PAT QUINN TO BLACK VOTERS: BRUCE RAUNER = RAHM EMANUEL?

8/18/14

Bruce Rauner, according to the polls, holds a big lead in the 2014 Illinois governor’s race.   My asking around, and my instincts, tells me that the polls are right.  Even natural Pat Quinn voters (liberal women, union members, even friends of mine who know Mr. Quinn and voted for him out of a sense of Fenwick affinity in 2011) have told me they won’t, even can’t, vote for the Governor this time around.   One would be a fool to write off Pat Quinn’s chances in any election; he is a great campaigner and a very clever politician.  (See, inter alia, 2014 Illinois Gubernatorial Election Year Rag:   “Hand Me Down My Bulletproof Vest…” (Rant Lifestyle, 1/20/14) and PAUL VALLAS ON THE TICKET:  PAT QUINN MAKES ANOTHER BRILLIANT MOVETOWARD RE-ELECTION, 11/8/13.)   Plenty of former politicians got that way underestimating Pat Quinn.

But Pat Quinn is clearly in trouble.  If he is to win, he has to do a lot of things, and one of those is to shore up his loyal base among black voters, primarily in Chicago.  How can he do that?

Black voters, if one believes the polls, don’t like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.   Rahm Emanuel has endorsed Pat Quinn but he is a close friend of Bruce Rauner.  Mr. Rauner helped Mr. Emanuel become wealthy during the Mayor’s brief stint as an “investment banker,” the two have done business together, and they even vacation together.   So at least one strategy would appear to hold some potential for Pat Quinn:  convince black voters that a vote for Mr. Rauner is a vote for Mr. Emanuel.

This will be difficult, especially when Mr. Emanuel is publicly, if not all that enthusiastically, endorsing Pat Quinn and Mr. Quinn is doing nothing to deflect that endorsement; after all, Mr. Quinn needs all the votes and financial support he can get.  But this is what political operatives of an especially Machiavellian, some might say sneaky, variety are for.   Somehow, the back channels have to be cultivated.  The word has to get out on the street, but only on some streets, that Mr. Emanuel is secretly backing his old pal Bruce Rauner and that support for Mr. Rauner is de facto support for Mr. Emanuel.

Can Pat Quinn pull off such a feat?   Despite his much vaunted, but now tarnishing, reputation as some sort of Mr. Clean, he has not survived nearly forty years in Chicago and Illinois politics by being some kind of choir boy.  One can be confident that Mr. Quinn has plenty of dirty tricksters in his indirect, or maybe direct, employ.   One can be confident that Mr. Quinn will try, or is trying, such a Rauner=Emanuel tactic, if only because he is almost at the point at which he will need to try anything.

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.