By Harold Henderson
“She is in the mold of Abraham Lincoln,” press secretary Edward Marshall explained. “It’s how she thinks of herself. In Illinois she thinks most mainstream Republicans are in the mold of Abraham Lincoln. If you want to read it as excluding somebody, that’s your conclusion.” (As comptroller, Didrickson did strike a blow for “individual rights and freedoms” by instituting an employment policy of not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.) Lately she’s taken to calling herself a “mainstream conservative.”
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9 Didrickson’s press secretary says she would “exempt families making less than $30,000” from a new flatter income tax “and do away with loopholes for the rich.” All sources of income would be treated alike. (One of her best lines is that it should take only 20 minutes to fill out your tax form, and that would include driving it to the post office.) Yet Didrickson would leave one deduction in place–the deduction for home mortgage interest. Speaking of loopholes for the rich, I wondered, would she put any ceiling on that deduction so that it would no longer provide tax windfalls for owners of million-dollar homes? Marshall: “You’re the only reporter who has asked that question.”
9 Facing an opponent with a bottomless wallet (Fitzgerald has already spent more than $6 million), Didrickson nevertheless hasn’t endorsed any of the nostrums liberals have devised to force money out of politics. The only campaign finance reforms she supports are to raise or eliminate the $1,000 ceiling on individual campaign contributions–a limit established in 1974, when you could buy a new car for $3,000–and to have all contributions disclosed promptly on the Internet. (Fitzgerald’s position is the same, even though his proposals to take competitive bids on riverboat casino licenses have gone nowhere, arguably because they threaten the big campaign contributors who now hold them.)
In fairness, Didrickson may have something more substantial to say on these issues, but she seems determined to play it safe. She didn’t make herself available for an interview, nor would she respond to written questions. In my 18 years of covering Illinois political races for cloutless alternative weeklies, the only other politician so sequestered was downstate Republican Dan Crane, who was embroiled in a sex scandal when he ran for reelection to Congress in 1984.
Peter Fitzgerald isn’t bedeviled by moderation or caution. On the February 25 Chicago Tonight he got in a historical mini-lecture, much to moderator John Callaway’s displeasure. Fitzgerald said, “I’m very struck by the similarities between the pro-choice arguments on abortion and the arguments made by Stephen Douglas” on the issue of slavery before the Civil War. “Douglas said he didn’t know whether black people were persons or property. Therefore he would give his friends the right to choose. I say, if there is any doubt [whether life begins at conception and therefore abortion is murder] we should err on the side of humanity, lest we make a terrible mistake.”
No moderate–and few conservatives who aren’t independently wealthy–would repeatedly offend the Republican establishment by proposing that Illinois’ lucrative riverboat licenses be auctioned off rather than doled out to political favorites. No moderate would make a frontal attack on Republican kingmaker William Cellini of Springfield for failing to pay back state “loans” to his luxury hotel or Republican state treasurer Judy Baar Topinka for allegedly letting Cellini get away with it.
