On paper, Comptroller Loleta Didrickson is the Republican Party’s dream candidate. Moderate. Suburban. Woman.
Secretary of State George Ryan, on the other hand, is a conservative from Kankakee and obviously not a woman. That’s why Ryan, the party’s consensus candidate for governor, begged and pleaded and finally convinced Didrickson last week to run against Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun. Ryan and Didrickson make a well-balanced team which, on paper, is the way it’s supposed to be done.
But, oh, has Ryan got a problem now, not on paper, in the March 17 Republican primary.
His candidate for the U.S. Senate could very well lose and saddle him with a running mate he has desperately tried to avoid. That would be young, wealthy state Sen. Peter Fitzgerald. Ryan made no secret that he was recruiting Didrickson to stop Fitzgerald, and Ryan expected the rest of the party leaders to fall in with her.
But the news that Senate President James “Pate” Philip is backing Fitzgerald over Didrickson means the GOP is going to war. And Ryan is going in with a shaky sidekick.
Didrickson has to convince Republican voters that she really wants to be a senator. First, she has to convince herself that she really wants to be a senator.
This is in doubt, since twice this year she announced that she didn’t want to run for the Senate. Just a few weeks ago, Didrickson announced that she would rather be secretary of state.
There isn’t much to being secretary of state. For the most part, you hand out license plates and lobby for drunk driving laws. Since George Ryan got the legislature to toughen the drunk driving laws last year, that one’s off the table for his successor.
So you have to wonder what was going through Didrickson’s mind while she pondered her choices, U.S. Senate or secretary of state.
Fix the nation’s schools, hand out license plates. Grab Illinois’ share of a $1.7 trillion budget, hand out license plates. Clean up the environment, hand out license plates. Vote on abortion, gun control, immigration. Hand out license plates.
Be a United States senator. Hand out license plates.
She opted for license plates.
Then, as she tells it, she heard from many ordinary folks who told her that it was much more important to be a United States senator than to hand out license plates. They changed her mind.
This was not an ennobling process going on inside the head of Loleta Didrickson.
She’s going to have to explain it, and when she does, she’s not going to be able to admit to the real reason why people want to be secretary of state: You control 3,600 jobs and you can’t get in trouble. If you’re lucky and you make enough political friends, you might get to be governor some day.
Fitzgerald, on the other hand, really wants to be a U.S. senator. He quotes Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville. He listens to audiotapes on the framing of the Constitution. He has never aspired to hand out license plates.
Didrickson will say that Fitzgerald is too conservative for Illinois. But this might be a tricky argument for her to make, since he’s closer philosophically to George Ryan than she is.
More Top Picks Why Glossy White Paper Makes Reading Harder
Didrickson will complain that Fitzgerald is trying to buy the Senate seat. And it’s true that his considerable personal wealth, largely gained from his father’s banking business, scared off some potential challengers.
But when Didrickson attempts to make an issue of his personal wealth, Fitzgerald will have a ready retort. All he has to do is look at how Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl answered questions about his personal wealth.
In his first campaign in 1988, Kohl said he was so rich that he couldn’t be bought off by special interests. This was his very effective campaign slogan: “Nobody’s senator but yours.”
After a summer full of a Republican-insider scandal in Springfield, and an October full of a Democratic-insider scandal in Chicago, wealth and extremism might not be the hot issues in 1998. Fitzgerald might be in a beautiful position to win because he’s made a practice of blowing the whistle on insider political trading by his fellow Republicans, including riverboat casino licenses and land deals in Springfield.
Here’s his message: “The greatest divide in American politics isn’t necessary between liberals and conservatives or Republicans and Democrats, but between the political insiders and the rest of us.”
No doubt, the Didrickson-Fitzgerald race will invite many comparisons to the 1996 GOP primary between Lt. Gov. Bob Kustra and former state Rep. Al Salvi, when all the party leaders backed the moderate Kustra, Salvi beat him, and then Salvi was trounced in the general election.
But there are plenty of differences. Fitzgerald is as ardently opposed to abortion as Salvi, but Fitzgerald has moved closer to the center on gun control, which of late has been a more potent issue in Illinois.
Didrickson will not be surprised by a right-wing challenge, as Kustra was. She knows what’s coming. And while Kustra’s major-domo was genteel Jim Edgar, Didrickson’s is scrapper George Ryan. Unlike Edgar, Ryan likes power politics, and he’ll have his patronage army working for her.
On paper, Didrickson is an ideal candidate. She reflects mainstream Illinois politics more than Fitzgerald does. She is right in line with centrists Jim Edgar, Jim Thompson and Charles Percy, the most successful Illinois Republican politicians of the last 25 years. She’s smart and savvy enough to serve in the Senate.
But that’s all on paper.
Right now, Fitzgerald has a huge advantage in having figured out a clear message for why he wants to serve in the Senate, and he has picked the right time to deliver it.
Didrickson, all anybody knows so far is that she finally decided the license-plate business wasn’t her calling.