Today, Biss for Illinois announced Abby Witt, the former Managing Director of Organizing for America (OFA), as its campaign manager. An Evanston native, Witt was responsible for strategic planning and day-to-day operations of OFA, an organization dedicated to advancing a progressive agenda through grassroots action and training.
“If we want real change and to start solving problems in Illinois, we need to build a movement to take our state back from money and the machine,” said Biss. “Building a bold and progressive grassroots campaign requires an organizer leading us every day, and we got one of the best in Abby Witt.”
Witt has over a decade of experience working with campaigns and progressive causes. Prior to her work organizing at OFA, Witt played several roles in the Obama presidential campaigns and administration from regional field director in key states in 2008 to Director of Political Operations during Obama’s 2012 re-election bid. Most recently, Witt worked with the Chicago Public Schools where she focused on improving the connection between the community and the school district. Witt’s professional background also includes time at the Center for American Progress and the Common Purpose Project.
“Daniel Biss started in politics as a community organizer and understands that real change doesn’t come with the ability to cut a check, but with the ability to organize a community,” said Witt. “I’m honored to join a movement to take our state back from money and the machine, and set us on a new course.”
“There is no one or two structural changes that we need to have as a requirement. I’ve never said any one thing has to be there,” Rauner said Friday during the [WBEZ] radio interview. “But we need a package of changes, structural changes that materially move the needle.”
Yet to move the needle to satisfy Rauner, the governor said “term limits definitely helps big with that.”
“So far the Senate Democrats have proposed a term limit on Senate leaders through a rule change, just for the Senate leader would be term limited. Well what we need is term limits on everybody, on me, on everybody in the General Assembly. That’s not on the table as of now,” he said.
Such elusiveness has frustrated some lawmakers at the Capitol who are looking for clarity on what it will take to reach agreement. Democrats like [Rep. Lou Lang] suggested Rauner isn’t being up front when he’s preaching flexibility.
“As you’ve seen the last few days, he’s commented, ‘Well, I don’t really need this. I don’t really need that. I just need everyone to come together.’ But the truth is that’s not what he wants,” Lang said.
* The Question: Do you think Gov. Rauner really wants a deal to end the impasse? Click here to take the poll and then explain your answer in comments, please. Thanks.
As Illinois considers raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, up from the current $8.25, advocates say the changing face of the low-wage worker is a reason why the minimum wage must be a living wage.
But some businesses insist a hike could kill them, causing more harm to workers and communities than good.
Ed Schubert, whose family owns the Dairy Queen franchise where Simpson works, said he can’t imagine how he’d keep his shop afloat with a $15 minimum wage, a rate he thinks shouldn’t apply to his largely teenage staff. […]
One survey found Illinoisans to be skeptical. TSheets, a time-tracking software, polled 500 Illinois residents and found two-thirds said they believed the $15 proposal would fail and nearly half said they did not support it; another 20 percent were indifferent. But they didn’t support the status quo, either. Only 6.5 percent of those surveyed believed the minimum wage should stay at $8.25. A raise to $12 was the most popular choice.
That wasn’t really a poll. It was a Google Survey. Click here for the results. Note the partisan breakdown. It leans Democratic by just 2 points. That’s not your usual Illinois result.
There’s a state budget plan circulating Springfield circles that is 1. balanced, 2. hides no tax hikes, and 3. actually makes budget cuts.
We’re calling it the “McPlan” budget prescription. Too good to be true, you say?
Republican State Senators Kyle McCarter and Dan McConchie (the Mc’s - get it?) are staking their stellar political reputations on what they’re calling the “Taxpayer Bargain Budget Plan” in response to Senator Bill Brady’s “Grand Bargain Budget” that features an income tax hike to pay bills that are stacking up.
“The plan is very strong medicine for a very sick state,” McCarter and McConchie said last week in an op-ed about their proposal. “It forces the Legislature to make tough decisions between needs and wants. The ‘Taxpayer Bargain’ requires lower spending, with 10% across-the-board cuts at state agencies and departments. It simply asks for a dime of savings for every dollar spent.”
Contact your senator and representative and ask them to sign on as a sponsor to one of the 15 bills that are needed to deliver a no-tax-increase-balanced-budget to the governor.
Except, the package of bills hasn’t even been introduced yet. Right now, the “plan” is a press release.
* From the Illinois Policy Institute’s news service…
In the wake of a publicly funded Illinois university trying to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a graduation speaker in the midst of a fiscal crisis, a state lawmaker is reintroducing a bill that would ban the practice.
