IL: Let the Class War Begin
Well, the primary is over, and the ballots are counted.
We now know who will be facing Quinnyboy in the November election.
In this corner.... Governor Doofus.
In this corner.... Bruce "trust me, I really am a Republican" Rauner.
This is gonna get nasty. very, very nasty.
(read below)
Out for now.......
Matt
Quinn vs. Rauner: Let the class war begin
John Kass – Chicago Tribune
What will the campaign for governor of Illinois look like between liberal Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn and Republican businessman BruceRauner?
Fists raised, mouths twisted in anger. Think of "Les Miserables" on bad acid, a constant, pounding tribal dialogue of us vs. them.
This one will be a class war.
It is a campaign that probably should have been waged years ago, but politicians were happy to buy the support of public-sector unions with tax dollars.
Now taxpayers are squeezed and businesses are leaving, taking jobs with them. Cops, firefighters, teachers and other public workers are stuck between two opposing political gravitational fields:
Promises from their union leaders and establishment politicians that can't be kept, and businesses already leaving Illinois.
"It's going to be ugly, and by Labor Day people won't even want to turn on their TVs because of all the ads," said a senior Illinois Democrat, who thinks Pat Quinn has only one route to re-election. "He's got to turn it into a class war. What else does he have to talk about?"
Rauner will be demonized. The wealthy hedge fund manager has dared to threaten the power of the public employee unions that wag the government dog. And Quinn casts himself as the people's champion.
Labor will demand Rauner's demonization, as will the national Democratic Party. Look for President Barack Obama to campaign in Illinois, and play his Mitt Romney card. Whether it will work on Rauner or not, I don't know, but he'll play it.
The national Democrats have already decided on class war as their strategy for the midterm elections. It beats talking about the disasters of Obamacare.
So demonizing Rauner — using the template already set out by the public unions who backed GOP rival Kirk Dillard — is the game plan.
Rauner is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He has more houses than you can count on one hand. He's a hunter, a fisherman, he rides a Harley and he drops his "g's" in his public statements, something he probably didn't learn at Dartmouth.
But for all the "g" dropping, Rauner is one of the oligarchs who see the problem clearly. The money is gone.
Quinn, meanwhile, is no longer the hapless Gov. Jell-O of my earlier columns. Now he has razor-sharp elbows. A class war is just what he needs.
But he's also the governor of a state that is drowning in debt and has unsustainable public pensions. The alliance between the politicians and public-sector unions has created an untenable situation:
Private-sector workers, most without politically enhanced benefit packages, are forced to subsidize the pensions of their own public servants.
Illinois already has the second-highest jobless rate in the country, while Indiana and Wisconsin lure jobs across our borders. And now the Democrats are quietly pushing a so-called "fair tax," a graduated income tax, to keep feeding the hungry government.
Quinn has taken the path open to him and cast himself as the populist protector of the downtrodden. Rauner has cast himself as the change agent.
And the class war begins.
Debates on economic policy are complicated, but campaigns are about TV ads. Though TV is incapable of handling context, it is great at one thing: conveying raw emotion.
So we'll have debates about the minimum wage, although that issue doesn't begin to address the state's dismal long-term prospects. And we'll talk about rich guys vs. poor guys, and who cares more, and who is insensitive to the plight of working people.
And what of the middle class, the folks who pay for a fat government that even our fat government now admits we can't afford?
They'll wait, and depending on how this one goes, they could vote a second time after the November elections. Then they'll vote with their feet as they trudge off, refugees from their birthplace.
A class war strategy not only requires Democrats to raise anger among the poor, they'll also have to increase registered voters, particularly African-Americans.
But will Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose support among black voters has slipped, according to polls, welcome a big voter-registration push with his own election coming just months after November?
Some have suggested that Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, toying with the notion of challenging Emanuel, could take advantage. They remember the massive city voter registration drive of the 1982 gubernatorial election, which morphed into the election of Harold Washington as Chicago's first black mayor.
Whether Preckwinkle has the steel for such a challenge isn't known. But Quinn will need those votes.
"I don't think all those African-American votes will go to Quinn," said the Rev. James Meeks, pastor of the large, influential and predominantly black Salem Baptist Church. He's backing Rauner.
A former state senator, Meeks once joined with Rauner to promote school choice. But that effort died when downstate Republicans, allied with teachers unions, walked away.
"Quinn will try to make this a class war, but African-Americans have been taken for granted by Democrats for years and years," Meeks told me. "Our people are stuck in terrible schools, our streets are full of crime, there is blood in the streets and there are no jobs. So what did we get exactly from the Democrats for all our years of loyalty?"
It's too early to tell if this campaign will be transformational or just more status quo. But you can count on this:
This one will be loud and angry. Class wars are like that.
