With hopes of wringing some Democratic presidential convention delegates out of Barack Obama's home state, officials for Hillary Clinton's campaign said today they will bring paid staff into Illinois starting next week en route to the Feb. 5 primary.
Though the numbers of paid workers aren't known at this point pending the results of this weekend's Nevada caucuses and the work going on for the South Carolina Democratic primary, their jobs are to try to buttress a volunteer force of congressional district leaders who helped organize the Clinton campaign's delegate slates.
jotham stein got the endorsement of harry katz, dean of cornell university's school of industrial and labor relations, which i failed to mentioned before.
there's been a slew of news in this race, for everybody running. rep. lipinski got the afl-cio endorsement [PDF] and the afscme endorsement. this isn't a surprise given the association of speaker madigan with lipinski, and madigan's closeness with the unions. lipinski also got the endorsement of pipefitters local 597.
mark pera got the endorsement of NARAL/Pro-Choice America as well as the endorsement of forrest claypool, who won almost 70 percent of the vote in four il-03 townships during the 2006 primary. pera was also endorsed by reformers ald. manny flores, ald. brendan reilly, ald. scott waguespack, st. sen. dan kotowski, st. rep. john fritchey, and mwrd commissioner debra shore.
You Don't Have to be a Rocket Scientist to Run for Congress -- But It Can't Hurt
former senator warren rudman famously said that there are three kinds of senators: about a third of the senate know why they are there, know what they want to do and understand how to accomplish it. another third, he opined, know why they are there, know what they want to accomplish, but are clueless to how to do it. and the final third, he generously noted, may not even know why they are in congress. and they wouldn't know what they wanted to do or how to accomplish it, if they did. the same thing, it seems to me, can be said of the house.
which brings me to bill foster. bill foster is a physicist. physicists like to understand how things work. that's what physics is, describing how the world works. physicists understand systems -- even systems where humans are the primary components. which is a good thing, if you want to see people in congress who are capable of accomplishing something. this was all made clear when bill foster sat down with a group of bloggers on saturday to talk about his run for congress.
simply put, bill foster isn't your typical politician. good politicians know that voters are lazy (aka stupid). they want quick, simple answers to their questions, answers that they can put up on the right self in their mental cupboard. voters trust (for the most part) politicians to find the answers, they even hope that the answers politicians find are the right answers, but they don't necessarily want to know about the dirty work involved. 'just get it done,' is the message that uninformed voters send to the politicians they elect. 'we don't need to know how you do it,' is the undercurrent to that message.
The contest will be one of the most expensive in the nation. Third quarter fund-raising reports gives Seals $498,872 cash on hand; Footlik, making his first run for office, has a $414,018 warchest. The winner faces Kirk, who has stockpiled $1.5 million and has no primary opponent.
"The issue here," carol marin says, "is whether the battle between Seals and Footlik will splinter Jewish voters, sap each campaign of cash and strength in the primary, and give Kirk the advantage he needs to capture a fifth term."
My name is Matthew Podgorski and I am running for the MWRD this year. I am running because I truly do want to do my part to help the environment and I think I have some pretty solid ideas on how to change the MWRD's role.
But I know in the bottom of my heart, the real reason I am running for public office in the first place is because of my hatred of wasteful, corrupt, arrogant bureaucracy.
I have been studying politics and public administration my whole life. In fact, I currently serve as adjunct professor of public administration at NEIU. When I see how a private company, like my company -- Kraft Foods, operates and treats its customers, I can't help but become angry at the way the government operates and treats its customers.
if media was all that mattered, the race against rep. lipinski would be lopsided. lipinski has generated a lot of negative publicity in his run-up to re-election, and you'd expect someone to take advantage of it. the incumbent faces a mini-scandal, one that doesn't particularly help his image as he tries to separate himself from his father (who handed him the seat in 2004). kristen mcqueary lays out the reasons for the lipinski scandal, and rich miller, of the capitol fax blog, summarizes:
Bill Lipinski games the system to get his kid elected to Congress. The son keeps his dad's cronies on the payroll, and two of them (includng one who remains on the payroll) are getting payments from his father's childrens' charity fund, which doesn't appear to be doing a lot of charitable work except for Dan Lipinski's benefit. Dan shares an office with his daddy's lobbying firm and even pays that firm for advice, but he insists he never talked with daddy about a project that the elder Lipinski is working on.
mark pera has emerged as the early netroots favorite. he's demonstrated that he's serious about this race, lining up pat botterman as his campaign manager and julie sweet as his deputy. pera has gotten the dfa endorsement and convinced the local dfa groups (all outside the 3rd) to send in the troops. pera just announced the endorsement of citizen action, which has been a bellweather endorsement in the past.
roll call was in the area this weekend, interviewing all the candidates in the 10th and 14th congressional districts. these two primary battles are getting national attention.
it may not have helped jay footlik, however, for this article to appear while the national reporter was in town:
October 21, 2007
BY CAROL MARIN Sun-Times Columnist
We already know Illinois is going to be pivotal in the battle for Congress. Republican Rep. J. Dennis Hastert of Plano is resigning; Democrat Melissa Bean of Barrington still has a target on her back.
But will Democrats sabotage their own chances in at least one of six defining Illinois races, five of which are now controlled by Republicans?
I'm talking about the 10th Congressional District and the seat held by four-term incumbent Rep. Mark Kirk of Kenilworth, a moderate Republican.
it doesn't take a lot to remind me that chicago is a center of confrontational politics. i will always remember that morton blackwell told students at the leadership institute to read saul alinsky's "rules for radicals." blackwell's purpose was not only to provide insight into the liberal mind (which we would argue about) but to demonstrate the kind of tactics that he believed conservatives needed to fight. careful observers would recognize many of the his tactics as reactions to what one finds in alinsky's works.
the history of confrontational politics in chicago and community-based organizing is truly fascinating -- especially to an outsider. but i have been kind of surprised by the kind of confrontational politics that i'm hearing about from supporters of dan seals. they have an apparent desire, compulsion, even, to overtly confront the democrat who parachuted into the 10th, making this a contested primary.
now a word of caution. while we have many indicators that jay footlik will run against dan seals in february, i still have not yet heard that he's been passing petitions. granted, tammy duckworth didn't circulate petitions until the last month, but she relied on machine elements out of chicago to help her pass. it doesn't appear that footlik has the same resources to begin circulating at the last minute. it seems odd that no one's heard of footlik circulating petitions, especially outside an event in his district where 750 democrats showed up.