Local control! Except when we don’t like local control!
State Sen. Jacqueline Collins wants to bar insurance companies from using a person’s ZIP code when setting auto insurance premiums.
The Chicago Democrat said Monday she’ll add the ZIP code rule to her pending bill that would block insurers from considering a person’s credit rating. […]
A recent report published by ProPublica and Consumer Reports that focused in Illinois and three other states concluded 33 of 34 insurance companies analyzed in Illinois charged at least 10 percent more in ZIP codes where a majority of the residents are minorities. Additionally, six Illinois insurers charged rates as high as 30 percent higher in minority ZIP codes, the report showed.
The Insurance Information Institute trade group disputed the report’s findings after hiring an independent expert to review the data it’s based on.
A good friend of mine moved from her Chicago home east of Western Ave. in the Beverly neighborhood a few blocks west to the Mount Greenwood neighborhood and every one of her insurance bills went down.
* Wanna bet that a bill gets filed to address this issue?…
You may be sweating through the annual race to file your income tax returns on time, but the state of Illinois is still trying to get tax returns that were due two years ago from hundreds of the very state employees whose salaries you pay.
Two incumbent state lawmakers are among the 312 people who the Department of Revenue determined are getting state checks but still haven’t filed returns for calendar year 2014, which were due two springs ago.
Each has already been assessed a $250 penalty for delinquency and faces an additional penalty equivalent to 10 percent of any taxes owed.
[Christopher Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois] questioned the continued effectiveness of Rauner’s blame-Madigan excuses as the campaign for governor fully begins to take shape.
“Generally speaking, the governor is held responsible, the chief executive of a unit is held responsible, by the public. That’s what we know about public opinion. It’s a pretty simplistic view of the world. And as time goes on, he’s got to take responsibility for that. Maybe he can effectively blame somebody else like Madigan or whoever, but that’s not normally what works,” Mooney said.
Asked about his ability to work with veteran Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan, Pritzker said governors “don’t get to choose … who the speaker is.”
“I’m an independent thinker and independent leader. I have been my whole life,” he said.
Rauner, Pritzker said, is seeking a second term by asking people to forget about his first term.
“He’s now campaigning for re-election pretending the last 2 1/2 years didn’t happen, as if to say it’s his agenda going forward, but we should just forget that 2 1/2 years have gone by,” Pritzker said of Rauner.
Oswego Willy’s favorite line in comments is “Governors own.”
And that’s normally true, as Mooney says. But this isn’t a normal state. Speaker Madigan is phenomenally unpopular here. He is every Illinoisan’s favorite bogey man - across the political spectrum and in every demographic. For crying out loud, the most recent Paul Simon poll had Rauner out-polling Madigan in Chicago.
So, all you gotta do is point the finger at Madigan and millions of Illinoisans don’t have to even think before they nod in agreement. It’s easy peasy.
* But in the wake of his attempt to kill off the Senate’s grand bargain, Rauner became the bad guy, which is why he’s now attempting to pin the blame on Madigan for its failure and praising the Senate Democrats.
And he did it again today in the Quad Cities…
.@GovRauner heaps praise on Senate Democrats at QC Chamber event. Says they want a balanced budget.
This reset appears to be a tacit acknowledgement that he lost the spin war in the Senate, so the governor is now trying to bring the debate back to more favorable turf: Speaker Madigan.
* Will it work? It certainly did during legislative campaigns last year, but it’s arguably tougher now that there are Democratic candidates zapping the governor from all sides.
On the other hand, the administration has almost no legislative accomplishments they can point to. Rauner’s always talking about the stuff he has done on his own and uses that to show how he could even greater things if it wasn’t for that Madigan dude.
“Blame Madigan!” is really the only thing they have in their arsenal right now. So Madigan is being painted as the “real” incumbent with Rauner as the good guy outsider tryin’ his gosh-durned best to change Illinois for the better.
Those of you who have been around a few years will remember how things used to be at the Chicago Transit Authority. Every year or two, the agency would suffer one of its inevitable financial crises. Without enough cash to pay the bills, whoever was the boss at the time would throw a five-alarm news conference, vowing to shut half the el stops, limit bus service to daylight hours every other Tuesday, and otherwise force everyone to walk 10 miles to work.
