“Hairspray. Who has hairspray?”
Lisa Madigan, attorney general-elect of Illinois, is walking the halls of her carton-strewn campaign office, hairbrush in hand. She needs to look picture-perfect for a photographer, though clearly this petite dynamo with the booming voice would be happier working a room or explaining the finer points of her policy agenda.
At 36, she’s the state’s youngest attorney general and the first woman, but neither distinction has really overtaken her other claim to fame: being the daughter of Mike Madigan, the speaker of the Illinois House and the head of the state Democratic Party.
From the moment she announced her candidacy, she was bombarded with charges of nepotism, but Madigan, who has just completed her first term as a state senator, used her high-wattage energy level and youth to distinguish herself from her Brooks Brothers-suited opponents.
The strategy worked and now Madigan is weeks away from translating her platform into action and heightening the office’s focus on consumer advocacy, environmental protection and public interest work.
Not bad for someone who passed the bar a mere eight years ago and logged four years practicing employment law at Chicago’s Sachnoff & Weaver. She also has a wedding in the offing to cartoonist Patrick Byrnes, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest.
WomanNews sat down with Madigan not long after her victory to see whether she was enjoying the transition to her new office as much as she did campaigning for it.
Q. What is life like these days?
A Really good. People are so excited. There are a lot of women–young and older–who will whisper in my ear, `We’re so glad you won. We need more women in government.’
Q. Is there a sense that one of us made it?
A. Yes. I think people look at this and say, `Wow. If a young woman can go through this and win, well then, so can I.’ That’s very, very satisfying–to be a role model in that way.
Q. You’re obviously very approachable. But do you feel that you don’t get the kind of respect a man would in your situation?
A. I would much rather be approachable. If you’re trying to represent people, you need to want to talk to them. I don’t have a big protocol issue.
Q. Is that something you picked up from your dad?
A. He’s a very quiet, private person–a completely different personality. I have my mother’s personality. She’s a hundred times more outgoing than my dad.
Q. And what was her contribution to the campaign?
A. Her contribution has always been to be my mother. And apparently it doesn’t matter how old you are, you will always have a mother. I was talking to a woman who is 67 who got married about seven years ago. Her mother was in a nursing home and was trying to dictate her wedding. I felt so good knowing it wasn’t just me.
Q. How are the wedding plans going?
A. They’re OK. We’ve got a church and a priest, my fiance’s brother. We’ve spent some time looking at magazines with wedding gowns. Some of those things I can’t even imagine–what is it, the 18th Century?
Q. Are you using a wedding planner?
A. No, I kind of figure we’ve had so many parties. We should be able to organize a wedding without too much trauma. We haven’t set a date. We’re hoping right after Easter.
Q. Is it true that you plan to have kids pretty soon after you get married?
A. My fiance and I welcome children into our life. When that will happen, I can’t say.
Q. You realize that everything about this will be heavily scrutinized, from the length of your pregnancy leave to the kind of child-care you arrange.
A. Of course. They already talk about my hair. I’m under a different type of scrutiny.
Q. Can we talk about your party? Democrats did well in Illinois and not so great nationally. Why do you think that is?
A. Here in Illinois we campaigned as a group. After the primary on April 27, Sen. [Dick] Durbin gathered all the statewide candidates up to kick off the campaign. All of us went on the road meeting people. The energy and the momentum continued throughout the election. People really want change and that new generation of leadership.
Q. But some of your values are traditionally liberal, aren’t they? Are you comfortable describing yourself as a liberal?
A. I don’t necessarily describe myself as liberal. No matter where you are, whether it’s in southern Illinois or on the South Side of Chicago or up in Rockford, at the end of the day we all want the same things–good education, a safe community, a job where they can earn enough to support their family, health-care coverage. The so-called hot-button liberal and conservative issues don’t concern people nearly as much as these other things.
Q. As a state senator, you’ve introduced legislation to make it easier to introduce police reports as evidence in domestic violence cases. Why is that necessary?
A. The change is necessary to prosecute cases in which women have either been intimidated from testifying or left the jurisdiction. It’s very difficult to do it right now. … The trend nationwide is to provide police departments with the equipment and the training to handle domestic violence investigations the exact same way they would handle a murder investigation–with the assumption that you will not have a victim [to] testify. It means making sure you have protocol to follow and resources such as digital photography and some of the new technologies that are around. … One of the largest problems abused women face is that they’re economically dependent on their victimizers. Here in Illinois, it’s estimated that we turn 10,000 women a year away from shelters–probably more transitional shelters than emergency shelters. They’re faced with a horrible choice: Do you go back to your abuser? If you don’t have a safety net, do you become homeless? Child support is another enormous issue. Here in Illinois, we’re 48th or 49th in the country in the collection and distribution of child support. An estimated 1 million children in this state should be receiving some form of child support and aren’t. We’re just doing a lousy job of collecting this money. Public Aid, the attorney general’s office and the state’s attorney’s office all have a piece of enforcement. You have so many agencies involved and there’s no case manager. … Currently there are proposals out there for at least the larger counties who want to use the state’s attorney’s office [as a coordinator.] We’ve been trying to introduce legislation to try that as a pilot program.
Q. Where do you think you acquired your social conscience?
A. I think we were all given talents and put here on earth to do something with them. I had an opportunity to go to South Africa for a year after graduating Georgetown University. They had a program for graduates to be teachers in Catholic schools. All of my students were Zulu women. I was teaching two sections of 8th-grade algebra, one of 9th-grade English, one of 10th-grade science, one of 11th-grade history. My smallest class had 40 students–my largest had 73. We had virtually no resources. There were days I did not have chalk. There were [students] who came to school who didn’t have shoes. We found out every other week that one of my students’ fathers, uncles or brothers had been killed or incarcerated. It was absolutely an awakening. You couldn’t be any lower on the totem pole at that time than to be a black woman in apartheid South Africa. Yet, I had the best behaved, most inquisitive group imaginable. To see them persevere in the face of that–nothing you or I are ever going to face is that horrible.
Q. Isn’t any of what lies ahead for you daunting or intimidating?
A. After what I’ve been through, what could possibly be intimidating? Seriously, it’s really not. In large part, I’m going to go back to being in South Africa. I remember when I went to the state Senate, some of my friends saying, `How are you ever going to function [there]? The majority of people are older and they’re all men.’ And I thought, `You know when I was 21, I was over in South Africa. My students’ first language was Zulu. I had to learn to live in a completely different culture. I had to learn how to communicate with people whose first language wasn’t even English. If I was able to do that, there’s pretty much nothing that I can’t do.’
