Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Politics / Clout City / News Scattered and Not-So-Scattered Thoughts on the Elections
Posted by Mick Dumke on Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:06 PM
A few thoughts after witnessing Chicago-style democracy in action:
SEIZING VICTORY FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY: Lisa Madigan wins!!! And so does Jesse White!!! Having no opponents helps.
THE RIGHT SHOWS ITS MIGHT: Or at least its impact on GOP primaries. For awhile last night it looked like so-called moderates might be making a comeback in the form of gubernatorial candidate Kirk Dillard and Senate candidate Mark Kirk. But then conservative Bill Brady slipped past Dillard by a few hundred votes (they’re still being counted) and Mark Kirk delivered a victory speech comparing his campaign with the American fight for democracy in WW I. It sounded like 2004 all over again.
THE JOBS CANDIDATE: Alexi Giannoulias won the Democratic Senate nomination by ignoring questions about his family’s bank and the scholarship fund he oversees as treasurer. Instead, he talked about nothing but creating jobs—even last night when he declared victory his podium had a sign on it that said "JOBS: The Big Issue." But everyone seems to think he’s going to get pasted by Kirk between now and November. Don’t be so sure. Democrats from here to Washington are lining up behind him—within minutes of his victory declaration last evening, Robert Menendez, the New Jersey senator who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, released a statement borrowed directly from the Giannoulias playbook: “Voters in Illinois will face a stark choice in this election: moving forward with a candidate who has a record of saving Illinois jobs, or moving backwards with a Washington insider who wants to return to the failed policies that created the economic mess we now face.” Giannoulias himself wasted no time getting started with the next phase of his senatorial quest. This morning he visited a shuttered GE plant in Cicero and blamed Kirk for supporting policies that drove those jobs overseas. Say what you will about the guy, but he’s shown remarkable discipline in sticking to his script. Even if it’s absurd for a rich banking scion with barely any work experience to be campaigning as somebody who can stand up to banks and create jobs, he’s done it well, and it would be a mistake to assume he can’t do it again. Besides, who says Giannoulias doesn’t know anything about good jobs? The two that he’s held both paid pretty well.
WINNING IN LOSING: The worst you can say about David Hoffman as a candidate is that at certain times he came across as overly righteous and at others as restrained to the point of boring. Running as a political unknown, though, he and his campaign gave Alexi Giannoulias a much tougher fight than many of us expected, losing by just five percentage points. I had the opportunity of spending time with him on the campaign trail, and I’m here to tell you that while he can be a bit uptight—barking out directions to his driver because he didn’t trust the car’s GPS—he’s also a friendly guy with the ability to laugh at himself, such as when he recounted being mocked by a gas station attendant downstate when he sought to buy a map. “He told me, ‘Don’t you know you can just use a GPS for that?’” Hoffman said. Here’s hoping he runs for office again and shows more of himself when he does.
LOSING IN LOSING: Todd Stroger didn’t just lose. He was demolished. He finished a distant fourth out of four candidates. The conventional wisdom in politics is that any election involving an incumbent is a referendum on his performance. I’d say Stroger got a thumbs-down for his. Life is long but it’s hard for me to imagine that his political career isn’t over. That is, after he runs the county for another year. Yes, this primary was really freaking early.
WERE ANY WOULD-BE MAYORS WATCHING?: Obviously Mayor Daley doesn’t have anywhere close to the political problems that Stroger had. For starters, the mayor is smart enough to blame underlings and throw them to the wolves when he gets in trouble. He always appears decisive even when the decisions are poor. Still, if anyone of substance has thought about challenging the mayor, now’s the time. Voters are angry about things real and imagined that they blame on politicians. There are daily headlines about suspect management at City Hall, and the combination of reduced city services and unyielding crime rates has people hot. I’m no David Axelrod or anything, but I’d humbly suggest that mayoral challengers might want to start introducing themselves to people filing in and out of city auto pounds. They’ll be eagerly received.
COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER: Before Jack Ryan’s 2004 Senate candidacy dissolved amid revelations that he’d tried to get his wife to have sex with him in public, he presented himself as a new kind of Republican, a investment banker who’d quit the big-money world to teach in the inner city, a fiscal conservative passionate about civil rights and equal opportunity. But when he resurfaced as a commentator last night on WGN and CLTV he sounded like a curmudgeonly old rich guy bitching that he had to pay too much in taxes while the country was going to hell. In other words, he could have put in a strong showing for the Republican nomination again this year.