Eventually, the CTA’s financial situation stabilized. But the lesson of “let’s hold our breath until we turn blue and scare the bejabbers out of everybody” apparently was not lost on Forrest Claypool, the ex-CTA boss who now runs Chicago Public Schools and is threatening to shut down CPS almost three weeks early in June because he can’t pay the bills. He and Mayor Rahm Emanuel loudly blame the shortfall on Gov. Bruce Rauner, who they say reneged on a deal to provide $215 million for CPS pensions.
There’s merit to Claypool’s claim, although the situation is more complicated than he suggests. But I have come to suspect that his threat to toss the kiddies out onto the mean streets isn’t real as much as a means to whip up parents to contact their lawmakers and demand that CPS get that $215 million tout de suite! […]
can’t see Emanuel raising property taxes further. Nor can I see him following Lewis’ advice to “go where the money is” and hit up the rich and/or bring back the hated employee head tax. And the tax-increment financing program just doesn’t have the $400 million-plus in excess cash that would legally be needed to give CPS $215 million right now.
That leaves borrowing, which would be extremely expensive, given CPS’ abysmal credit rating, but perhaps possible in small amounts. And/or a shorter early recess, more layoffs of those hated CPS bureaucrats or a delay of a few weeks in a huge $721 million pension payment CPS is scheduled to make by June 30. In other words, something ugly, short-term and unsustainable. Somehow, it fits at CPS.
Also, CPS’ budget is so opaque it’s difficult to tell if they’re being honest about their finances.
So do you want footage of Schakowsky, Quigley and a reluctant Biss doing the Chicken Dance from the Tax Day Rally?
But of course, I replied. A dancing gubernatorial candidate is always a fun post, especially so when it’s attempted by a very, um, non-loose guy like Daniel Biss.
* I allowed commenters to rate the state spending cut proposals from the Democratic gubernatorial candidates last week.
* Here’s Juice on Ald. Ameya Pawar’s proposal to get rid of the state subsidy for Sox Park…
If the hotel/motel tax revenue is not sufficient to meet the debt service, the City of Chicago then becomes on the hook for the payments (which many on here are probably fine with, but a Chicago Alderman probably shouldn’t be).
Nice talking point, but not likely doable.
* Evanstonian on Sen. Daniel Biss’s long soliloquy …
Definitely laughed at Biss’ bold plan to save the taxpayers $138,000/year. Nice work, progressive champ.
Also, I asked for “one state spending program that you/your candidate would cut or reduce if elected,” and Leslie Munger’s salary isn’t exactly a spending program, unless you lump it in with patronage hiring.
* Arthur Andersen on Superintendent Bob Daiber’s proposal to abolish CMS…
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, CMS manages a handful of the more difficult programs in State Government. So, when we abolish it, does every agency procure their own healthcare? Will we see “streamlined procurement” like DHS and the empty warehouse? Let every agency decide what kind of vehicles they like without the advantage of buying in bulk?
Good point, but as another commenter mentioned, CMS charges agencies huge fees to do their purchasing, which artificially inflates agency costs in order to subsidize CMS’ operations.
* Chris Kennedy wants to merge the comptroller and treasurer’s office, so that qualifies as a cut, albeit a tiny one.
* Nobody really weighed in on Pritzker’s actual proposal, which was basically an “ounce of prevention” type thing. He wants to spend more money on certain programs in order to save money. There is a growing body of evidence to support his claims (click here for an informative NYT article on this very topic), but I asked for a specific programmatic cut. So, he didn’t answer the question.
It was kind of a silly story because the final deadline for passing House bills out of the originating chamber isn’t until April 28th. The Senate has the same deadline for passing its own bills over to the House. Those deadlines weren’t even mentioned in the story, by the way.
And it’s more than a little ironic that the ILGOP would use this angle since the most important legislation of the year was derailed in the Senate by Gov. Rauner.
Gov. Bruce Rauner: The bad news is the House Democratic leadership has been sending over some of their lieutenants and some of the leaders of their special interest groups that fund them over to attack the Senate Democrats — and try to blow up the grand bargain. That’s what’s been happening over the last six weeks. And I feel bad for Senate President Cullerton and some of his Senate Democrats. […]
Tony Sarabia: Where did you hear that about House Democrats, because this is the first time that we’re hearing this — that they’re sending over, as you say, special interests to block …
Rauner: You should check with the Senate Democrats about the pressure they’re getting. President Cullerton has been under relentless pressure. Special interest groups are beating him up. Senate Democrats are feeling a lot of pressure. In fact, I’ve been told that several — I won’t name names right here on this program — but several of the Senate Democrats have decided, boy, it’s not worth the pressure they’re getting. They’re pulling back off the grand bargain and not wanting to negotiate anymore.
