by Mark Rhoads
This post is written at about 1 pm on Friday, Feb. 26 so news events could overtake it.
It is only natural that any political candidate wants to run out the string as far as possible when a lifetime goal seems so close but yet so far. But having said that, now would be a good time for State Sen. Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale) to publicly declare his full support for his colleague State Sen. Bill Brady (R-Bloomington) and to congratulate Brady as the presumptive Republican nominee for Governor without further delay.
While Brady and Dillard have done their best to maintain cordial relations, this Feb. 2 vote count has been the longest count in Illinois since the long count of the Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1925. Further delays in a concession by Sen. Dillard are not realistic and only delay preparations for the fall campaign. The liklihood that further examination of provisional or absentee votes might change the result or reduce the margin to less than 100 votes that Dillard stated as his threshold for a recount is just too remote to be credible with today's voting technology.
I have known Kirk Dillard since the late 1980s and my impression of him as a very capable and hard-working public servant did not change much over the last thirty years. As the narrow ideological spectrum of the Illinois Republican Party goes, Dillard was no more liberal than his mentor former Gov. Jim Edgar but surely no more conservative either. Dillard and Jim Edgar should now be able to fully support Brady with enthusiasm as the responsible alternative to Gov. Pat Quinn who also came from Hinsdale.
There was a primary within a primary on Feb.2 and Kirk Dillard did not run far enough ahead of his rival for the old-line establishment Republican endorsements, Andy McKenna. McKenna self-financed his media campaign and was endorsed by The Chicago Tribune, which once upon a time had a lot of clout with Republican primary voters in the collar counties. Kirk Dillard was endorsed by his former boss Jim Edgar, The Chicago Sun-Times, The State Journal-Register, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Peoria Journal Star. Dillard's image as a moderate or liberal Republican might not have been entirely deserved to the same degree it stuck based on his long voting record over many years. But the fact that he got endorsements Republicans do not normally get at all, let alone in a primary, from the IEA and Local 150 of the Operating Engineers, caused understandable discomfort and bewilderment among many conservative voters who concluded that for them Brady was a much safer choice for a nominee who would follow conservative policy options if elected. Brady won his primary within a primary by combining conservative appeals with regional downstate organization efforts to run far ahead of other conservative candidates with not as much money or organization such as the imaginative idea candidate Dan Proft. The ideological gulf between Brady and Dillard was not huge, but it was enough to give conservative activists and voters a good reason to support Brady in preference to Dillard.
In recent days the GOP primary vote margin between Brady and Dillard has received a surprising degree of detailed coverage in primarily liberal blogs such as Progress Illinois and The Huffington Post. I think the reason for this intense interest might be that some liberal bloggers now think the final result of the GOP gubernatorial nomination vote could be almost tantamount to the fall election result if things continue to go as badly for Quinn and national Democrats as sone trend line polls now indicate. In other words the liberal bloggers think that whoever the GOP nominee is will be the next governor and they hope that person is not Bill Brady. They might hope Dillard is the lesser of two bad outcomes from their viewpoint just because Dillard is on speaking terms with unions that most Republicans do not normally talk to.
Many times in the past winning establishment Illinois GOP candidates in a primary have asked conservative Republicans to unite behind them as they are now doing in the case of slightly moderate US Senate nominee Mark Kirk. Mark Kirk is good on national security issues and did sign the Taxpayer Protection Pledge but broke it in the opinion of many people when he voted for new energy taxes. But now, for governor, it should be the turn of establishment GOP leaders to unite behind the conservative Bill Brady as the responsible candidate to benefit not just the GOP but all of Illinois citizens.
