PAUL VALLAS ON THE TICKET: PAT QUINN MAKES ANOTHER BRILLIANT MOVE TOWARD RE-ELECTION

11/8/13

Regardless of what you think of the guy’s ideology, background, or performance on the job, you have to admit that Illinois Governor Pat Quinn (no relation) is running a brilliant campaign for re-election.  (See my 9/16/13 post ILLINOIS DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY:  DALEY IS OUT; IS LISA BACK IN? for only the most recent of my comments on the campaign.)  The latest manifestation of this brilliance is his selection of Paul Vallas as his running mate.

Mr. Vallas’ being on the Quinn ticket makes sense for all the obvious reasons.  Originally a budget wonk in Springfield who caught a lot of important people’s eyes, he was appointed budget director for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley early in the reign of Richard II, when the scion was a good mayor and fiscal manager, before Mr. Daley became a living, breathing argument for the wisdom of term limits.  After leaving that post, Mr. Vallas did a great job, or at least as good a job as anyone could do, given the circumstances, as the CEO of the Chicago Public School System.  After a failed run for governor (against Rod Blagojevich; how would you like to have that vote back?), which was partially Mr. Vallas’s fault but was at least partially engineered by the bosses in Chicago who ran Roland Burris to siphon the black vote from Mr. Vallas in the primary, Mr. Vallas went on to run the public school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and, currently, Bridgeport, Connecticut.  His performance in all three tough jobs has been admirable.  So Mr. Vallas has expertise in the areas of education and budgets, the first of which is always important and the second of which is beyond critical at this point in Illinois’ history.

Some can argue that Mr. Vallas had made enemies among the teachers’ unions in his tenure at the helm of the CPS.  But so what?   Mr. Quinn has already enraged the public employee unions with his aggressive push for a solution to the state’s public pension problems.  And where else are the public employee unions going to go?  

So Mr. Vallas is a great candidate for the obvious reasons.  But yours truly also finds merit in the selection for what it says about Governor Quinn.  Mr. Quinn’s Republican opponents, who are supposed to eschew such things as racial, ethnic, and gender quotas out of principal, go about selecting running mates who just happen to be women, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, or some combination thereof.  Mr. Quinn, however, eschews such tokenism and selects a running mate based on the man’s merits.  This refusal to kowtow to the conventional wisdom is a mark of character on Mr. Quinn’s part. 

Don’t think voters don’t notice Mr. Quinn’s good sense…and his opponents’ hypocrisy lily-livered obeisance to pollsters, conventional wisdom, and addle-brained political correctness.  Don’t misunderstand me; Mr. Quinn has made a career of obeisance to pollsters, conventional wisdom, and addle-brained political correctness, but voters have short attention spans and hence politics becomes a game of “What ya done (for me or to me) lately?”

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.