Cullerton spokesman John Patterson questioned Rauner’s assertion of House Democratic involvement.
“I don’t think they had anything to do with … Republican votes for the budget deal disappearing overnight,” he said.
According to Patterson, the full quote was “I don’t think they had anything to do with all but one of the Republican votes for the budget deal disappearing overnight,” a reference to Senate Republican Leader Christine Radogno’s lone support in the face of the governor’s opposition.
Aside from Radogno, the only people in the Senate who are standing against the groups and people who fund their campaigns are Democrats. Not all of them, for sure, but most.
It’s not just that universities create opportunities by educating students; they create opportunities by their very existence, especially in places without other major industries. As long as the budget impasse scares students and parents away from its schools, the state loses out on both.
“We had a net loss of 16,000 students last fall who went to school out of state. An enhancement of the MAP program might have kept some of those folks in state,” said [Illinois State University President Larry Dietz]. “Imagine if we kept just half of those 16,000 students. Just think what 8,000 students would have done for all the institutions in the state. 16,000 who left means conservatively $10,00 in tuition and fees that is crossing the state line. That’s $160 million a year.” […]
“The biggest issue around the leaving is the human capital and the intellectual capacity that those individuals take with them. If you go out of state you reduce dramatically the probability that person returning in state to start their business, serve a not for profit, whatever that might be. You may never get that human capacity back. That to me is the worst part of all of this.” […]
Eastern Illinois University President Davis Glassman, without referring to the governor by name, said there “has been much talk of growth needing to be a major element” of the changes the state needs.
“EIU agrees wholeheartedly and we would point out that our greatest opportunity for growth as a state will be through supporting the personal growth of our more than 12 million residents,” as in improving Illinois by investing in Illinoisans, he said.
“We take students from all backgrounds and circumstances and help them identify where they can make the most significant contributions,” said Glassman. “We then train them and arm them with the analytical skills necessary to improve not only their own circumstances but those of their communities and beyond.”
* Biss was clearly a star of the show, but the march didn’t get a whole lot of coverage…
Large protests rarely begin with the Chicken Dance, but Saturday’s Tax March in Chicago’s Richard J. Daley plaza was an exception.
The march — attended by thousands of protesters — called for President Donald Trump to release his tax returns. It was one of about 200 such marches held across the country ahead of Tax Day on Tuesday. U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and State Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Evanston) spoke, as did Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.
Democratic governor candidate J.B. Pritzker on Sunday accused the media of trying to divide the primary field into categories of establishment and progressive contenders and said he’s firmly in the progressive camp despite his immense wealth.
“Let’s be clear that it’s the media that’s decided to break it down into an establishment versus progressive. I’m a progressive,” the billionaire investor and entrepreneur said on WGN AM-720 in describing his work on child care, education, social justice and job creation.
“There’s nobody running in this race and nobody on the other side — for sure, the governor — who’s created jobs like I have. So job creation is hugely important. It’s something I’m running on. I don’t know what you want to call that. I call that good for the state,” he said in reference to founding the private investment firm the Pritzker Group and the tech incubator 1871.
Pritzker is seeking the Democratic nomination for the chance to take on Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner along with another wealthy rival, Chris Kennedy of the iconic political family. Two others seeking the nomination — 47th Ward Ald. Ameya Pawar and state Sen. Daniel Biss of Evanston — have warned Democrats they should not try to combat Rauner’s wealth by nominating a wealthy candidate and have sought support among populist progressives in the party.
We’ve had four cycles in a row where the Democratic candidate attacked the Republican candidate for being a rich white guy (Quinn vs. Brady, Obama vs. Romney, Quinn vs. Rauner, Clinton vs. Trump). It’s what they do, and it’s worked more often than not in this state, so Pritzker is in for the same treatment.
Pritzker is in Springfield and Champaign today…
JB Pritzker to tour the Illinois Coalition for Community Services and learn about how the organization has adapted without a state budget. ICCR is a member of the Illinois Collaboration on Youth, an organization that serves as a collective voice for young people and community-based providers.
He’s also apparently doing a lot of social media advertising…
Iroquois County Democrats are already on board with former University of Illinois board chairman Chris Kennedy as their party’s nominee for governor in 2018.
The party’s central committee endorsed Kennedy last Tuesday — more than 11 months before the March 20 primary election.
“It was the initiative of the people on the committee,” said Dale Strough, party chairman. “Even though it is early in the campaign I think we have a pretty good idea of the field, who is running and the basic information and who we think is the best candidate.”
