Illinois primary candidates will be taking the high road Saturday as they march behind President Bush in the city’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade. But that respite of smiles and merriment is likely to be just a brief detour of a road that appears to be sinking ever lower as Tuesday’s election nears.
On Friday, some Republicans in southern Illinois received automated telephone calls or found political mailings touting Jim Ryan, the GOP front-runner for governor, as a supporter of gay rights and “opening the door to gay marriages.”
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“Stand up for gay rights and vote for Jim Ryan,” says the tape-recorded caller, who identifies himself as “Terry” representing a fictitious “Bi-Gay-and-Lesbian Federation.” The mail piece, featuring two tuxedoed male bridegroom figurines atop a wedding cake, said “Thank You Jim Ryan for opening the door to gay marriages.”
Ryan supports amending the state Human Rights Act to prevent housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, but with an exception for religious institutions. Ryan, however, said he does not support same-sex marriage.
“I can’t defend myself anymore. There’s so many attacks coming from so many fronts and I only have a limited amount of money and time to explain my positions on all these attacks,” an angry Ryan said as he traveled through central Illinois on Friday night. “They’re trying to create a candidate, a Jim Ryan, that doesn’t exist and then they are trying to defeat that candidate.”
Ryan contended his conservative rival for the nomination, Patrick O’Malley, and O’Malley’s chief financial supporter, Jack Roeser, were behind the effort.
Although O’Malley spokesman Dan Proft denied the campaign was responsible for the mailings or the phone calls, he said O’Malley agrees with the “substance of what is being said.” O’Malley said Ryan’s support of anti-discrimination legislation would give homosexuals “special rights,” Proft said.
“Pat O’Malley doesn’t want sexual orientation included in the Illinois civil rights code and Jim Ryan does,” Proft said. “It’s as simple as that.”
That view was shared by Roeser, a Barrington industrialist who heads the Family Taxpayers Network and has given $476,000 in cash and services to O’Malley’s campaign. Roeser said the return address on the mail piece was the same as his organization’s, but the group had nothing to do with it. Still, he said, the group supports its conclusion.
“If you pass this thing, you’re yielding to the political influence of the gay lobby,” Roeser said.
Automated calls
Also on Friday night, some collar county Republicans began receiving automated calls on behalf of O’Malley, contending Ryan knew about the licenses-for-bribes scandal that helped end Gov. George Ryan’s political career, but did nothing about it.
“Jim Ryan chose to protect George Ryan rather than keep his promise to root out public corruption–even after 39 people were convicted and even after children died,” said a caller who identifies himself as a “John Pulley” with the “Illinois Republicans for Honest Government.” “On Tuesday, say `no’ to corruption by voting for Patrick O’Malley for governor.”
Proft did not return calls about the O’Malley campaign’s role in those taped messages and a search of state campaign disclosure documents and other databases failed to turn up any such organization.
O’Malley has pegged his 11th-hour campaign strategy on trying to tie Jim Ryan to George Ryan. The two are not related. Jim Ryan has maintained that the federal government had long been looking into corruption in the secretary of state’s office when George Ryan held the job and that it would be folly to run a parallel investigation.
Celebrity backers
The third Republican in the governor’s race, Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood, has been using automated messages from author Scott Turow and feminist Gloria Steinem in an effort to gain Democratic and independent support to help her overcome a huge deficit in public opinion polls.
Republicans weren’t the only ones getting telephone calls this weekend.
Mayor Richard Daley and Margaret Blackshere, the head of the Illinois AFL-CIO, each voiced separate automated calls on behalf of Lisa Madigan. Madigan, a state senator and daughter of House Speaker Michael Madigan, is seeking the Democratic nomination for attorney general against former Justice Department official John Schmidt.
And staunch gun-owner rights opponent Sarah Brady also is voicing automated calls on behalf of Rod Blagojevich, a Democratic candidate for governor.
Follow-up to mailings
Brady’s calls follow the latest mail piece sent out by the Blagojevich campaign, accusing rival Paul Vallas of “cozying up to the gun lobby” even though both men have said they share the same views on gun control.
In taping a debate that is to air at 10 a.m. Sunday on WBBM-Ch. 2, Blagojevich maintained Vallas was “running ads against me in southern Illinois criticizing my record on fighting for gun safety.”
“That’s ludicrous,” Vallas responded. “Rod’s been actually saying different things in different parts of the state.”
He accused Blagojevich of courting the National Rifle Association by promising to allow them to review any future gun legislation he proposes. But Blagojevich said he had agreed to work with the “sportsmen’s caucus” of legislators in the General Assembly. He called any suggestion he would work with the NRA “baloney.”
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A positive proposal
Earlier on Friday the third candidate in the Democratic contest, former Atty. Gen. Roland Burris, proposed reforms to the criminal justice system as he appeared alongside three men wrongly convicted of the 1986 murder of medical student Lori Roscetti.
“Fifteen years of their lives taken away just because they were young black boys,” said Burris. “There is no reason for that in our judicial system. We must take steps to correct that.”
As the state’s top lawyer, Burris ignored warnings from an assistant and fought to keep Rolando Cruz on Death Row though Cruz was later found to be innocent in the murder of a 10-year-old Naperville girl.
“I say my prayers every night that … Cruz was able to get out of that because I was a part of that,” Burris said. “If I had been a part of executing an innocent person, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
Burris, the first African-American elected to statewide office, has spent recent days focusing on the need to improve criminal justice in an effort to appeal to the black voters that form his core constituency. He called for stiffer penalties for prosecutorial misconduct and a re-examination of previous trials involving prosecutors charged with misconduct.