline to get their names on the ballot.
Moreover, there’s the crucial game of jockeying for position, set into motion when Republican Gov. Jim Edgar announced in late August that he would not run for re-election. Ryan wanted to announce right away, lest other GOP hopefuls get the impression that he wasn’t champing at the bit.
That spurred potential candidates who wanted to run for Ryan’s old job–the domino effect in politics is wonderful to watch–and so on.
Voters of yore set this system in motion by approving the screwy Illinois election cycle scheme in a referendum proposal in the 1970s.
But for all the excitement churning on the political scene, who really can blame the public for greeting the big fall kickoff with a yawn? Certainly not the players and coaches themselves.
“We just have too many damn elections,” said state Sen. Miguel del Valle (D-Chicago), who has pestered the legislature to change the system. “People just get bombarded. It tends to make them numb.”
Del Valle said that when he first became involved in politics 10 years ago, the campaigns were thrilling.
But then came another campaign that seemed like the be-all and end-all of electoral politics. And another. And another.
“Now, people are, like, `What happened in between?’ ” Del Valle said.
What happens is government, said state Rep. Judy Erwin (D-Chicago), who also has tried to change the system. She argues that governance is so influenced by election season politics that only a tiny window of time remains for elected officials to concentrate on their jobs.
“The perpetual campaign frames all of the policy debates that we ought to be having in this state in a whole different perspective,” Erwin said. “Whether people want to or not, they tend to constantly be forced to view a policy issue–be it education, health care, welfare–in the context of the political advantage that one candidate or party might gain.”
A prime example is the idea of overhauling the way Illinois pays for public schools, which virtually all sides say the state legislature must do.
But Republican lawmakers didn’t let it happen this past spring because they were too busy salivating over the upcoming election. In the months to come, expect them to attack Democrats who supported the income tax increase that could have improved public education dramatically for the state’s poorer kids.
Almost every year, state lawmakers talk about interrupting the Perpetual Campaign. This year alone, legislators introduced no fewer than seven bills to shorten the campaign season. They would have moved the primaries to as late as September–providing voters with a potential reprieve of up to six months.
Other states have seen the wisdom. Thirteen have non-presidential year primaries in September, and 21 hold them in the summertime. Others have consolidated elections so that a big one occurs only once every four years.
But the trend toward shorter campaigns is heading the other way in presidential election years, with states leapfrogging each other to have the earliest–therefore the most important–primary. (A new Maine law even specifies that the state’s primary must occur on the same day as New Hampshire’s. New Hampshire statutes, on the other hand, dictate that its primary be one week earlier than anyone else’s.)
The result is longer campaigns and less context for them. All of this makes for antics that alienate the public–and cement the walls around the worlds of politics and governance that already make them the Land of the Insiders.
Witness the gossip network working overtime in state Capitol circles these days. The telephones are ringing roughly twice as often as usual, and every other call seems to deal with the same self-interested but nonetheless breathlessly shared subject matter.
“OK, you can’t say who you heard this from,” said the caller, “but I’ve got the lowdown on the secretary of state’s race.”
Wow. The Illinois secretary of state, the bureaucrat in charge of license plates.
“All right,” the state worker continued conspiratorially, “so you might have the old speaker in there, especially now that the county board chairman won’t run against him. But they both still have to worry a little about the comptroller . . .”
There was no need to use names, because, to an insider, the references are obvious. And anyway, why say the name of former House Speaker Lee Daniels, or any of the others, when who knows who might be listening?
It was, after all, a state telephone.
With Ryan hip-deep in his gubernatorial campaign and three Democratic candidates now getting ready for their March primary, the political coterie waits for the other pieces to fall into place.
Sometime soon, for instance, Comptroller Loleta Didrickson will make up her mind whether she wants to run for the U.S. Senate, as party leaders have been openly courting her to do for the past week. The gossips can hardly wait.
But with all this campaign talk going on, an interested voter might wonder when the work is getting done. No wonder people complain about government, distrust public servants and stay home on Election Day.
The insiders, in the meantime, dedicate themselves to tying up state telephones whispering about who’s going to be the next Illinois state comptroller if Didrickson doesn’t run.
You know, the comptroller. The bureaucrat who pays the bills with taxpayers’ money.