Strough said there was discussion about making the unusually early endorsement, “but in the end it was unanimously approved.”
Illinois House Democrats will launch a social media campaign to promote candidates who are lifting up the middle class, and push back against Republican politicians who continue pushing an agenda that protects corporations and corporate CEOs at the expense of Illinois’ families.
Democratic Majority’s Lifting Up Illinois campaign can be found at facebook.com/LiftingUpIL and twitter.com/LiftingUpIL. The pages will share news and information on House Democrats’ efforts to advance aggressive economic reforms that strengthen the middle class, grow the economy and help Illinois businesses compete.
“Governor Rauner and Illinois House Republicans are failing to do their jobs. They remain focused on promoting a corporate agenda that hurts middle-class families in order to boost the profits of big businesses. House Democrats want to rewrite the rules so we can protect working families, and we plan to share our own message about lifting up Illinois, not tearing it down,” said Steve Brown, spokesman for the Democratic Majority. “We agree Illinois must do more to create jobs, but cutting the wages of middle-class families and stripping away workplace protections to boost corporate profits isn’t real reform. House Democrats have a clear vision for revitalizing our economy and creating jobs, and we look forward to promoting our message and holding accountable those who stand with corporate interests over working families.”
While Gov. Rauner and House Republicans continue to stand by their corporate agenda, House Democrats are fighting for economic reforms to grow the economy and build a stronger middle class. To this end, House Democrats are working to put more money in the pockets of working families by expanding middle-class tax credits and raising the minimum wage. Efforts by House Democrats are also being made to level the playing field for Illinois’ small and medium-sized employers while closing loopholes that allow big corporations to avoid paying any taxes at all.
Not much of anything at either of those two links yet. We’ll see how this develops. Any suggestions?
* From a full-page newspaper ad that ran October 14th and signed by dozens of pro-choice Republicans and Democrats including Diana Rauner herself, who helped personally pay for the advertisement…
The only difference between Bruce Rauner and Pat Quinn on reproductive rights is the issue of parental notification. Pat Quinn opposes parental notification, and Bruce Rauner favors it.
In accordance with his beliefs that healthcare should not be predicated on income, Governor Quinn supports legislation restoring abortion coverage under the state Medicaid plan.
About 20 Republican lawmakers sat down with Rauner in recent weeks to deliver a message on the abortion legislation: if you want us to support you in your quest for reelection, veto HB40. The meeting came at the urging of social conservatives who wanted a discussion with the governor about his intentions. The bill has been best known as a way to abolish a “trigger law” on the books now in Illinois that would make abortion illegal in Illinois if Roe v. Wade is overturned. However, language in the bill would also allow public funded abortions under Medicaid and state health plans. Social conservatives adamantly oppose both aspects of HB40.
‘Social conservatives have not asked for much’ — “They asked to meet with him and communicated how important this was and how this would be an indication of whether he was going to support a lot of people who got him elected the first time. I think that’s a fair proposition,” state Sen. Kyle McCarter told POLITICO last week. “I mean, the message has been delivered very clearly. I hope he’s listening to that. The social conservatives have not asked for much. We tolerated a lot and this is one thing that we do expect in order to support the governor in the next election.”
Madigan’s Tax Hike Puppets
Pawar, Pritzker, Kennedy and Biss Want Tax Hikes Without Reform
Democratic candidates for Governor are working overtime to court Mike Madigan’s support, meeting with Madigan insiders and conversing with the Speaker himself.
They’re even going so far as to copy his tax hike agenda.
Pawar, Pritzker, Kennedy and Biss want to raise your taxes without reform, just like Madigan.
Gov. Bruce Rauner’s proposed 2018 budget would eliminate or significantly cut funding in at least 40 areas, a new analysis finds.
Those include after-school programs, immigrant services and mass-transit subsidies, according to the Associated Press analysis.
Still, those cuts collectively would result in only $242 million in savings — one-half of 1 percent of what the state government spends in a year.
That illustrates how much more cutting would need to be done to make a real difference for the state, whose financial crisis has worsened over the course of a two-year stalemate between the first-term governor and legislators led by Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago.
* It also illustrates how the governor’s critique of the Senate’s grand bargain in this early March AP report is so hollow…
[Gov. Rauner] denied pressuring anyone and said Tuesday he opposes the package, negotiated by Democratic Senate President John Cullerton and Republican Leader Christine Radogno, because it spends too much.
