Hot Type, for the week of March 12, 2004 -- continued Meanwhile, where was Hynes? Not buried under a slag heap. "Ask what an operative would ask: Who does it help?" the Tribune's John Kass had advised in a February 29 column that surely helped persuade Hull's kids that blaming "insiders" was the way to go. Obama, it would seem. And who else? "Hynes, son of former Cook County Assessor Tom Hynes, is the candidate the Daleys of Chicago would like in the U.S. Senate," Kass explained. "Hynes is running a low-profile campaign by design. The strategy is that he'll have the ward bosses and organized labor churning out votes in Chicago, Cook County and far southern Illinois." It hasn't been a low-profile campaign in southern Illinois. Hynes was on TV there hammering away about jobs and health care when no one else but Hull was on TV. Hynes has managed his obscure state office visibly and creatively, going after companies that want state contracts but owe back taxes or have expatriated jobs. "The comptroller doesn't exactly have a high-profile job," says Bill Recktenwald, who teaches journalism at SIU in Carbondale. "One thing he does has something to do with trust funds for the upkeep of old cemeteries" -- as comptroller, Hynes launched an annual Cemetery Clean Up Month. "Our county has dozens of little cemeteries. He's organized people to go out and maintain them. It sounds silly, maybe, to Chicagoans, where the archdiocese takes care of them, but down here it's very important. I can recall times he was out there cutting the grass." Recktenwald's a former Chicago Tribune reporter. "My home county, Hardin County, is one one-thousandth the size of Cook County," he says. "They vote at almost twice the rate of Cook County. If Cook had voted at the same rate in the last presidential race they'd have had another 600,000 votes." What about Obama? "Barack has the name problem," Recktenwald says. "I was talking to some people last night and they couldn't pronounce his name. But strangely enough, in a conversation I was having with a couple of black students -- one from East Saint Louis and one from the Quad Cities -- one of them told me Obama was head of the Harvard Law Review. That kind of surprised me -- first of all that college students would know anything at all about Chicago politicians, and that they knew this." Hull, Hynes, and Obama aren't the only candidates. Maria Pappas -- whose strategy seems to presume that she can charm anyone she meets and meet enough voters to win -- launched a downstate TV campaign in early March. (John Jackson spotted the Pappas ad -- the one with the cutout suits -- and was totally charmed. "That's the funniest thing I've seen in ages," he said.) Metro East -- the Illinois portion of metropolitan Saint Louis -- is the second-costliest TV buy in the state and a huge waste of money, since you're mainly buying hundreds of thousands of Missourians who couldn't care less. "But the bottom line is, if you look at the Metro East area, that's the second-largest concentration of Democratic voters, outside of Chicago," Pappas's press secretary, Jim Allen, told me. "Some people haven't advertised in that area. Most people have lost." (Two years ago Metro East gave Blagojevich the margin he won the primary by.) Obama rented some billboards in Metro East, but until late this week he was only on cable TV. I have in-laws in Edwardsville, the county seat of Metro East's Madison County. "Clearly Hull is the spender," says my brother-in-law Norman Nordhauser. "You ask around, 'Who's running?' and they say Hull's running, and they're not sure who else." Norman's a retired SIU history professor; when he asks around he's talking to other professors. He guesses he sees ten TV spots for Hull to every three or four for Hynes, and if anyone else from either party has been running TV ads they haven't registered. Obama had a media breakthrough in Edwardsville when he was endorsed by Evelyn Bowles, a popular retired state senator, and by Sheila Simon, daughter of the late U.S. senator. Recktenwald thinks Obama probably will carry Carbondale, where Simon sits on the city council. "This morning I saw 30 or 35 Obama signs on people's lawns, individual house lawns," he said the other day. More than Hull? "In yards, yes. Hull's are along the highways, where somebody put up 10 or 12 together." According to the Chicago Tribune, Hull is paying workers $75 a day to plant those signs. "A good job down here," says Recktenwald, "is eight bucks an hour." Chris Mather, Hynes's communications director, says she's heard Hull even pays people to come out and cheer. "We're up against a $40 million campaign," she told me last Friday. "We're never going to be able to compete with the way that looks." But, she added, "we've got 85 of the state's 102 county chairmen and over 800 elected officials supporting Dan from all levels of government." She asked if I'd seen the day's two new polls. I'd seen the Daily Southtown poll, which had Obama overtaking Hull and leading with 28 percent of the vote, Hull with 23 percent, and Hynes right behind at 22. Jack Ryan led by double digits on the Republican side. Mather told me to check out Bloomington's Pantagraph. Again, Ryan led by a mile, but in this poll Obama was barely ahead of Hynes, 22 percent to 20, and Hull was back at 15 percent, a point ahead of Pappas. "No question," pollster Del Ali told the Pantagraph, "the story of Hull's divorce has played a significant factor." Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2004 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.