Over the past week or two, talk in Illinois of former Chicago
Bears coach Mike Ditka making a run for the U.S. Senate became
surprisingly serious. Before Ditka announced yesterday that he’s
not interested, enough members of the Illinois Republican State
Central Committee, which will select a nominee to replace Jack
Ryan, had endorsed Ditka that the nomination was his for the
taking. This despite his lack of campaign experience and an
apparent ineptness at packaging his message: in a
moderate-to-liberal state, Ditka declares himself
“ultra-ultra-ultra-conservative,” despite being anti-gun.
To understand why so many were so quick to embrace Ditka, it’s
necessary to understand just how desperate the Republican Party has
become in the Prairie State.
For decades, Illinois was politically divided between the
machine politics of Chicago, uniformly Democratic since the
Depression, and a mostly Republican downstate, with the suburbs
holding the balance of power and usually looking to Springfield to
balance the city. Republicans held the governor’s mansion
continuously from 1976 to 2002, and Daniel Walker, the Democratic
governor immediately before that, was a maverick against Richard J.
Daley’s Chicago machine. Until 2000, Illinois was a national
bellwether, voting for the winner in all but two presidential
elections from 1896 to 1996 (the exceptions were 1916 and
1976).
If national suburban trends toward Clinton and Gore combined
with the successful leadership of Richard M. Daley — mayor of
Chicago since 1989 and consistently the most popular politician in
Illinois — to help make the Chicago suburbs more friendly
territory for Democrats, it was the disarray of the Illinois GOP
itself, in the wake of Governor George Ryan’s disastrous tenure,
that made Illinois the solid blue state it is today. While he was
governor, it came out that the Secretary of State’s office, when
Ryan had held that post, had been a den of corruption. Campaign
documents were shredded to thwart federal investigators looking for
government workers doing political work on state time, and an
ex-aide testified last year that Ryan knew about this act of
justice-obstruction. In the most prominent scandal, truckers’
licenses were issued for bribes; six children burned to death in an
accident involving an unqualified trucker who got his license this
way. (For good measure, Ryan was the first sitting U.S. governor to
do a photo-op with Fidel Castro, and he emptied death row with a
blanket commutation, saving the lives of over 150 convicted
murderers.)
Ryan declined to seek a second term, but the Republican nominee
who ran in his place was the unfortunately-named Jim Ryan — no
relation, though he was George Ryan’s attorney general. Hobbled by
association with George Ryan, Jim Ryan lost to the Daley-allied Rod
Blagojevich; Democrats meanwhile increased their majority in the
state House and took control of the state Senate for the first time
in 10 years. This gave Springfield its first Democratic government
on friendly terms with Chicago since 1968.
Smarting from its losses, the Illinois GOP nominated yet another
Ryan, Jack, unrelated to the other two. He was the strongest of the
primary candidates, but after winning the nomination he faced
his
own scandal, and despite his momentary defiance was forced from
the nomination by the GOP leadership.
For weeks, Republicans have cast about for a candidate to put up
against Barrack Obama, the Democratic candidate who, as a black
politician of middle-class and Ivy League pedigree with proven
appeal to white voters, seems destined for stardom: he’ll be giving
the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention this
year, and if elected will become a perennial favorite of tea-leaf
readers looking for the next presidential or vice-presidential
candidate. The former governors Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar could
seriously challenge Obama, but both are uninterested; the various
names that are being thrown around are universally
unimpressive.
The Hail Mary movement to draft Mike Ditka, then, made complete
sense. While all the other candidates look like sacrificial lambs,
it’s possible that Ditka’s celebrity appeal might have generated
enough buzz to stop Obama. Unless Iron Mike changes his mind, we’ll
never know.
John
Tabin is a frequent online contributor to The American
Spectator.
