When you traveled with Paul Simon through the heartland, his heartland, southern Illinois, the first impression you got was that he was a masterful politician. He knew everybody. He knew their names and their parents’ names and sometimes he even knew to ask if grandma was doing well after a recent illness.
Nice to see you, he would say, the emphasis, always, on you.
That was more than a masterful politician, of course. That was a man who thrived on the kind of people who made towns like Pinckneyville and Carlyle and his own home, Makanda, comforting and comfortable places to live.
Paul Simon was more liberal than Illinois is. More liberal than southern Illinois is. Certainly more liberal than the country was when Ronald Reagan won a landslide re-election in 1984 and Democrats were crushed just about everywhere, except here, where Paul Simon beat the Republican Chuck Percy and went to the U.S. Senate.
Simon was elected because he connected so well with people. He spoke with candor and they trusted him even when they disagreed with him. It rankled him that other politicians trusted polls more than their own instincts. It rankled him so much that he wrote his last book about it: “Our Culture of Pandering.”
He took risks, even before he entered politics. He was a journalist who crusaded against local mobsters and crooked politicians, not always a healthy thing to do in the notorious precincts of Madison County. He was a descendant, in a way, of Elijah Lovejoy, the newspaper editor in Alton who was murdered to silence his abolitionist crusade. Simon wrote a book about Lovejoy, too.
He was a renegade in the Illinois legislature, part of a group that included the likes of Abner Mikva and Tony Scariano, who laughingly called themselves the Kosher Nostra. That might not sound politically correct today, but they called themselves that because they reveled in their religious and ethnic diversity. They tried to clean up Springfield and had a good time at it.
He had disappointments and setbacks–a campaign for governor fell short. A campaign for president failed to grasp the imagination of Iowa caucus-goers and eventually failed. He stayed optimistic and came back from each defeat.
He retired from the Senate, but he didn’t stop campaigning. He ran the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University to push the national debate. A couple of weeks ago he stopped by this newspaper to encourage us to support an effort to get Congress to put money toward scholarships for international studies.
Our children don’t know the world, he argued. How can we expect them to lead it?
Simon will be remembered for his contributions, particularly to education and the people of Illinois. Even more than that, he will be remembered as a political leader who was never afraid to tell you something you didn’t want to hear.
