Romeoville, Ill.
“Have you ever been on the phone with an out-of-state friend or relative who laughed at you because you were from Illinois?” asks Rep. Mark Kirk, the Republican running for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat.
Kirk’s audience, employees of a pump-manufacturing company in this Chicago suburb, are nodding in agreement — they’ve have heard plenty of jokes about their state’s tradition of political corruption. “It’s happened to us all,” Kirk says.
Coming from the place that elected Rod Blagojevich governor can make you sensitive to all manner of slights. In Kirk’s case, it’s more than a matter of sensitivity — it’s an issue. His Democratic opponent, state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, has a resume that includes a family bank that did business with an inordinate number of organized crime figures — guys with names like Michael “Jaws” Giorango — before sinking under the weight of its own bad loans and being seized by federal regulators.
“If someone with Alexi Giannoulias’ background becomes our senator, who comes from the exact same political tradition as Governor Blagojevich, you risk the danger of continuing the problem,” says Kirk. In his home territory, Chicago’s northern suburbs, Kirk says, “We represent a much cleaner government tradition.”
This race is enormously important for Democrats; losing Obama’s old seat to Republicans just two years after the triumph of 2008 would be a serious embarrassment. But Obama may be a less important factor in this race than the legacy of Blagojevich. If Kirk wins — and the last half-dozen polls here show him leading Giannoulias by between two and four points — it will be because voters balked at giving the ex-governor’s party another chance. (Bill Brady, the Republican candidate for governor, is also leading Blagojevich’s Democratic successor, Pat Quinn.)
Signs of scandal fatigue are everywhere. On Tuesday, when Bill Clinton came to Chicago to campaign for Democrats, he was introduced by Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin. Of course, there is another Illinois Democrat in the Senate, Roland Burris, but he was nowhere to be seen on the podium. Burris, whose appointment by Blagojevich to succeed Obama came after an astonishingly corrupt selection process, bears the taint of his benefactor. At Democratic events, he is the man who isn’t there.
At Republican events, he’s the living embodiment of what’s wrong. When Kirk addressed a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition Monday night, he made a point to introduce himself, “My name is Mark Kirk and I’m going to replace Roland Burris in the United States Senate.” If Democrats won’t say the name, Kirk will.
Given that background, it’s not surprising that even in a state beset by economic woes, the Senate race has turned into an ugly contest about personal integrity. Kirk would probably be running away with it but for the problems he created for himself. He has an impressive record — degrees from Cornell, the London School of Economics, and Georgetown Law School, a decade in Congress, and 21 years in the Navy Reserve with service in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. By any measure, Kirk is vastly more qualified for the Senate than Giannoulias, whose experience, aside from his current post as treasurer, consists of helping wreck his family’s bank.
Yet Kirk has sometimes embellished a record that didn’t need embellishing. He claimed he won an award; we later found out that his unit won it. He claimed his plane came under fire in Iraq; we later learned that didn’t happen. And he claimed he had been a teacher; we later learned he had just been an assistant. Kirk has owned up to and apologized for what he calls “mistakes.” The bottom line is the embellishments weren’t enough to bring Kirk any benefit but enough to cause him much grief, giving Democrats virtually their only issue against him.
The candidates’ three debates have resembled WWE smackdowns, with both men going after each other hard. Their final face-off was Wednesday night and reached a comic conclusion when Giannoulias accused Kirk of accepting campaign contributions from criminals and then proudly announced that “I’ve decided for the rest of this campaign to go positive.”
It’s too late for that. The last days of the race are likely to be dominated by still more charges and countercharges. But the fundamental issue here is whether people want a change in their political leadership. Voters, especially independent voters, “know that the state is falling behind,” Kirk says. “They’re ready for someone from a different political tradition than a Chicago Democrat.”
Byron York, The Examiner’s chief political correspondent, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
