Two months before Jim Ryan would score an easy victory to become the Republican nominee for governor, his campaign staff sat in their downtown headquarters watching a television commercial portraying him as an extremist on abortion.
One of his wealthy opponents, Corinne Wood, was using the ad to attack Ryan–the first strike of many he would take in the nasty GOP primary. It was an expected assault, and it triggered the Ryan campaign’s anticipated response.
“We’re going to hit her back,” Patrick Durante, head of Ryan’s efforts in the collar counties, recalled campaign director Steve Culliton telling him. “It’s as simple as that.”
Within a week, Ryan was running a commercial blasting Wood’s ad and took the opportunity to label the lieutenant governor a “full and equal partner” with unpopular Gov. George Ryan.
The give and take among Ryan and his opponents set the tone for the remainder of the GOP race.
“The whole campaign was geared toward this: Every time they say you’re a bad guy, you come out and say you’re a good guy,” Durante said. “Don’t let anything take hold.”
In the hierarchical GOP, Jim Ryan was always the presumptive front-runner against Wood and state Sen. Patrick O’Malley of Palos Park. A two-term attorney general, Ryan had stronger name recognition because of his longevity in office and personal travails, including a fight with cancer and the sudden death of a daughter.
As a result, Ryan’s game plan was to play defense, a risky strategy that succeeded not just because Ryan fought off attacks on his character but also due to his competitors’ failures. Wood was unable to attract the moderates and Democrats she needed, while O’Malley couldn’t siphon enough conservative votes from Ryan.
“Very early on, we promoted a Jim Ryan that was a man of integrity and made this campaign replete with integrity,” Culliton said. “So when the flak got thrown around, which we knew would happen, all we had to do was maintain that integrity.”
In the waning days of the campaign, O’Malley and Wood tried to chip away the core of Ryan’s campaign: his character.
They questioned whether Ryan looked the other way as attorney general while corruption ran rampant through the secretary of state’s office. But just hours after O’Malley made the charge, Ryan held to the game plan, claiming Wood and O’Malley were running such negative campaigns they had taken the race into the “toilet.”
While Ryan was eager to knock down aspersions in controlled forums, he was loath to meet with his rivals in public, agreeing to only three debates.
“We thought, `How many times do we give them a forum to knock us down?'” Culliton said.
As Ryan did this, he positioned himself as the moderate between Wood, who touted an agenda of traditional Democratic issues such as abortion rights, and O’Malley, who was embraced by the party’s most conservative wing because of his vehement opposition to abortion and his strong support of the rights of gun owners.
Like O’Malley, Ryan opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, but he has backed legislation that prohibits discrimination against homosexuals.
“We were in between the two of them,” Culliton said. “And obviously that’s what most people liked.”
Still, Ryan’s campaign feared O’Malley could undermine the conservative base Ryan worked more than a decade to construct.
The issue came to the fore in the campaign’s final days, when conservatives sent out mailers and made automated phone calls Downstate claiming Ryan’s support of the Human Rights Act–which prevents housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation–opens the door to same-sex marriages.
Ryan said he’s opposed to such unions and in midcampaign met with conservative groups about the issue. During the meeting, Ryan formally changed his position on the bill, saying he wanted an exemption so religious institutions wouldn’t have to abide by it.
It could be a sign of a steady move back right for Ryan in his November bid against Democratic challenger Rod Blagojevich. “Rod is a pretty liberal congressman, and I’m a pretty conservative Republican,” Ryan said Wednesday. “I think now the voters will have some clear choices.”
