ILLINOIS’ LOOMING REMATCH
Apparently the consulting work or whatever it is former U.S. Sen.
Carol Moseley-Braun’s been doing since her defeat
in 1998 hasn’t flourished, so she’s looking to get back into the
political game. Recall that Moseley-Braun lost her seat to
Peter Fitzgerald, today one of the few vulnerable
Republicans up for re-election in 2004.
It wasn’t that she deserved to win. Her tenure in the Senate was
marred by scandal: from reports that she verbally abused staff and
used them for personal business to charges that she used her Senate
position to help friends in their lobbying efforts in the U.S. and
abroad.
Rumors in Chicago, where Moseley-Braun has a residence, but
where she has not resided full time for several years, have also
had her looking at a possible challenge of Democratic mayor
Richard Daley. But reality must have set in.
Daley, who recently announced that he was running for a fifth term,
won better than 70 percent of the vote last time. “She wouldn’t
have a prayer,” says a Chicago political consultant. “He’d destroy
her.”
So now Moseley-Braun apparently wants her old seat back. And
don’t count her out, because Republicans may ease her way.
Fitzgerald has angered a number of Republicans, most pointedly
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who believes the
junior senator didn’t support the speaker’s pork-barrel projects
strongly enough. As well, Fitzgerald was practically invisible
during the fall campaign. He did little fundraising for the party
or for candidates and did not actively campaign for the party in
state.
Fitzgerald’s seeming lack of enthusiasm didn’t help in a season
that saw the GOP lose the governorship and state legislature
seats.
“You can’t pin the party losses on Pete,” says a state
representative. “Hastert and his crew ought to look at each other
for blame. Whether they want to believe it, Pete’s the future of
the party. If he ran for governor this time around, he probably
would have won. He’s that popular.”
Debates about popularity aside, Fitzgerald will at the least
have to deal with ongoing talk of a challenge in the Republican
primary. And he will face new scrutiny from a media eager for a
Fitzgerald rematch with Moseley-Braun.
STUCK WITH SPECTER
Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania faces a similar
situation. Conservatives in the state GOP are agitating for a
challenger to Specter in the primary, an attempt to push the
moderate senator more to the right. But if the recent Pennsylvania
elections are any indication, the state party isn’t being wholly
realistic. Democrats ran well across the state, particularly in the
urban centers where they have to win big in to offset suburban and
rural GOP strongholds.
Faced with a strong Democratic governor pressing for his party,
the national GOP will probably step in and block any attempt by
state Republicans to put Specter in too much danger.
“That’s one seat we can’t afford to put in play,” says a
Republican National Committee staffer. “We apparently are going to
have too many other issues to worry about in the next couple of
years.”
