When last we heard from state Sen. James Meeks, the
Chicago independent had dropped out of the governor’s race and
endorsed Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s much-hyped education/lottery plan.
With the proposal now under fire from almost all corners, I thought it
might be a good time to check back in with him. “Nobody is discussing the education-reform
plan,” Meeks says when asked what most surprised him about the
reaction. “Everybody is discussing the funding source.”
That’s true. Most editorialists, columnists, and
critics have lauded the proposed education reforms, but they’ve all
blasted away at the idea of selling or leasing the lottery to pay for it. Still, I suggest to Meeks, there’s a growing
sense that the education reforms he pressured the governor into accepting
in exchange for bowing out of the race will benefit Chicago at the expense
of downstate. Meeks is undaunted, pointing out that well over $200
million would be spent statewide the first year. Plus, he says,
“Everybody will get new textbooks, all schools will get new libraries
. . . and new technology.”
Meeks refuses to directly criticize the
governor’s universally panned rollout of the proposal, but he is
clearly not happy with the way it was done. When asked about House Speaker
Michael Madigan’s letter to legislators, which demanded several
answers about the proposal, including the funding source, Meeks says,
“A mistake that any leader makes is when that individual’s
entire leadership team is not on board and forced to ask public questions.
Speaker Madigan is now asking public questions. . . . But before I would
make a big announcement like that, I would make sure that my leadership
team is completely on board.”
Meeks is also taking Madigan’s belated criticisms
with a grain of salt. Madigan noted in his letter that he worked with Gov.
Jim Edgar on a tax-swap plan, so Meeks claims that Madigan is now implying
that the tax swap is the way to proceed. “But when I was trying to do
that [tax swap] deal,” Meeks says, Madigan was “nowhere to be
found. He was silent. But now all of a sudden he writes letters
about that, and I’m saying, ‘What in the world is going
on?’”
Meeks dismisses much of the harsh criticism by the
media and in the political sphere of the lottery-based funding mechanism.
“The same people who are saying this is a bad idea . . . these are
the same people who were against what I was trying to do before,” he
says, adding it doesn’t make a difference what is proposed; the level
of criticism will be the same. What about the criticism that he was looking for a
graceful way out of the race and fell for a Blagojevich bluff? Meeks
insists that he was serious about the campaign and reminds me of all the
conversations we had about the legwork and preparations he had done. And Meeks has harsh words for those who suggest that he
agreed to a bad idea. When he was contemplating a run for governor as a way
to force a deal on education reform, he claims, “none of the
school funding groups, not one, called me and said ‘This is the right
thing to do.’ They were not backing me — and now all of a
sudden they have a lot of opinions. If they were around to give me some
advice, maybe I would have made the choices that they wanted.”
The governor has taken some well-deserved hits for his
claims that the threatened Meeks candidacy had nothing at all to do with
the new education plan or the timing of the announcement. Meeks won’t
directly counter the governor’s statements but does note that he met
with the governor’s education people twice to discuss his plan and
that much of what he proposed on the reform side “showed up as [the
governor’s] plan” three weeks later. Another criticism leveled at Meeks is that he trusted
Blagojevich to implement a plan even though almost nobody in state
government trusts the guv. Meeks says he hopes that the Legislative Black
Caucus, which he chairs, will back him up next spring. “If they
don’t see what the governor has promised in next year’s budget,
they don’t have to vote on it,” Meeks says. “We could be
there until Christmas.”
This article appears in Jun 22-28, 2006.
