NOW THAT THE HEALTH CARE BILL IS PASSED, WHAT WILL WE DO WITH OUR TIME? ALL EYES—WELL, SOME EYES—WILL TURN TO SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS WHERE DEMOCRATS WILL DECIDE WHOM TO NOMINATE FOR LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR.
By Gail Collins, New York Times, March 27, 2010
Now that the health care bill is passed, what are we going to do with our time?
Lots of other exciting stuff is going on! For instance, on Saturday, all eyes — well, some eyes — will turn to Springfield, Ill., where Democrats are going to decide whom to nominate for lieutenant governor.
Illinois is a reminder of how important this post is. True, in most states the lieutenant governor has nothing whatsoever to do except hang around in case No. 1 dies or has to resign because of scandal. However, this resigning thing has been happening quite a bit.
As in the case of Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois who goes on trial in June for allegedly trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. In the meantime, he’s appearing in “The Celebrity Apprentice.” What do you think would make the residents of Illinois feel worse? If their disgraced former governor failed to impress Donald Trump in a series of fun challenges? Or if he actually seemed to have an aptitude for that kind of thing? In the first episode, Blagojevich carved out a worst-case scenario by letting the food get cold in a hamburger-selling contest while he attempted to convince the customers that he was innocent of all pending corruption charges.
But about the lieutenant governor.
I have always been particularly interested in this office since I nurture a secret ambition to become a lieutenant governor one day myself. I am really pretty well qualified since I am extremely good at waiting around for something to happen.
Gov. David Paterson of New York, a former lieutenant governor who moved up after another scandal-resignation, is now engulfed in all sorts of scandals himself. If he decided to resign, it might open up a window to my long-cherished dream, while also allowing my state to finally beat Illinois in the race for the most dreadful political culture in the country.
However, Illinois has not been standing still. It held the primary for state offices at the beginning of February, which is not a time when people are in the optimal mood to go to the polls. The Republicans wound up with a gubernatorial candidate who once called the minimum wage “government intrusion.” For the Senate, Democrats got the son of a Chicago banking family whose bank seems about to fail.
Then there was the No. 2 slot. In Illinois, the candidates for lieutenant governor run all by themselves in the primary. Then the winner is yoked to the gubernatorial nominee on the ticket in November. Would-be lieutenant governors tend not to be household names, so the results of these primaries can be peculiar. (In 1986, Democratic voters nominated a 28-year-old follower of the extremely strange Lyndon LaRouche. This happened on a night that the Chicago LaRouchians were busy holding a mock exorcism in front of the home of a religion professor they had decided was a warlock. The gubernatorial nominee, Adlai Stevenson III, was so horrified that he bolted the ticket and ran as a third-party candidate. Everybody lost.)
This year, on the Republican side, the lieutenant governor winner was one Jason Plummer, a 27-year-old heir to a lumber fortune. He had virtually no prior political experience but stressed his leadership training as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves. Postelection scrutiny showed that Plummer had received his commission three days after announcing his candidacy last September.
Democratic voters, meanwhile, picked Scott Lee Cohen, who turned out to be a pawnbroker with a former steroids abuse problem whose ex-wife charged him with failure to pay child support and whose ex-girlfriend once claimed he threatened her by holding a knife to her neck.
On the plus-side, the results inspired the Legislature to move the primary to March.
Eventually, Cohen was pushed out. The chastened Democrats then announced that the search for a new lieutenant governor would be all about “transparency,” and around 250 people applied for the job via a Web site. The party then reduced that number to 116, then 17, by a mysterious process that no one seemed prepared to explain.
On Saturday, the State Central Committee will make the final choice. Gov. Pat Quinn, who will be on top of the ticket, wants Sheila Simon, a downstate law professor. She is the daughter of Paul Simon, the late, revered United States senator — a very big plus in a state with a crying shortage of revered politicians. On the other hand, her biggest previous foray into politics was losing a race for mayor of Carbondale to the guy who just came in fourth place in the race for lieutenant governor, which was won by Jason Plummer.
Her main opponent, State Representative Art Turner of Chicago, argues he should be the choice because he came in second to Scott Lee Cohen.
I’m sure whoever wins will be a big improvement. Who says that in American politics, things only get worse?
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Saturday, March 27th 2010 at 4:37PM
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