When Blair Hull formally announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in June of last year he sounded the traditional campaign themes of working to create jobs and affordable health care and then he added a vow to “fully fund our schools” and end the funding disparities in education.
But only minutes later, when reporters questioned how he would use federal tax dollars to fix Illinois’ school funding scheme, Hull acknowledged that his speech “may be an exaggeration.”
That acknowledgment was prophetic. This has been a lengthy but lightly regarded Senate campaign among Democrats and Republicans.
Most candidates had the money, the ego, or both, to take the stage, but they still weren’t ready for prime time.
On Tuesday, voters will narrow a field of seven Democrats and eight Republicans down to a single contender from each party for November’s general election.
But this rarest of all political endeavors–an open-seat Senate contest–has suffered from too much exaggeration and too little enthusiasm.
Faced with uncertainty over their jobs, their economic future and how to pay for the skyrocketing costs of health care and college, people are looking for that intangible but very real feeling of being able to connect to a candidate. Instead, this Senate contest has been a largely passionless pursuit of victory.
Multimillionaire political novices have spent freely of their own money in an attempt to craft an imagery of independence that raises the question of why they want the job in the first place–except to join yet another exclusive club.
Instead of practical platforms and solutions, voters have been offered cheap promises and rumor-mongering designed to tap into their basest fears, along with a dollop of ice cream on the side.
This is, after all, a campaign that featured a candidate for the Republican nomination who announced his candidacy, put together a staff and spoke highly of the need to encourage voter registration–while all the time the candidate himself had never been registered to vote.
One of the most accurately worded pieces of targeted mail sent out among the hundreds of thousands delivered to voters in the state over the last few months came from Hull. The outside of the mailer had one word: “Different.”
Even if details had never emerged about Hull’s messy divorce and drug use during a “youthful” phase in his life at age 40, there were plenty of questions to be raised about a neophyte candidate whose character appears to be that of a loner accustomed to using money to get his way.
In his commercials he labels himself an independent Democrat who is free from special interests. Yet Hull himself was a special interest to Illinois Democrats last year, with his specialty being “how to get elected.”
He seeded county and ward organizations with cash and donated money to pay for local workers. Using more than $460,000 in loans, direct cash, use of an airplane, flowers and lavish breakfasts, Hull bought a political internship with Rod Blagojevich during the campaign for governor. The price tag was merely the cost of doing business, even though he and Blagojevich continue to tout the line “no more business as usual.”
Of late, Hull’s travails have provided the only excitement in an otherwise lackluster Democratic race.
Things were so bad that a recent press release from the campaign of deadpan-demeanor Dan Hynes, the state comptroller, declared that he had passion. Noting on his TV ads that his wife is a doctor may reassure voters who fear he often doesn’t show signs of having a pulse.
It has been interesting also to watch Hynes try to portray himself as politically independent. He is a product of the city’s 19th Ward and the son of former Cook County Assessor and state Senate President Tom Hynes.
About a month ago at a news conference in Pilsen, Hynes readily accepted the endorsement of several Hispanic politicians who he claimed were independent Democrats who appreciated good government. In reality, many of them were aligned with the Hispanic Democratic Organization, a group backed by Mayor Richard Daley’s allies.
With Hynes and Hull challenging front-running state Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago) on his voting record, it’s surprising that both of his opponents have ignored one critical moment in Obama’s legislative past.
In 1999, when a court struck down Daley’s landmark Safe Neighborhoods Act, which was an attempt to cut down on handgun crimes, Obama was counted as an early and eager supporter of gun control. Yet, when the state Senate vote was taken, Obama was nowhere to be found and aides refused to say where he was, even when an offer was made to fly him back for the vote.
Obama, then a candidate for Congress against Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), eventually admitted that he was visiting his mother in Hawaii and said he couldn’t return to Springfield to vote because one of his children was ill. The excuse may have been valid, but the attempt to cover up his whereabouts wasn’t. Obama went on to lose that race and likely learned a hard lesson about campaigning.
Obama might be learning another lesson, the one about timing being everything in politics.
