Chad Koppie is serious.
No more third-party candidacies. No more gruesome anti-abortion TV ads. No more running just to make a point.
The retired airline pilot from Gilberts has done all that. He was a fringe candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1992 and 1996 and would have been ignored entirely if not for his sensational campaign ads showing dismembered fetuses.
But this time, Koppie insists, he really wants to win. He is running for governor as a Republican–the first to announce, in fact. And he has secured enough signatures on nominating petitions to get on the March primary ballot, where he will butt heads with GOP heavyweight George Ryan, the current secretary of state.
“We’re viable,” said Koppie, who opened an office for his little-noticed campaign in West Dundee. “We’ll be there on Election Day.”
Koppie is bashing Ryan from the right, arguing Ryan undercut his own conservative credentials by recruiting two women who support abortion rights as ticketmates–Rep. Corinne Wood of Lake Forest for lieutenant governor and Illinois Comptroller Loleta Didrickson for U.S. Senate.
And as a bona fide member of the Springfield establishment, Ryan would hardly be inclined to make the cuts in a patronage-bloated bureaucracy that conservatives crave, Koppie charges.
“A guy who’s been around politics for 30 years–he’s had his chance,” said Koppie, who once delivered manure to the state Capitol to protest a tax increase. “We don’t take turns; it’s not George’s turn to be governor.”
Though he shares the ballot with Ryan, Koppie sounds like anything but a Republican when he talks about the need to break the decades-long hold that the GOP establishment has had on the governor’s office.
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“That chain can be broken, and it needs to be broken,” he said. “It’s time for new blood.”
Koppie says he’s already pumped between $50,000 and $100,000 of his own money into his campaign and is soliciting donations. But it’s unlikely that he’ll raise the millions needed to wage a statewide campaign.
Ryan doesn’t even pay Koppie the courtesy of acknowledging his candidacy.
“We don’t want him to turn this primary into a circus,” said Ryan spokesman John Torre. “But are we overly concerned? No.”
Still, says Koppie, “We’re very serious.”
Help wanted: It wasn’t a typical political advertisement, and even the people who paid for it acknowledge it wasn’t entirely effective.
The ad, a small block of type in the classified sections of local newspapers, sought someone with “integrity, traditional moral values, anti-big government (and) anti-obscenity views.”
Applicants had to be “people-oriented, conservative, patriotic.” Oh, and they had to be registered to vote in Park Ridge or Des Plaines.
The ad was paid for by the Family Political Action Committee, a conservative, anti-abortion group that was recruiting candidates to run against moderate Republican Rep. Rosemary Mulligan of Des Plaines, among others, in the GOP primary.
Paul Caprio, the PAC’s director, said only 8 to 10 people replied to the ad and, for a variety of reasons, none were considered candidate material. But Caprio is hardly disappointed.
Jim Curley, a one-term Des Plaines alderman who says he never saw the ad, has emerged to challenge Mulligan, and Family PAC is considering sending campaign support his way.
Mulligan’s is among a half-dozen GOP primary battles in which Family PAC is dabbling this year. The PAC, chaired by Tom Roeser of Park Ridge, is pressing for abortion restrictions, new obscenity laws and family-friendly tax relief. It has doled out about $450,000 to legislative candidates since 1992, Caprio said.
“I guess they felt they couldn’t get anybody to run against me, so they had to run this ad,” said Mulligan, a regular target for conservative GOP forces.
“The ads kind of stir the pond,” said Caprio. “The ads are a winner for us because they allow us to get the word out.”
Never too safe: For weeks, there’s been a mild buzz about the re-election bid of Rep. Cal Skinner Jr. (R-Crystal Lake).
Shortly after he filed his nominating petitions to get on the Republican ballot, Skinner abruptly withdrew them. Was he thinking about bowing out? He had faced primary opposition before. Was it just getting too trying for him?
Hardly.
Skinner submitted and withdrew his petitions, which contained 600 names, because of a “picky little thing” that just annoyed him but seriously worried some of his advisers, who feared a legal challenge.
The problem? One sheet identified his district numerically–“64th.” Others had it written out–“sixty-fourth.”
“I didn’t want to be a test case,” Skinner said, referring to a provision in the election code requiring the petitions to be uniform.
“I’d rather use the money on a mailing,” he said.
Mystery solved.