The level of arrogance and political stupidity
exhibited by wealthy office-seekers never ceases to amaze me.
Long before the media got wind of it last
year, much of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Blair Hull’s
top staff knew about the police report alleging that Hull struck
his then-wife during a late-night argument. Some of those staffers,
particularly the high-paid D.C. consultants, were dead-set against
going public early about the charges. If an early revelation had
killed off Hull’s candidacy, it would have meant the end of
their boffo monthly paychecks. Hull, a political novice without a
whole lot of common sense, listened to the vultures and paid a
heavy price — both monetarily and electorally.
Jack Ryan sought out reporters as long ago as
the 2000 Republican National Convention to ask, without revealing
too much, what they thought about a potential skeleton in his
closet. He also asked the advice of top Republicans in 2000 —
four years before the GOP U.S. Senate primary — about whether
the media would try to delve into partially locked secrets in his
past.
Ryan decided to lie and spend a fortune. But
the damaging info about his sex-club jaunts came out anyway and
exposed Ryan as someone who couldn’t bring himself to tell
the truth. Like Hull, Ryan couldn’t buy his way out of
trouble, and he was forced to resign from the ticket in disgrace.
Almost exactly one year after the Jack Ryan
debacle, we have yet another millionaire candidate on the verge of
self-immolation: Ron Gidwitz, a Republican candidate for governor.
A Gidwitz-family company manages a hellhole of
an apartment complex in downtown Joliet. Gidwitz also partially owns the building.
Congressman Jerry Weller, a fellow Republican, recently told the Daily Southtown that
the property is an “unsafe, unhealthy, crime- and drug-ridden,
outdated public-housing project.” Weller has been working with
Joliet to shut the place down and turn it into a mixed-income
development.
Gidwitz is a well-known philanthropist, and he
seems defensive when questioned by the media about the project,
claiming that he is trying to do good for the poor of Joliet. But
the place is obviously a mess, and Gidwitz admitted to the Daily Southtown recently
that he hasn’t even bothered to visit the apartment complex
“in a long time.”
With the Joliet paper, local ministers and
prominent civic leaders condemning the building as a rathole
— enough to fill hours of negative TV ads with amazingly
frank and damaging quotes — you would have thought that
Gidwitz would have dumped the dump long before deciding to run for
governor. But that would have been the easy way out, not to mention
the politically smart thing to do.
Instead, Gidwitz, like Hull and Ryan before
him, believes that he can go his own way. Perhaps he’s hoping
that his money will extricate him from this mess. Money solves a
lot of problems in this life, but, as Hull and Ryan discovered just
last year, all the money in the world can’t buy an unknown
candidate’s way out of big-time media trouble.
If many voters already knew who he was and had
a high opinion of him, this Joliet situation might not be such a
big deal. But Gidwitz was at 1 percent in the most recent
Republican primary poll. Despite chairing the Illinois State Board
of Education and all of his other philanthropic work, there is no
well of goodwill out there for Gidwitz to draw from.
Gidwitz probably should have waited before he
started running television ads across the state this week. It
doesn’t make any sense for a candidate to hand over a bunch
of cash to an ad-placement consultant if he won’t first deal
with reality. And the harsh political reality is that if Ron
Gidwitz doesn’t fix this very real Joliet problem, he has
virtually no chance of winning next year, no matter how many TV ads
he buys. It’s as simple as that.
Politics is not a terribly difficult game. But
if a candidate won’t come to the realization that part of his
existence is potentially repugnant to voters and then refuses to
take the necessary steps to change the reality on the ground, that
candidate is hopeless — useful only as a pigeon to be plucked
clean by the consultant class.
Just ask Blair Hull and Jack Ryan.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2005.
