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player ready...Trying to climb out of last place in his election campaign, John Stroger on Tuesday clambered aboard the popular statewide political bandwagon of anti-crime initiatives with two new TV ads that focus on guns and drugs while attacking his opponents.
Stroger introduced the issue in his campaign in the Democratic race for Cook County Board president, but two candidates for the party’s gubernatorial nomination, Atty. Gen. Roland Burris and Cook County Board President Richard Phelan, have already made it a staple of their TV image.
Using actresses in the commercial to repeat statements made by Maria Pappas and Aurelia Pucinski at a recent forum, Stroger attempts to portray his opponents as being soft on crime.
“The County Board president is not responsible for fighting crime,” says one actress in a sing-song, little-girl voice that is supposed to be Pappas, a county commissioner. “The County Board can lobby the legislature,” says the second actress in an unsympathetic and nonchalant voice while Pucinski’s name and picture are on the screen.
Stroger does not speak in the ad, but a strong male voice says that Stroger is the only candidate with the experience and a plan to fight crime, including banning assault weapons, expanding drug courts and increasing police.
“Snatching selective snippits is unfair to both candidates,” said David Ormsby, Pucinski’s press secretary. Pucinski’s first TV ad, which started Monday, says that she saved taxpayers nearly $35 million while clerk of Cook County Circuit Court, Ormsby said.
Kathy Posner, who creates TV ads for Pappas, said Pappas was “shocked and disappointed over Stroger’s false and desperate use of the crime issue. . . . He is trying to portray Maria in a light that is not true.”
Roland Burris: The centerpiece of Burris’ ad, running this week, is his advocacy and use of a statewide grand jury to hear cases of wrongdoing that cross county lines, a technique particularly useful in fighting drug trafficking.
Creation of a statewide grand jury had been rejected for decades by state lawmakers, who said they feared that attorneys general who aspired to higher office would overshadow local state’s attorneys and use the new jury system for publicity.
The law finally got passed on Burris’ watch as attorney general, and sure enough, the system is now becoming a political football.
Burris presents the system as an example of how “we saw a problem and we fixed it,” and promises to fix more such problems if elected governor.
What the ad doesn’t say is that Burris took 11 months to convene the first grand jury and 19 months to return the first indictments.
Those indictments were returned in July 1993, a few days before Burris formally announced his candidacy. He had hinted at his intentions in November of 1992-the same month he convened the first statewide grand jury.
Burris has said paperwork and staffing problems delayed the beginning of the first grand jury, and Lisa Cohen, deputy campaign manager, defends the track record of the system.
Cohen said last week that 34 indictments and 17 convictions have been obtained under the statewide grand jury, and that “more indictments will be announced soon.”
Albert Hofeld: Democratic attorney general candidate Albert Hofeld said Tuesday that if elected, he would propose revoking driver’s licenses of deadbeat dads who don’t pay child support.
“Parents who refuse to pay child support should also be refused the privilege to drive in Illinois,” Hofeld said. He has already said he favors publicizing through the media and posters parents who refuse to pay support, as is done in neighboring Iowa.
“We have a scandalous situation here in Illinois where we are 48th in the nation in the collection of unpaid child support. That is absolutely unacceptable,” said Hofeld, whose TV commercials play on his being raised by a single mother who received no child support from his father.
Exceptions would be made, he said, for those who prove their cars are necessary for jobs that will allow them to pay support. And those unable to make payments at all would be eligible under his approach for community service.