No one has ever accused George Ryan of being a sleekly packaged politician. White hair, gruff voice. A ’50s guy in a ’90s world. What Ryan loses in style points he recovers through his reputation as a master political dealmaker.
That was the essence of Ryan’s campaign for governor: He may not be pretty, but he gets the job done.
So where has that George Ryan been seen since Inauguration Day? After a couple of months in office, all we’ve seen is the anti-Ryan. A ’90s guy in a ’50s world.
He has done everything to polish his image as a thoroughly modern Republican governor, a compassionate conservative.
Ryan anguished in public over whether he should spare the life of Andrew Kokoraleis, a murderer who mutilated his victims. “You can talk about it summarily, like `fry the guy,’ but when you’re the guy who pushes the plunger, it’s a different story,” Gov. Ryan said. Maybe that’s not the way Gandhi would have put it, but you get the message. In the end, of course, Ryan did what a compassionate conservative does. He stepped aside and let the executioner do his work.
Ryan took up the cause of Anthony Porter, who was freed from Death Row for murders he didn’t commit. Ryan deftly recovered from a press aide’s stupid remark–that freeing Porter after 17 years on Death Row proved “the system worked”–and he searched high and low for ways to fix the capital punishment system.
Ryan took the high road on ethics, issuing a decree that banned state workers from soliciting campaign contributions for him.
Last week, the compassionate conservative pushed for a state law to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians. Ryan pulled out all the stops, making personal pleas for the bill, and it failed by just one vote in the House.
Yes, George Ryan is well on his way to shedding any image of being a gruff, old coot. He looks like a sweetheart.
That should mean Ryan is enjoying a wondrous political honeymoon. Just one thing gets in the way. Just as he has surprised folks with his warm-and-cuddly public image, he has shocked them with his political fumbling. Gov. Get-it-done looks like it’s all getting done to him. He has the footprints on his back to prove it.
A few events in recent weeks have some wondering if Ryan has lost his skill at political logrolling just when he got in the prime position to use it.
The first was Ryan’s embarrassing and aborted attempt to install House Minority Leader Lee Daniels as chairman of the Illinois Republican Party.
The benefits for Daniels were obvious: he’d control party operations and spending as he tried one more time to claim control of the House. The 2000 election, which won’t have any of the major statewide offices up for grabs, would be an all-Daniels affair.
But the benefits to Ryan, or anybody else, weren’t so obvious. Daniels is not one of the state’s more trusted politicians, even within his own party. Oddly, Ryan gave his blessing to Daniels without checking with Senate President James “Pate” Philip, who knows his fellow DuPager well enough to be suspicious of him. Philip halted Daniels in his tracks, and embarrassed Ryan. Daniels had to withdraw, Ryan had to make another pick for party chairman, and now it looks like Ryan can be held hostage by Philip whenever Philip finds it convenient, just as Jim Edgar was.
Some other political maneuvering this week got less attention, but could be even more trouble for Ryan. Daniels, again, was in the middle.
The House passed a bill to give tax credits to parents who pay tuition for private schools. That should be a slam-dunk for Ryan. The legislature passed the tax credit a little over a year ago, but Gov. Jim Edgar vetoed it. Ryan has publicly supported it. This year, it was expected that Ryan would get to be the hero, pushing the credit through the legislature and signing the tax break himself.
The House passed the tax credit, but only after Daniels added an amendment to require that 51 percent of all new money in the state go to public education. That’s a poison pill. If it’s not removed it will sink the tax-credit bill because lawmakers don’t want their spending options restricted by law.
It’s another embarrassment for Ryan. He campaigned on a pledge to put 51 percent of new money to education, but he doesn’t want his options cut off either. Now he has to lobby to keep out of state law the very same commitment he made in his campaign.
Finally, in the last week Ryan missed a chance to ride to Mayor Richard Daley’s rescue and look like a hero on gun control.
Daley’s gun-control package, including limits on purchases to one gun a month, was knocked down in the House despite a huge lobbying effort by the mayor, suburban mayors and police organizations. Everybody was on board–except Ryan, a professed champion of gun control. He ignored pleas from Daley’s allies to support the bill, and it lost largely because it was rejected by the suburban Republicans with whom Ryan would have had influence.
Now, the more jaundiced view of what’s been going on in Springfield is not that Ryan has fumbled, but that he has succeeded by failing.
In this view, Ryan was secretly happy to see the deal-killer attached to the tuition tax credit because he realized the credit would pull some $80 million out of his first budget. In this view, the failure of the gay-rights bill by just one vote was carefully orchestrated–Ryan would look noble in pursuing it, and the religious right wouldn’t get too upset with him because the bill wouldn’t become law. Daley’s failure on guns means that Ryan’s own gun package becomes the only game in town.
But if those moves are a grand scheme on Ryan’s part, it’s an odd way to play politics. Governors don’t usually dream up ways to make themselves look feckless.
The public-relations machine seems to be establishing Ryan in the ranks of Republican cold-steel-but-nice governors like George W. Bush. But with Ryan’s combination of soft heart and softer political instincts, he’s starting to look more like another Southern governor–Jimmy Carter.