SHOULDA BEEN A CONTENDER: Jim Ascot didn’t have much of a chance to beat incumbent Congressman Danny Davis, but I was rooting for him anyway. He gets my award for nicest guy in the 2010 primaries. Ascot has a successful commercial real estate business that’s now mostly run by his son, and he says he’d like to spend his time addressing problems like the decay of our public transit system and the lack of affordable housing on the west side. “I’m available for public service,” he said. Unlike a lot of hacks in this election, he meant it.
SHOULDA BEEN ANOTHER CONTENDER: Based on pure effort, Jim Madigan should have won more than 35 percent of the votes in his run against Heather Steans for the Seventh District seat in the state senate. I live in the district and received at least three phone calls from Madigan’s campaign—and they weren’t robocalls but real live people who wanted to make sure I knew about the guy. The last one was from Madigan himself.
IT’S HARD TO WIN A RACE FOR A JOB NO ONE KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT: As challengers for the water reclamation district board found out. One of them, Todd Connor, ran one of the most organized, aggressive, informed, and sharp campaigns for any office in this primary season—and he finished fifth out of nine candidates. Just as they did in 2008, the incumbents won. This time there was one open seat, and public affairs consultant Michael Alvarez won it, thanks in part to a surname that translated into lots of votes in Latino wards.
A FAMILY AFFAIR: One of the incumbents who held onto her water rec board seat was Mariyana Spyropoulos, who received 172,667 votes. It cost her a pile of money. Between July and the end of 2009 she spent $160,394.85 in campaign funds, which translates to about 93 cents a vote—not in the realm of Michael Bloomberg, but a fair amount to get a job overseeing wastewater treatment. And expect the figure to rise in a couple months when she discloses how much more she spent during the heart of the campaign in January—perhaps to $2 a vote or more. Between July and Election Day, she’d collected $359,199.46 in campaign contributions. All of it came from family members.
DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK: As we’ve noted before, Jesse Jackson Jr. has been pretty quiet since he was mentioned as Senate Candidate 5 in court filings against Rod Blagojevich. But he’s hardly off the political scene. Two of Junior’s political disciples appear to have won the Democratic primaries for statewide offices: Robin Kelly, formerly a lawmaker from the south suburbs, won the nomination for state treasurer, and state rep David Miller has a slim lead in the race for comptroller, though the votes are still being tallied. Meanwhile, Jackson did all right too. He not only breezed his way to another nomination for Congress—hardly shocking, since he was unopposed—but also toppled former state senate president Emil Jones Jr. to become the state central committeeman for the Second Congressional District. Sure, it’s a party post that doesn’t mean much to the outside world, but it never hurts to beat an old rival who’s on his way into full retirement.
Comments (16)
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Minor error in your blurb on the Water Reclamation district election: Michael Alvarez is not an incumbent. He was slated back in September to replace Gloria Majewski, who is retiring from the MWRD board after serving 26 years as a Commissioner.
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It is a glorious morning to see that despite the shameless shilling by the media, that David Hoffman can now be sent back to rock that he crawled out from under.
He and the media have learned the lesson that:
- you cannot buy an election (He spent $500,000 of his daddy’s money to run)
- Corruption isn't the #1 issue on voters' minds, jobs are, and David Hoffman has never worked a day of his life in the private sector, nor can he name one instance where he created or saved an American job
- David Hoffman thinks the most important issue in this election is his resume. Winning campaigns think the voters are the most important issue.
- David Hoffman, and the various editorial boards, and many others keep reminding us that David Hoffman is smarter than the rest of us, and frankly, voters are not only sick of it, but it ain't helping. A whole lot of very smart people got us into the trouble we're in.
- Hoffman, as Chicago's inspector general from 2003 to 2008, was a glorified gadfly, fighting city corruption by issuing press releases and holding press conferences. He issued his "report" on the parking meter lease 2 months after the City Council approved it. Hoffman's impact on Chicago's "culture of corruption" ranks between minimal and negligible.
fedup dem: Thanks for the clarification, but I didn't refer to Alvarez as an incumbent. I noted that he won the one open seat. But your point about him being slated is important, since it again shows that you don't win this office unless the powers that be are behind you.
