By all rights Judy Biggert should be poring over The Washington Post’s real estate ads now to price the apartment she’ll take when she goes to Congress next year.
She looks like a Republican dream candidate: a moderate, suburban woman who moved from the PTA to the Hinsdale high school board to a leadership spot in the Illinois House. Her campaign biography describes her as a “former car pool mom and assistant soccer coach.”
She looks like she has a dream district, one dominated by soccer moms and the Republican Party of DuPage County.
So why doesn’t election in the 13th Congressional District come easy for Biggert? Because she has struggled with the decree by the right wing of the Republican Party that only political absolutists need apply.
Since she was elected to the state House in 1992, Biggert’s personal instincts have wrestled with her instincts for political survival in the GOP.
She once spoke in support of gun control, now she opposes a ban on assault weapons and favors allowing people to carry concealed weapons. Her survival instinct, I suspect, came into play in those decisions.
Her personal instinct was to support Gov. Jim Edgar’s call last year for an income tax increase for education. Her survival instinct told her to vote against Edgar’s bill, and she did.
The temptation is to chide Judy Biggert for evolving from a PTA president into a political animal, for not following her gut.
Her survival instincts, though, have proved accurate. Biggert had the endorsement in the Republican primary of Edgar and retiring U.S. Rep. Harris Fawell. But conservative Senate President James “Pate” Philip, the boss of the DuPage County GOP, thought she was still too liberal, so he backed an import.
State Rep. Peter Roskam moved into the district, picked up Philip’s backing, and nearly knocked off Biggert by slamming her as a big government, tax-and-spend Lefty who was out of touch with her constituents.
Even though Biggert opposed Edgar’s income tax increase for schools, Roskam still ripped her because she voted for the ultimately successful school reform bill, which included some sin taxes and a telephone tax.
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She survived the primary, but won less than 50 percent of the vote. It’s quite possible she would have lost if she had given the Roskam campaign more ammunition by not bowing to her survival instincts on some votes.
The Republican Party hereabouts, and in much of the rest of the nation, has become less a party than a confederation of interest groups with little in common other than mutual suspicion.
This is a problem for Secretary of State George Ryan, the GOP candidate for governor. Ryan has to contend with the nuisance of anti-tax zealot Jim Tobin running as a Libertarian. Tobin tried to squeeze Ryan–Tobin said he wouldn’t run if Ryan got the legislature to approve a constitutional amendment to make it much tougher to raise taxes. Ryan’s a conservative, but not a zealot, and he refused the bait.
So Tobin says he’s in the race for governor. Republicans who vote for him can achieve nothing except to defeat Ryan, which is apparently not their concern.
This is a problem for state Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, who is at risk of losing moderate GOP women who no longer admire Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, but who fear that Fitzgerald’s election to the Senate would mean the right wing takes control of the state GOP.
And this is a problem for Judy Biggert, who has sponsored a slew of anti-crime and pro-education laws, whose natural instincts are a good fit for the 13th District, but whose efforts to appease the right wing may cost her in November.
Biggert’s difficult victory, and the votes that may have helped her to survive the primary, have some Democrats believing they have an opportunity.
Biggert is running against Democrat Susan Hynes of Naperville, who has seized on several of the conservative votes that Biggert cast in her futile attempt to keep the right wing from trying to maul her. Biggert’s voting record, Hynes says, is pro-gun and anti-women.
The 13th District goes with Republicans, but it isn’t always terribly fond of them. Bob Dole gained barely 50 percent of the vote in the 1996 presidential race. George Bush mustered only 47 percent in 1992, when Ross Perot had a strong showing. Harris Fawell used to have an easy time on Election Day, but Hynes held him to 60 percent in 1996 even though Fawell spent four times as much money.
Now Hynes, the owner of a communications firm, is back for another run, trying to convince Democrats to put money into her race based on her 1996 showing and the prospect of an open seat. Could Democrats steal the seat? Probably not, but a few of Judy Biggert’s votes and her uneasy relationship with the GOP’s right wing take that out of the unthinkable column.
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Near the end of last week’s column I inadvertently typed in the wrong name and wound up writing that Glenn Poshard was a political strategist for Ed Vrdolyak during the Harold Washington administration. Of course that’s not true. Vrdolyak’s strategist was Joe Novak, who now works for Poshard and deserves credit for Poshard’s effective media campaign in the March primary. No longer can I use one of Joel Weisman’s favorite lines: “The last time I made a mistake was the last time I thought I made a mistake.”