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The View From Downstate
Who's Hot, Who's Not, and Why It looked for a time as if the business with Blair Hull and his second wife would play right into Jack Ryan's hands. At least that was the view of conservative Republican political junkies, a pack of voters who spend as much time talking to themselves as liberal Democratic political junkies do. Consider this late-February conversation spotted on FreeRepublic.com: First post: "I can't see downstate Ill. Dems voting in a big way for a Mr. Barak [sic] Obama. Blair Hull, unwounded, would have been a significant favorite. . . . If Obama wins the primary, this seat goes from likely Dem pickup to retainable." Second post: "Imagine Jack Ryan asking State Senator Barak [sic] Obama (D-Chicago Machine Radical Wing) what his fellow Harvard Law alumnus Obama has personally done to see to actual education of black kids on the South Side of Chicago, why Obama and the Machine want and NEED to keep the South Side black kids ignorant and on the Demonrat plantation, why gay rights legislation is sooooo much more important to Barack Obama in his capacity as a full service supermarket for special interests like the pathetic teachers' unions and the exotically lifestyled . . . "Ryan can actually tie Obama down in the ghetto while people in less than affluent southern and central and northwest Illinois ask themselves if they can really see themselves being represented in the US Senate by Barack Obama, Ivy League radical lunatic fringe candidate of the no longer socially conservative but ever financially ravenous Chicago Machine. Richie Daley endorsing gay marriage won't help Obama much either. "God is being good to Illinois and America so long as 34-year-old Hynes a statewide officeholder and competent candidate is deeply buried under the Demonrat slag heap for lack of adequate funding. Blair Hull is and always was easy road kill. Obama even more so." Face it, Barack Obama is an exotic name to find on a ballot in the southern third of Illinois. ("People get over it," Obama spokesperson Pam Smith says hopefully. "This is a state that elected a governor with the name of Blagojevich.") Blair Hull sounds like the name of some 1930s antitrust act, but he's been running downstate so long that half the voters probably think they went to high school with him. But Dan Hynes underfunded? Deeply buried? Don't think so. Hynes hasn't matched Hull, the $40 million man, in downstate media visibility in the closing weeks of the Senate primary, but he's been miles ahead of everyone else. When a wide-open statewide race like the current one for the Democratic nomination for senator is strictly between Chicagoans, the winner will often be the candidate most adept at slipping out of town to cop votes in the boonies. Hull understood from the get-go that the way to win a seven-candidate race was to roll up the parts of Illinois that money could buy because nobody'd heard of anybody. "He took a page out of Blagojevich's game book," says Hull's press secretary, Jim O'Connor. (A north-side congressman and the son-in-law of a Chicago ward boss, Blagojevich ran third in Chicago and Cook County in the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary and won thanks to voters south of Springfield.) The 18-city, seven-day tour that launched Hull's Senate campaign last June began in Carbondale with an appearance alongside Paul Simon. Hull's ads started running on local TV there the same week, and Carbondale was the site of his first regional campaign office. Obama doesn't have an office south of Springfield, and the Springfield one didn't open until February. In mid-February political scientist John Jackson, a member of the Public Policy Institute of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, told me this about Hull: "He's been out early and most often and is now by far the best-known candidate in this end of the state, even including Dan Hynes, who's run and won twice statewide. I think Blair Hull has not only the most advertising but the most effective advertising. The one with the senior citizens going to Canada -- which touches a nerve on the drug-pricing issue -- is out there all the time. He comes through in that ad very well." At the time polls showed Hull leading Obama by about ten percentage points. But then the media started carrying those stories about Hull and second wife Brenda Sexton -- stories sprinkled with phrases such as "order of protection," "sealed files," and "mutual combat." Soon new polls put Obama in front. I called Jackson again March 3 and asked if the revelations about Hull's divorce in the Chicago papers had made their way down to the Kentucky border. Yes indeed, he said. "It's been unremitting bad news. Interestingly enough, there's a full-page ad in today's Southern Illinoisan by his children saying he's been a good father and you can't believe those bad things they've said about him. It's an effective, well-done ad. And his first wife, as I understand it, has come out saying he has never been violent against her. But those are the only good news items in what has been a week of bad news." Hull has done everything first in Carbondale, and sure enough the "open letter from Kristen, Jeff, Megan and Courtney Hull" ran in the Southern Illinoisan a day before it appeared in the Tribune and Sun-Times. "Perhaps we should not be surprised at how strongly the insiders have struck back against his independence," wrote Hull's four grown children, all by his first wife. "As soon as he began leading the polls, the response was not an attack on his position on issues but an attack on his character."
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