Days ago, he began airing testimonial TV commercials featuring the supportive words of liberal Rep. Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.). But the ads showed up only hours before her husband, longtime social activist and opportunist Robert Creamer, was indicted on federal charges of tax kiting and tax evasion.
Gery Chico, the former president of the Chicago Board of Education, has tried to make education the centerpiece of his bid and late last week the campaign lesson he provided was pure Chicago. He passed out $500 checks to organizations in East St. Louis and the Quad Cities.
The other candidates on the Democratic side are just that, the others.
Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas spent a lot of money to run one ad featuring her against a background of suit-wearing mannequins. The TV ad might have had some effect on voters in the Chicago area, where she is more known, but it did little for anyone south of the Tri-State Tollway.
They don’t know who she is and conceivably could have thought she was promoting blazers and ties for Men’s Warehouse.
Radio talk show host Nancy Skinner has had only one campaign theme. She can talk. And health-care executive Joyce Washington apparently believed that by losing the Democratic nomination for the meaningless job of Illinois lieutenant governor two years ago, she earned a shot at serving in Washington.
Republicans, too, have had trouble engendering support. There’s little wonder.
Frontrunner Jack Ryan has steadfastly maintained that portions of his 1999 divorce file involving his former marriage to actress Jeri Ryan were sealed to protect the couple’s child. But the judge in the case initially refused to seal the documents, contending Ryan was trying to protect his budding political career. The documents were later placed under seal, but Ryan has refused to explain the nexus between items in the file that have to do with his political career that might also protect his child.
The multimillionaire Ryan’s naive campaign style also can be troubling. Until recent days, reporters who asked questions about his conservative social agenda were often greeted with the automatic replies: “That’s a good question” or “I’m glad you asked that.” He has not used those responses when asked about his divorce files, however.
Then there is Jim Oberweis, the boutique dairy entrepreneur and investment broker, who ran an uninspired losing bid for the Senate in 2002 in which he told audiences on both sides of the abortion issue what they wanted to hear.
This time around, the re-tooled Oberweis, who two years ago likened religious opponents of abortion to the Taliban, now notes how he was “raised in the Catholic faith” and will vote 100 percent pro-life.
“You have my word,” he told supporters in an e-mail.
Oberweis, who also worked harder this time to leverage his dairy-business advertising into helpful name ID for his candidacy, has gained notoriety for latching onto opposition to President Bush’s immigration reform plans through a series of broadcast commercials that warn that “10,000 illegal aliens” enter the country every day.
Given the zeal with which he has pursued the immigration issue, some think he will revise the inventory of his very own Oberweis Dairy stores so that future customers will be limited to purchasing only vanilla ice cream and whole milk.
There also is state Sen. Steve Rauschenberger of Elgin, a late entry into the race whose poor campaign planning has forced him to resort to such stunts as getting his beard shaved to make up for a lack of money to pay for TV ads.
Rauschenberger’s effort is noteworthy not for piling up several newspaper endorsements across the state, but for his call for teachers to arm themselves in the classroom–then taking that idea back because his wife told him she didn’t think it was a good idea.
As a top surrogate on the campaign stump, Rauschenberger has been using his good friend and colleague, state Sen. Chris Lauzen, a resident of Aurora and perhaps also of another planet.
Lauzen once went to court to try to legally add the term “CPA” to his name. He also once moved into a new Senate district office only to learn that his new digs were actually located in someone else’s Senate district.
This also is the Lauzen who complained loudly about pork-barrel spending in the state budget but freely spent what he describes as ever-so-precious tax dollars to pay for stained-glass windows in a Naperville parking garage and a fancy bell tower for the well-heeled community. As a state comptroller candidate Lauzen also knows how to lose to Dan Hynes.
As the saying goes, with friends like these …
Finally, rival Andy McKenna, once ballyhooed as a major challenger to incumbent Peter Fitzgerald, distinguished himself primarily for being undistinguished. And little-noticed contender John Borling got rid of his campaign manager late last week, raising the question, “What took so long?”
And so this race goes.
So many candidates, so little character.
