By Ben Joravsky
And yet his candidacy is a long shot–a very, very long shot. It’s not just that he’s a first-time, relatively unknown candidate up against Congressman Glenn Poshard and former Illinois attorney general Roland Burris, two veteran campaigners with strong bases. And that he’ll have to contend with the double standard that benefits Republicans who are able to keep on winning by promising tax cuts they can’t possibly deliver, exploiting white fears of blacks, and doling out patronage to their pinstripe donors.
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On top of all that, Schmidt is a liberal (no matter how much he trumpets his support of the death penalty)–at least his base is the liberal wing of his party. As such he must confront the painful reality of liberalism in the age of Daley and Clinton. It has become a meaningless ideology, easily bashed and easily manipulated.
Like so many other Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Schmidt has a slick-talking North Shore lawyer named Dan Walker to partly blame for his woes. In 1972 Walker talked a lot of liberals who should have known better into helping elect him governor. Despite all of his antimachine blather, Walker was incompetent, disingenuous, and corrupt. He was defeated in 1976, and the Republicans have held on to the governor’s mansion ever since. For years the Democrats told themselves there was nothing permanent to the Republican hold, that it was merely a testament to the charisma of former governor Jim Thompson (who, for what it was worth, should have been a Democrat, since he was more liberal than most, at least when it came to supporting Chicago). But after Thompson stepped down voters overwhelmingly elected Jim Edgar, a bland moderate–and so went that theory.
At the moment, Schmidt has no solid issues on which to run. In his announcement he criticized Edgar for “a passive attitude born of 22 years of one-party rule of the governor’s office that has yielded an administration by autopilot.” But he offered no clear programs or themes–certainly nothing like Netsch’s bold plan on taxes. He even lost a chance to galvanize a growing suburban movement by blasting the state’s tollway authority.
The general predictions of Democrats who stayed behind to chatter with reporters is that Burris will take the black vote Schmidt needs to win, leaving Poshard as the front-runner, a depressing thought to any liberal. “In Poshard we’re talking about a downstate conservative who opposes abortion rights and gun control,” sighed one north-side elected official. “These are tough times for liberals. No one is as strong as we used to be. We have to find a breakthrough issue. It would be a disaster for the party if the nominee was Poshard.” o
