HOW DARE BILL BRADY TAKE RISKS, PUT PEOPLE TO WORK, AND ACTUALLY PUT SOMETHING ON THE PILE?

12/22/13

Today’s (i.e., Sunday, 12/22/13’s, page 4) Chicago Tribune reports that State Senator and GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady has been sued twice since 2010 in connection with about $4mm of loans on which his real estate development company has defaulted.

This is old news on which I commented the first time Mr. Brady ran for governor; see my 4/25/10 piece in the Insightful Pontificator entitled “SOME PEOPLE GET THEIR KICKS…STOMPIN’ ON A DREAM…”.   My conclusion has not changed.   If Mr. Brady had spent his life, er, feasting on the public mammary gland, like at least one of his GOP primary opponents and the current governor, he wouldn’t have gotten himself into financial trouble.   But Mr. Brady is a small business man and, like many, if not most, small business people, has had to put his personal assets on the line in order to obtain the financing necessary to pursue his dream, or at least to keep his business operating, building homes and employing people.  He has spent his life contributing to the economic pile that most politicians have spent their lives distributing as if it were somehow their own. 

My hat remains off to Mr. Brady; while I have not yet decided whom I will support in the GOP primary, or in the general election, Mr. Brady is the type of man who should be in public office…temporarily.  NO ONE should be in public office full time, permanently.  But the idea of a citizen legislator, or citizen executive, has become a quaint notion in the era of the professional barnacle on the ship of state.

Perhaps I am being uncharacteristically naive about Mr. Brady; maybe he, like at least one of his GOP opponents, is just another guy making money from his connections but is not as artful at doing so.  See today’s other post, WHY IS WEALTHY INSIDER BRUCE RAUNER TRYING TO TELL US HE IS A SIMPLE, MIDDLE CLASS OUTSIDER?  As the ever insightful H.L. Mencken (probably more than) once said

“All men are frauds.   The only difference between them is that some admit it.” 

No one in public life in the state of Illinois, of course, admits it.

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.