May 15, 2002
BIRKETT HOPES "QUAYLE SYNDROME" EQUALS VICTORY

ANALYSIS & OPINION BY RUSS STEWART

An image, once established, is difficult to shed. A classic political example is former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who was perceived as being dumb and dumber, and was never taken seriously as a presidential candidate.

Although Lisa Madigan won the Democratic primary for Illinois Attorney General in March, largely through the efforts of her powerful father, Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan, her reputation as one of the least-qualified candidates for the state’s top legal post was thoroughly established, and will be difficult to eradicate. She carries a lot of negative baggage into the election. 

Madigan, age 35, who has been a lawyer for just eight years, and an Illinois state senator for four years, readily admits to being a novice when it comes to the practice of law. She has never tried a case on her own. If she were running for judge, she would be rated unqualified by the bar associations, who require a minimum of 10 years’ practice before going on the bench.

But Madigan is portraying herself as an experienced “advocate,” as opposed to a prosecutor, and claims that, as attorney general, she’ll be highlighting and publicizing problems like pollution, consumer fraud, official corruption, charitable abuse, and elder abuse, instead of prosecuting violators. In effect, Madigan would make her office a social service agency, rather than a law enforcement operation. A Chicago Sun-Times column by Steve Neal on March 8 called Madigan “clueless about the office that she is seeking.”

Madigan’s approach did not resonate with voters on March 19. Nevertheless, because of the clout of  her father, who is also the state Democratic chairman, she beat the better-qualified, but politically-cloutless John Schmidt, a former associate attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration, who had 35 years of legal experience. Madigan’s 194,546-vote margin (58.2 percent) in the Democratic primary seems impressive until one remembers that the entire Democratic establishment was behind her candidacy: Mayor Rich Daley, all 50 Chicago ward committeemen, 29 of 30 suburban Cook County committeemen, and two-thirds of the Downstate county chairmen, and virtually all of the state representatives who serve under Mike Madigan’s thumb. The speaker gave 25 of his legislative aides bonuses totaling $97,000 – which was taxpayer money -- just days before they all took leaves-of-absence to work on Lisa’s campaign.

Schmidt, who ran for governor in 1998, finishing third in the Democratic primary with 236,309 votes (24.9 percent), spent freely from his own wealth, and his $2 million media buy repeatedly lambasted Lisa Madigan for her legal inexperience, and asked the obvious question: Would she be the people’s attorney general, or would she be her daddy’s political tool? Without her daddy’s help, she would have lost to Schmidt. Does anybody really expect that an “Attorney General” Madigan would investigate any possible wrongdoing in Speaker Madigan’s House or among his members?

If Madigan wins in November, she’s on a fast track to be Illinois’ governor at some time in the current decade – perhaps as early as 2006, provided that Republican Jim Ryan beats Democrat Rod Blagojevich in November. Otherwise, Madigan would have to wait for “Governor Blagojevich” to vacate the job or run for national office – which could be eight or 12 years. Speaker Madigan, now age 60, has run the Illinois House with an iron fist for 18 of the past 20 years, and expects to continue for the foreseeable future. He will never be governor. But, as with any parent, his dream lives on through his daughter, whom he wants to see as governor. So, too, does former Cook County Assessor Tom Hynes, who engineered the election of his son, Dan Hynes, as state comptroller in 1998, and Young Hynes is aiming for governor. And, of course, so does Chicago Alderman Dick Mell (33rd), who has been instrumental in the rise of his son-in-law, Blagojevich. This Big Daddy’s Club, sort of a monarchy-in-the-making, may be an issue in November.

Much as the relentless attacks of Corrine Wood and Pat O’Malley on Jim Ryan softened Ryan’s support, and damaged his reputation for probity, so, too, did Schmidt’s attacks on Lisa Madigan. As is apparent in the adjoining vote chart, the most reliable portion of the Democratic base, black voters, delivered nicely: Madigan got 72.8 percent of the vote in Chicago’s 20 black-majority wards, and 139,667 of her total Chicago vote of 288,129 came from those black wards.

As is also apparent from the vote chart, other key components of the Democratic base – “good government” liberals, women voters, and white ethnic voters – were strikingly resistant to Lisa Madigan. On the Northwest Side, despite the Herculean efforts of committeeman to push the Blagojevich-Madigan-Rahm Emanuel slate, Schmidt won the 41st (by 1,905 votes) and the 45th (by 537 votes) wards, and barely lost in the 38th, 39th, 40th, 47th and 50th wards; only in Mell’s 33rd, Mike Wojcik’s 30th, and Bill Banks’ 36th Ward, did Madigan win convincingly. Roughly half of white voters in the outlying white wards made a conscious decision to reject Madigan.