“From what I’ve been told, based on what’s in the package so far, they don’t make any real spending cuts,” Rauner said. “So the budget’s not balanced. That’s one challenge. I’ve said please try to get that done - that’s pretty critical.”
“When you’re governor, you’ve got to step up to the plate, you’ve got to make a proposal for a balanced budget. That’s the requirement. And then you’ve got to sit down and negotiate if the folks that you need to work with disagree with you on points,” [Pritzker] said.
“Instead, what did he do? He went into the room. He said, ‘Great, lay all of your ideas on the table.’ They did. Then he walks out of the room and lambasts all the people in the room. And then he walks back into the room and says, ‘Great, let’s keep negotiating.’ And then he walks out of the room and lambasts every one of the proposals and then walks back into the room. And that’s his idea of negotiating,” Pritzker said.
Last week, Rauner spent two days touring the state on a campaign-funded tour. He blamed Democrats for stonewalling on his economic agenda.
As you know by now, Gov. Bruce Rauner toured the state for 2 days last week. He denied that the tour had anything to do with the 2018 election, but it was pretty darned clear that he and his team were tuning up the band for the big show down the road.
Campaign funds not only paid for the tour, but political money was used to promote in it advance. I’m told Rauner’s advertising on social and online media served more than a million impressions in the days leading up to the fly-around.
And like a musician touring to promote a new album, Rauner played up his latest hits. The “Chicago Machine Democrats” just want to “duct tape” the state’s problems instead of fixing them. Rauner’s latest TV ads, paid for by a “dark money” subsidiary of the Republican Governors Association, feature him in a pristine workshop using duct tape to explain how Springfield politicians don’t ever really fix problems.
Whatever he lacks in governing abilities, there’s no doubt that Gov. Rauner is a master at laying out a very simple, popular and easy-to-understand message and then staying on that message no matter what.
During his Peoria appearance, Rauner slammed the House Democrats’ stopgap budget as just “taping over our problems – duct taping cracks in our system.” The only thing missing was the bright, sharply pressed flannel shirt he wore in the TV ad.
As with all established bands on tour, the governor also played popular tunes from his recent albums. Since about the beginning of the year, when he was asked by a reporter to grade his first 2 years in office, Rauner has repeatedly pointed to his own successes at unilaterally cutting unspecified waste from the system (which plays right into the hugely popular notion that waste is the state’s biggest problem) and then contrasted that with the obstructionism of the “Madigan Democrats” in the General Assembly.
“They’ve created the worst crisis of any state in America,” Rauner said of the Democrats while speaking in Springfield. “On things that I can control, we’ve done wonderfully. Where the General Assembly has blocked progress, they’ve made the problem worse.”
Rauner even brought back a line from his February budget address, when he encouraged the Senate’s leaders to hammer out a grand bargain. He spoke about that effort as if he’d never actually knocked the grand bargain off the rails in March.
And, of course, he brought out the old standards that he’s been playing for years: property tax freeze, term limits and becoming “much more pro-growth, pro-business, pro-investment, pro-job creation,” as he said in Rockford.
The Democratic candidates, for their part, stuck to their #DoYourJob theme in response to Rauner’s tour, saying the governor should be getting a budget deal done rather than campaigning. None mentioned that the House and Senate are in the midst of a 2-week spring break, so doing a deal or even meeting with the other leaders probably wouldn’t be possible. Also, governors often use spring breaks as an opportunity to hit the hustings. This is nothing new.
Much of the Chicago-based print media focused on the fact that Rauner denied he was campaigning while obviously campaigning. But they never put that into the broader context of the governor’s habit of saying one thing (cheerleading the Senate’s grand bargain) while doing another (killing the Senate’s grand bargain).
Channel 7, the most-watched television station in Chicagoland, ran a purely positive piece.
“I want all of you to have a better future, I want your children to have great schools, and I want your salaries to go up,” Rauner said during the Chicago station’s report. There was no mention of the fact that none of that has happened since he became governor, and there is no foreseeable time when any of it will happen as long as we have this never-ending gridlock.
Rauner also appeared via phone on several talk radio programs during his tour and faced mostly softball questions from conservative hosts. Even conservative activist Dan Proft, who has sharply criticized the governor on his radio program since the start of the year, allowed Rauner to endlessly rattle on about his main talking points, duct tape and all, without much of a peep.
For those on Rauner’s side, this was a good tour. For those on the other side (and polls show there are a lot of them), well, they wouldn’t like it anyway.
Those in the middle probably got the message that the governor and his team wanted to send, with a big assist from the media.
