The political game: brains are required

By Greg Rivara

Neil Hartigan’s gubernatorial quest all but died this month when he let his people talk him into running that stupid television commercial with the cheap graphics and annoying music.

He opened the door to slurring remarks and closed the door to the governor’s office.

You know the commercial. The gigantic T-word falls from the screen, pounding Illinois into a rubble. Later, Secretary of State Jim Edgar’s picture falls from the wall and, hopefully, from voters’ grace.

Today, in a society where elected officials have to count more on looks and snappy soundbites than political platforms, it is increasingly important to make the right moves.

This commercial was not one of those moves.

Before the commercial ran, the race was a virtual toss-up. Hartigan is the Attorney General, a great position from which to come out and support people-popular issues and not be directly tainted with any unpopular legislation winding through the legislature.

Edgar isn’t as lucky. He isn’t afforded this luxury, and must deal with old ladies miffed because the state finally took away their driver’s licenses, and their daughters refusing to accept a fact of life.

And Edgar potentially had problems with the middle-class. Blue-collar workers swinging to the Republican Party were crucial in keeping Jim Thompson in office for so long and electing Ronald Reagan and George Bush to the nation’s big screen.

Edgar’s push to curtail drunk drivers was beneficial and dangerous. Hartigan can’t come out and say Edgar made the laws too stringent. Every mother in the state would form a lynch-mob and throw him in a caged rink with a driver just getting off of a three-martini lunch.

But those blue-collar workers are the ones getting hit with the tougher laws. It becomes illegal to stop and have two beers at a bar on the way home from work. Rolling through a stop sign or a busted tail light could translate into a DUI conviction.

So it wasn’t an election to win. It was an election to lose. Whoever made the first wrong move was going to be on the outside looking in.

The commercial was the wrong move.

It was cheap. It was on taxes, an issue in which any politician can devise some creative bookkeeping and become the hero instead of the villian. Taxes are a volatile issue where emotions override common sense.

More importantly, Hartigan’s forces fired the first shot in the attack-the-enemy TV campaign. Before, Edgar’s spots were touting him as a down-to-earth guy where a handshake still meant something—a commercial obviously aimed at the working class.

Hartigan doesn’t have the money to fight on TV. Hartigan says that at every campaign stop. He asks for the grass-roots help because he admits his war chest is a drawer compared to Edgar’s walk-in closet.

Aaah yes, politics. Nobody said democracy was smart or its players intelligent.