Ditto in the Cook County suburbs. Madigan won them with just 51.1 percent, with her margin coming from the south suburbs, which are part of Mike Madigan’s South Side political machine. Madigan lost in liberal Evanston Township (by 2,172 votes) and Oak Park Township (by 1,657 votes); she also lost big in Niles Township (by 2,233 votes), Maine Township (by 1,909 votes), and even in Norwood Park Township (by 167 votes) – even though each township Democratic organization endorsed her and was working for her. Roughly 60 percent of Democratic primary voters are women, who presumably should have opted for Lisa Madigan. Yet about half of the white women voters, and the bulk of the white liberal voters, opted for Schmidt. Ditto in the collar counties, where Schmidt won with 52.8 percent. Only Downstate, where the county chairmen worked hard for both Blagojevich and Madigan, did she do well, winning with 61.5 percent.

Clearly, the Schmidt vote was predominantly an anti-Madigan vote. And that was either because of her inexperience or because of her daddy. So the relevant question is: Will those Schmidt voters, being Democrats, back Lisa Madigan in November because she is the Democratic nominee? Or will the reasons they spurned her in the primary be sufficient to merit another anti-Madigan vote in November?  

To win the AG’s job, Madigan must  beat Republican Joe Birkett, the DuPage County State’s Attorney, the post held by Jim Ryan from 1984 to 1994, when he became attorney general. Birkett, age 45, is a career prosecutor, with over 20 years’ experience, and has been his county’s chief prosecutor since 1996. He also  has a controversial record to defend, including his role in the case of Rolando Cruz, who was charged with and convicted for the 1983 murder of Jeanine Nicarico. Cruz was sentenced to death, but that was later overturned, and he was freed, but only after evidence surfaced that three former county prosecutors and four sheriff’s officers fabricatred evidence, and conspired to frame Cruz.

Birkett was not involved in the original prosecution, nor was he among the prosecutors who argued against overturning the appeal on several occasions during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Jim Ryan was State’s Attorney. But he was State’s Attorney in 1998, when Cruz had his last retrial, and he opposed any change of verdict.  Birkett is also a strong advocate of the death penalty, and opposes Governor George Ryan’s current moratorium; Madigan also supports the death penalty, but supports the moratorium. Birkett, however, encountered a tricky situation when he advocated a life sentence – not the death penalty -- for Marilyn Lemak, the Naperville mother who was convicted of  killing her three children. Had he sought death, he would have been attacked as being too harsh; but Madigan surely can’t blast him not for being too soft.

Birkett, unlike Madigan, has a record of prosecutorial achievement, and he won his primary confortably over Bob Coleman, 514,946-288,829. Coleman spent heavily on cornball TV ads, with minimal impact; he got only 35.9 percent. Coleman engaged in no negative attacks, so Birkett came out of the primary in fine shape.

The first post-primary poll put Madigan ahead of Birkett by a 47-40 margin. That’s not good news for Madigan, since she is now very well-known, while Birkett is still largely unknown. She should be up by a much bigger margin. As detailed in the adjoining vote chart, Ryan won big in 1998 against Miriam Santos – another flawed female Democrat from Chicago (although Santos had not been indicted and convicted at that time) – by taking 77.8 percent of the vote in the collar counties, 66.7 percent in the Cook County suburbs, and 67.9 percent of the vote Downstate, on his way to a statewide margin of  783,802 (60.9 percent). Ryan got only 30 percent of the Chicago vote, carrying several Northwest Side wards; Santos won 88.3 percent of the black vote. To win, Birkett must replicate Ryan’s 1998 gameplan, and win the collar counties, Downstate, and the Cook County suburbs by not more than 10 percent less than Ryan did.

My early prediction: Once voters become more familiar with Birkett, his support will climb. He’ll peel off some current pro-Madigan voters, and capture the bulk of the undecideds. For most voters, the office of Attorney General rises above politics and gender. Competence is the criterion. Unless Madigan can somehow show Birkett to be unfit for the job, which means launching a negative TV blitz this summer, she will lose…but it will be close.