Two years ago many people detested Bill Clinton and took it out on Michael Madigan, who was the Democratic speaker of the Illinois House. Maybe that’s not fair, but that’s how politics works. Clinton’s reverse coattails hurt so many Democrats that they lost control of the House.
Now many people despise Newt Gingrich and there’s every reason to think that they will take it out on Lee Daniels, the Republican speaker of the House. If Daniels is booted it won’t be because of anything he’s done, but because the Republicans are down and the Democrats are up. That would be a shame.
The race for the presidency is finished, and most minds are made up on how to vote for Paul Simon’s U.S. Senate seat. So now that the big shows are all but decided, maybe some voters will pay attention to the races where their vote will really count.
Forget about Durbin and Salvi and Clinton and Dole.
We’re talking about Crotty and Doody and Scully and 203 other largely unknown people, including a guy in McHenry County who calls himself “Big Joe.”
They’re all running for the Illinois House, and that means they’re all part of the biggest political war that nobody’s watching.
The Republicans took over Illinois government two years ago. This will come as news to most people in the state, because most people don’t know which party runs the legislature.
The Republicans do. In the same landslide that gave the Republicans the run of Congress, the GOP won the Illinois House for the first time since 1980. They already had the Senate and the governor’s office, so they got everything.
There’s a very good chance that the Democrats will grab back the House on Election Day, in part because voters don’t know Crotty and Doody from Howdy Doody, but they sure know Newt Gingrich is a Republican.
They ought to make the distinction between Washington and Springfield. The Republicans under Daniels and Senate President James “Pate” Philip and Gov. Jim Edgar have had a quiet revolution going on without the hubris and extremism that is sinking Gingrich.
The Republicans took apart the hopelessly befuddled and corrupt Chicago Public School system, handed the parts to Mayor Richard Daley and gave the mayor all the power he needed to put the school system back together to his own liking.
The Republicans did this on their own. There are 43 Chicago Democrats in the House and Senate. Only one of them–Rep. Judy Erwin–voted for the bill that let Daley and Paul Vallas start to fix the Chicago schools.
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For all the rhetoric that local Democrats throw around about being the real friends of education, consider this. In the last two years, the Republicans put $716 million into education. In the last two years that the Democrats controlled the legislature, 1991 and 1992, they cut school spending by $49 million.
Over the same years, the Republicans increased spending on the mentally ill and developmentally disabled seven times as much as the Democrats did. They passed a welfare reform law that is more humane than the federal law passed this year.
And the Republicans have put the state in its best financial shape in many years. The state is actually paying its bills on time.
Now, these Republicans do go off half-cocked at times. Some of them have made a lot of noise about staging a coup at O’Hare International Airport and letting people carry concealed guns and giving Death Row inmates the option of being electrocuted. So far, at least, it has just been noise. Edgar and the Republican leaders have kept their more rabid members at arms’ length.
The Republicans got carried away last year with their new-found power. They ran through some monumental bills without much debate, which wasn’t fair to the legislators or the voters. Their huge revision of the state’s civil justice system had constitutional failings, and it’s being picked apart now by judges across the state.
But all in all they’ve done a lot of good things. And the alternative is a return to the reign of Michael Madigan, who held the state hostage to his political whims when he was speaker. Madigan governed to protect two constituencies, lawyers and labor. Usually, that meant preserving the status quo at any cost. Make no mistake–if Madigan were speaker today, Paul Vallas would not be running the Chicago schools. The Chicago schools might not be running at all.
There are some excellent Democratic legislators. And some of them say privately they’re not upset with Republican rule. They don’t get to sponsor any bills that become law. (The Republicans have adopted Madigan’s rules, which means the opposition party gets credit for nothing.) But they see things getting done that they like, and that their own party’s rulers wouldn’t have let happen.
This is a vote that’s going to count on Tuesday. If the Republicans lose four seats in the Senate or six in the House, they will lose control of those chambers.
The Senate probably won’t change hands–only four or five seats are considered to be up for grabs. But the House is a toss-up. The Republicans won almost every seat they possibly could in 1994, so they’re playing nothing but defense this year. As many as 17 Republican seats could go to the Democrats.
The frustrating thing for the people running these campaigns is that they’re almost invisible, and their political fortunes might rest not on anything they’ve done, but on how the big guys are playing in Washington.
There’s been a big difference of late between Washington and Springfield. One can think that Newt Gingrich is a soulless, conniving, wretched excuse for a statesman, and still find some very good things happening here under the GOP mantle.