Happy: "You cannot buy an election." Sorry, you've cited the wrong race to make that argument.
What has happened with the Moreno-Garcia race for the County Board? Tribune article this morning quotes Garcia as the apparent winner, in talking about how he's planning to work with Board Prez nominee Preckwinkle. But a check of the county election board results just now shows the incumbent Moreno holding onto the nomination.
PolWatch,
The County reports only those votes from the suburban part of the district. You need to combine those numbers with the city numbers from the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
Dear Happy (oreo): Do you have anything else to do besides copy/paste your incoherent rant on every Chicago message board? Find something more productive to do with your time, sport.
I'm terribly sorry Hoffman offended you and other Daley bootlickers by daring to stand up to the Dirty Little King. For someone who got into the race late he did extremely well. Sorry to tell you this, oreo, but Hoffman built a sound foundation in this campaign and he will be around for a while. He certainly would have been a much better candidate than the empty suit Giannoulias, especially as the Broadway saga continues to unfold.
I agree with Hysterical. A year from now, I suspect Mayor Daley will be rueing the day that he failed to provide the extra push to elect David Hoffman to the US Senate, thus getting out of the way as a mayoral contender.
Mick - I've been telling people the same thing about Alexi as you. The guy is extremely disciplined, has a great message, and he's very personable. I'd agree with Happy too, except that I think those bullet points were actually originally mine.
As for Hoffman's political future: he and his cheerleaders are delusional:
- He only got 29% in the city in the Primary;
- He and his donors just did a pretty nice job of blowing all their cash;
- The municipal elections are 12 months away;
- Hoffman as an Executive? Laughable;
- You can no longer claim you're an outsider, not a career politician, when you run for two different offices in less than 12 months.
Agree with Yellow Dog.
A further study of the vote totals reflect that Cheryl Jackson did exceedingly well in African American wards in the City. If not for Ms. Jackson's candidacy, Hoffman's abysmal showing would have been much worse - the Jackson pulled from Alexi's totals.
So Hoffman can go back to the country club, trust-fund baby lifestyle for the next 11 months until the mayoral election and if he has regrown his sack by then, the Mayor will do him the pleasure of administering a more thorough ass whipping than the one he got Tuesday.
"You can no longer claim you're an outsider, not a career politician, when you run for two different offices in less than 12 months."
Never stopped Ray Wardingley.
Just for the record, I had the following brilliant exchange with the idiot behind the Sun-Times' twitter account:
Suntimes: Don't forget to pick up a copy of the Sun-Times today - and we donate 10 cents of the sale to Go Red for Women.
@Suntimes How about if I donate a buck directly and you guys concentrate on exposing people like Scott Lee Cohen *before* the election?
@FGFM The arrest was widely reported - and copped to by Cohen. The details have been sealed until the last couple of days.
@Suntimes "[Scott Lee Cohen's] arrest was widely reported" No, it was not, you fucking liar. I'll be glad when your shitty rag goes under.
@FGFM OK, then. Buh-bye.
@Suntimes "OK, then. Buh-bye." Give me some citations if I'm wrong, you fucking cunt.
---
I'm not holding my breath.
So, Yellow Dog, Alexi's personable (like any bar drunk), extremely disciplined (read: avoids answering tough questions) and is programmed to deliver a good message. That's an extremely low bar to clear. And if those weak bullet points were originally yours then Happy (oreo) has no qualms about stealing them as he has difficulty formulating original thoughts.
And oreo: "A further study of the vote totals reflect that Cheryl (sic) Jackson did exceedingly well in African American wards in the City." Well, duh!
What are Alexis qualifications? He worked in Daddy's bank, bringing it to its knees with bad loans, as well as freely loaning to mobsters. He was Obama's basketball buddy and picked up his cadence of speech on the way. Then the Boy Blunder somehow became treasurer and his most notable achievement was badly mismanaging Bright Start. Even Obama, Axelrod, and Rahm know Alexi is an empty suit so they begged Lisa Madigan to run. That's one hell of an unimpressive resume.
Chicagoans (outside of those gorging at the patronage trough) are sick of Daley and Hoffman would be the one to deliver the message of the Dirty Little King's gross mismanagement, incompetence, and corruption. Hoffman would carve Daley to pieces. He had just five months in the Senate campaign and no backing from the Democratic establishment, and still put a scare into Alexi.
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