Republicans have to be wondering if George Ryan is going to bring down the party.
The scandal-dogged governor actually had a pretty good run last week. He made good on a campaign promise by kicking off a road project to fix the Hillside Strangler. George W. Bush showed up and proved he wasn’t afraid to get within camera range of Ryan. Bush waited until the GOP presidential nomination was a lock before he hit town, and he didn’t exactly offer a spirited defense of Ryan. But he was here.
There are signs of trouble, though. Republicans aren’t just running away from George Ryan. Some of them are running against George Ryan.
One of them is state Rep. Bill Brady of Bloomington, who is trying to win a seat in Congress. He has a TV ad that features Ryan’s mug.
“In 1999, George Ryan called for higher taxes,” the ad says. “State Rep. Brady urged the governor not to do it. But when he did anyway, Brady didn’t quit. He rallied other conservative Republicans, and he led the fight against Ryan’s tax increase.”
Ryan’s candidate in that race is state Rep. Tim Johnson from the Champaign area. Brady has tagged Johnson for his connection to the governor. Johnson has answered Brady with a TV ad that features a testimonial from a governor–Jim Edgar.
Johnson is the front-runner in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Tom Ewing, but Johnson’s lead has slipped. Johnson appeared with Ryan last week at a ribbon-cutting, but a Johnson aide took great pains to tell me that event was Ryan’s idea. Johnson was there because it would have been bad form not to be there. But the governor has not been invited into the district by Johnson.
So Ryan may well cost Tim Johnson a seat in Congress.
And Ryan may well save the political career of state Sen. Chris Lauzen of Aurora.
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Lauzen’s running for re-election and by all rights he should be in trouble. He ran for state comptroller in 1998 and was crushed by 615,000 votes. Four of the mayors in his district have come out against him, saying he’s out of touch. He has a couple of aggressive opponents. But Lauzen is likely to save his seat because he’s touting how often he has stood up to George Ryan.
There are a couple of other races to watch Tuesday for signs of resentment toward Ryan.
State Sen. Dave Sullivan of Park Ridge should be a huge favorite. Sullivan has raised eight times as much money as his opponent, businessman Arlen Gould of Arlington Heights. But Sullivan was political director of Ryan’s 1998 campaign and there’s some anger over the way Sullivan was handed the Senate seat a month after Ryan’s election by GOP bosses allied with Ryan.
One of the best members of the statehouse, Rep. Patricia Reid Lindner of Aurora, is in trouble. She’s running against a candidate backed by religious conservatives and she’s getting tarred for supporting Ryan on key votes.
On the surface, it’s Ryan’s political agenda that figures in these races. Conservatives are picking on his $12 billion infrastructure program and the taxes he raised to pay for it. No Republican seems to have the temerity yet to call him a scoundrel. But they’re feeding on the public’s disgust with the driver’s license-selling scandal, which has led to 22 criminal convictions.
Voters don’t trust Ryan. A Tribune poll taken in late February found 46 percent of the public disapproved of the job he’s doing and only 32 percent approved. Those weren’t just disgruntled Democrats who were down on the governor. As many Republicans as Democrats gave thumbs down. Even worse, only 18 percent of the public believe Ryan when he says he didn’t know about the license selling. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that a few Republicans figure it’s a good idea to run against him.
But you can bet that if a couple of Republicans lose a primary on Tuesday because of Ryan, the party’s going to be petrified about what could happen in November.
There couldn’t be a worse time for Republicans to have a governor in such trouble. This is a census election. Whoever controls the House and Senate after the November election will draw the maps for congressional and legislative districts for the next decade. Democrats control the House. Republicans have a 32-27 majority in the Senate. But they have at least two vulnerable incumbents running in November and a Ryan backlash could put more seats in play.
There may not be much Ryan can do right now to clear his name. The public doesn’t believe him, and he only hurts himself when he says, as he did last week, that corruption “is part of the culture” at the secretary of state’s office, where the license-selling was going on.
He’s right. The secretary of state’s office had plenty of corruption problems before Ryan got there.
What Ryan doesn’t answer is this: If he knew corruption was a problem going in, why did he install a see-no-evil political crony as inspector general for the office?
If Republicans are desperately looking for good news, maybe it is here. The Tribune poll asked whether voters consider themselves to be Democrats, Republicans or independents. It’s a measure of party loyalty, and typically Democrats in Illinois hold a 10- to 13-point edge. The poll in February found the Democrats had only a 5-point advantage in party loyalty despite the Republican governor’s troubles.
The Democrats, of course, haven’t even started to make hay out of Ryan’s political troubles. For now they’ll let some Republicans take care of that.
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