It’s a funny thing about politicians in these parts, every time they touch a gun they shoot themselves.
This year the victim of his own gunslinging is a Republican state legislator named Bob Churchill, who wants to be the secretary of state. He’s running against Al Salvi.
Everybody knows Al Salvi because he spent a lot of money to run for the Senate two years ago. Not too many people know Bob Churchill. In the race for secretary of state, about the only thing Salvi and Churchill can find to argue about is whether your car should have one license plate or two. That doesn’t exactly have people likening Salvi and Churchill to Lincoln and Douglas.
Since nobody knew Churchill he needed a way to make a name for himself, and the great plate debate wasn’t going to do it. So he decided to be the gun lobby’s very best friend.
A group called Gun Owners of America mailed a questionnaire to 350 candidates in Illinois. Most of them threw it in the trash, but a few didn’t, including Churchill.
Churchill had a perfect score with the gun group. He went 13 for 13 on the questionnaire.
He opposed any ban on assault weapons. He opposed background checks for gun buyers. He opposed any waiting period to buy a gun. He even said he would support a law to let anyone walk around with a concealed weapon without so much as getting a permit.
The gun lobby has justly rewarded Churchill. He has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association, the Illinois State Rifle Association, and Gun Owners of America.
Gun Owners of America is run by Larry Pratt. He’s the guy who had to leave a high post in Patrick Buchanan’s last presidential campaign after he was linked to white supremacist and right-wing militia groups. Pratt thinks what this country really needs is armed vigilante groups to keep people in line.
The gun lobby, which loved Al Salvi when he ran in 1996, hates him now because he changed his mind. Salvi supports the Brady Law and an assault weapons ban and wouldn’t allow concealed weapons.
Larry Pratt was so happy to help Bob Churchill kick Al Salvi that Pratt planned to come to Illinois last week to meet Churchill. But things got a little sticky. You see, Pratt wanted to kick Al Salvi, but he also wanted to kick Secretary of State George Ryan because Ryan supports gun control, including the Brady Law and an assault weapons ban.
Churchill got cold feet. He’s backing Ryan for governor, and it would certainly be bad form for him to stand next to a guy linked to white supremacists and militia groups who’s calling George Ryan a gutless parrot of the gun-control zombies. So Churchill backed out of the meeting with Pratt, and claims he never really agreed to it in the first place.
Now, in the wake of the Pratt fiasco, Churchill’s campaign is taking a remarkably novel approach to the gun issue.
The candidate backed by the National Rifle Association, the Illinois State Rifle Association and the Gun Owners of America is saying, in effect, “I’m a gun nut, but he’s a gun nut, too.”
Churchill’s campaign showed me a letter from a local coordinator for the NRA who says that he’s backing Salvi because Churchill has flip-flopped on assault weapons. The letter cites a March 1 television interview in which Churchill apparently got confused about an answer. Churchill is still true blue on guns, his campaign says, but this letter proves that Salvi is still trying to court the NRA-types, too.
Bob, Bob, Bob, that’s what happens when you get in bed with the take-no-prisoners gun lobby. One slip, and some of the NRA folks start to abandon ship. Salvi realized that after 1996.
For Salvi’s part, I understand his conversion for what it is. He recognizes that most voters here support reasonable gun control, and he has followed suit.
“I support the 2nd Amendment, but I think there are limits and should be limits,” Salvi told me this week. “A lot of people are bitterly disappointed in me. But it couldn’t have hurt me too much. I’m further ahead in the polls than I’ve ever been in my life.”
The conventional wisdom in Illinois is that being pro-gun hurts a candidate in a general election, but helps in a Republican primary. The 1996 version of Al Salvi proved the first bit of wisdom to be true, and the 1998 version might well prove the second bit of wisdom to be false.
Salvi has taken a lot of criticism for his conversion on gun control. The gun lobby and some commentators have accused him of being a politically expedient, bald-faced liar. But the most recent Tribune poll found that Republicans, by and large, still think very well of Salvi, which is why he had a two-to-one lead over Churchill.
There’s more evidence in the poll. When voters were told that Peter Fitzgerald would allow people to carry concealed weapons and Loleta Didrickson would oppose that, the voters sided with Didrickson by nearly a two-to-one margin.
The poll also showed that Didrickson has blown the chance to use this issue in the Senate race. Two-thirds of the voters didn’t know where she and Fitzgerald stood on concealed weapons. Finally, just this week, she started to run a TV spot pointing out their differences on the issue.
Now, U.S. senators actually vote on gun legislation. You might wonder what all this talk about guns has to do with the Illinois secretary of state. Nothing, really. The secretary of state has nothing to do with guns. But the secretary of state often goes on to bigger things. Jim Edgar became governor. Alan Dixon became senator. George Ryan is running for governor.
The gun lobby sees big things for Bob Churchill. Illinois might have a different idea.
