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: Who Will Govern Illinois? -- The power struggle to appoint a replacement. |
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| | From:  tc101 (Original Message) | Sent: 12/14/2008 11:48 AM |
WSJ JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL
DECEMBER 11, 2008, 8:51 P.M. ET
Who Will Govern Illinois? -- The power struggle to appoint a replacement.
By JOHN FUND
Three of the nation's five largest states have seen their chief executives spectacularly fall from grace in recent years. California's Gray Davis was recalled by voters after downplaying the state's fiscal mess (the state is now in an even deeper hole). New York's Eliot Spitzer had to resign after a sex scandal that followed on reports that he had tried to smear a political opponent. Now Rod Blagojevich of Illinois is perhaps days or weeks away from being forced out of office after being indicted for trying to sell an appointment to the U.S. Senate seat held until last month by Barack Obama.
When Mr. Blagojevich leaves office he will be replaced by Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who for six years served as the governor's No. 2 even though they don't like each other and have rarely spoken in recent months. In Illinois, candidates for the state's two top jobs run on the same ticket in the fall election but run separately in their party primaries -- an arrangement that can create strange bedfellows.
So who is Pat Quinn? By all accounts, he is a populist reformer, fiscally conservative for a Democrat and, refreshingly, an honest man. That's important in a state that has seen four of its governors indicted on corruption charges in the last 35 years.
Mr. Quinn, a tax attorney, first came to prominence in the late 1970s when he backed a measure that would have given the state's voters the power to enact laws by initiative. He secured enough signatures to put it on the ballot, only to see the Illinois Supreme Court declare the measure unconstitutional and prevent it from being voted on. He later unsuccessfully backed a measure to limit the terms of state elected officials.
This year, Mr. Quinn led a quixotic effort to give Illinois voters the right to recall their elected officials. When that failed, he championed a proposal for a state constitutional convention that could meet and enact the right of recall along with other reforms. That measure failed last month in part because Cook County Circuit Judge Nathaniel Howse Jr. ruled that the ballot proposal's wording was "misleading and false." He ordered election officials to rewrite the ballot question, but his ruling came too late to change the ballot. The correct language was contained in flyers that were to be handed out to voters at the polls, but instructions to distribute the new language were often ignored.
"In a state that has more than its share of crooks and people who go along to get along, Pat Quinn stands out as someone who takes on the powers-that-be," says Howie Rich, a conservative activist who has worked with Mr. Quinn. Charles Wheeler, who directs the public affairs journalism program at the University of Illinois at Springfield, says Mr. Quinn is "still very much a populist."
Perhaps it shouldn't surprise anyone, then, that the state's power brokers are moving quickly to strip the governor's office, and thus potentially Mr. Quinn, of the power to fill Mr. Obama's Senate seat. Instead, they want a snap special election in which the Daley machine in Chicago would have an outsized influence. Illinois officials claim they are simply acting out of concern that the disgraced Gov. Blagojevich might try to appoint someone. Their real motivation may be to prevent Mr. Quinn from naming a fellow reformer they can't control.
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