Now that Bill Daley has dropped out of the Democratic primary
race for Illinois governor, we
have to consider the ramifications of that move both for the state’s politics
and for the state’s fiscal survival.
First, the politics.
We roughly six months will transpire before the March primary, so there
is plenty of time for another candidate or two to enter the race. Could one of those candidates be Attorney
General Lisa Madigan? Recall that Ms.
Madigan dropped out in July claiming that her father’s remaining as House
Speaker would make it difficult for her to win the race, and, if she did, to
govern She said this with a straight
face as if it came as a surprise to her that her dad would not give up his job
for life in order to make it easier for his daughter to take the next
transitory step in a political career that the press has repeatedly assured her
is heading to the very top. See my 7/16/13 piece, LISA MADIGAN WON’TRUN FOR GOVERNOR: WOULD YOU WANT THE JOB?
It’s easy to reflexively say “No way” when the question of
Ms. Madigan’s re-entering the race comes up, but her potential re-entry
deserves more thought than that.
Recall that in the aforementioned 7/16/13 piece, I gave two real reasons for Ms.
Madigan’s hasty exit, or non-entrance.
First, as I explained it…
Lisa wanted a
coronation, not an election. Bill Daley
made it a fight.
Whenever one is facing the incumbent office-holder in a
primary, one is in for a fight. The last
person to win such a brawl in this state was Mike Howlett, the jovial but
limited then Secretary of State who was able to topple Dan Walker in the
Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1976, but only with the last major
demonstration of the raw, dominant power of the Richard J. Daley Machine. To say that Mike Howlett’s primary victory
was Richard J. Daley’s last hurrah would not be an overstatement. But I digress. Daley went on to let the ever likeable Howlett
hang out to dry once the bothersome Dan Walker had been dispensed with, but
that is another story and another digression.
A three way race involving the incumbent Pat Quinn (no relation), Bill
Daley, and Lisa Madigan would have been tough to the point of impossibility for
both of the two challengers; incumbency, even an inept incumbency, is almost
always strong enough to face down two strong challengers. Yes, Ms. Madigan had the advantage of being
the only woman in the three way race and a press that simply can’t get enough
of their imagined incarnation of Wonder Woman, and those factors might have been enough for her to
prevail against not only the long odds against the incumbent but also Ms.
Madigan’s “daddy problem,” but it would have been a long shot. Once Daley got in, Madigan had little choice
but to stay out unless she wanted something she had never experienced before…a very
difficult, arduous election.
So does Daley’s leaving open a door for Lisa Madigan? No.
Now it is not Bill Daley who is making it a tough fight; it is Pat Quinn
who is making it a tough fight. As I
said only most recently in my 8/15/13
piece, PAT QUINN PUTS PAT FITZGERALD ON A VESTIGIAL COMMISSION: IS THE GOVERNOR RUNNING THE TABLE?
Pat Quinn (no
relation) may have a deserved, or otherwise, reputation as a reformer, but he
is showing he didn’t get this far in Chicago Illinois
Pat Quinn has made some brilliant political moves which, no
matter what Bill Daley says (see below), went a long way toward convincing Mr.
Daley that this race was unwinnable or very close to unwinnable. It would be equally nearly unwinnable for
Lisa Madigan; she’d prefer to wait around for a coronation.
The second reason I gave in my 7/16/13 piece for Ms. Madigan not entering the race was,
as I put it
The better reason is
not quite as political but very simple:
Would you want to be governor of Illinois
The state of Illinois
is in a hell of a mess. The daughter of
the man who cannot deny a good measure of the responsibility for getting us in
this mess was not the person to get us out of it. Maybe (probably?) no one can get us out of
it.
So Lisa Madigan’s real reasons for dropping out—that it
would be too difficult to win the primary and that the state is in such a
fiscal mess that no sane person, and especially no sane, politically ambitious
person, would want the job—remain valid.
So I don’t anticipate a dramatic Madigan re-entry into the race. But anything can happen, and Ms. Madigan
tends to believe the hagiographic press she gets.
The second aforementioned reason for Ms. Madigan not getting
into the race gets us beyond the politics to the fiscal prospects for Illinois : they stink.
Bill Daley, who, despite looking really bad for deciding to get out of
the race after saying that he got into it after a great deal of thought, is no
dummy. In giving the reasons for his
taking his leave, he stated
“To be honest with
you, losing it wasn’t the worst of my fears. In many ways, winning it and having
the commitment of five years to nine years was something I struggled with. You
know, the dog catches the tire and, boom.”
A point of useful digression: Whenever anyone uses the term “To be honest
with you…” or something like it, and especially when a politician uses that
term, yours truly immediately assumes that s/he is lying the rest of the time,
probably all the time. If s/he weren’t
lying all the time, why would s/he have to preface anything with “To be honest with
you”? To do so is to indicate that one
is not being honest when one does not
use that preface. So I believe and so I
advise my students. They need someone
like me to balance this starry-eyed optimism fad.
His campaign manager, Pete Giangreco, said that Mr. Daley dropped
out after considering “what it’s going to take” to dig Illinois
out of its fiscal hole.
So Bill Daley, by his own words and through his campaign
manager, is telling us that the state is in such bad shape that Mr. Daley can’t
fix it, or at least not without an exertion of time, effort, and will that he
is unable to provide. This is coming
from a man with no shortage of ego.
What does that tell you about the fiscal state of the Land
of Lincoln
See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of
Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge,
A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on
how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.
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