April 2009

ICFST Loon of the Day: Tom Roeser

Holy shit. I hope someone has taken away Roeser’s keys to his car:

 

2. Chris Kennedy.

Rather pathetic isn’t it, Chris Kennedy’s desire to run for the U. S. Senate. I always thought of him as the best of Bobby’s kids but I guess the prospect of picking up the fallen, tattered Kennedy flag now that pro-abort Catholic Uncle Teddy has petered out literally and figuratively…trying to outlive the memory of his depravity of allowing that girl to drown by slow degrees in his upturned car…and pro-abort Catholic Caroline with her uh-uh-uh and ya-know, ya-know, ya-knows bombed out with the media (of all things)…and was rejected yet again…thankfully….thankfully…when the Vatican gustily turned down this pro-abort very close pal of the minus-quantity dauphin prince legatee of the New York Times’ Pinch Sulzberger, as Obama’s ambassador to it.

The Illinois media is notoriously sycophantic to Dem liberals and I can just see Philsy Ponce doing a back-flip on “Chicago Tonight” and un-spooling the old reels of JFK, Bobby and Teddy while wiping glycerin tears away…and the grimacing Joel Weisman and his trained seals on “Chicago Weak in Review” predicting a Return of the Dynasty. Speaking of trained seals last night Blondie presided over a typically balanced panel on Obama’s first 100 days. Now can you guess who she had? The all-time Obama black cheerleader Laura Washington for whom a stray conservative thought would produce an aneurism…Alan Gittelson of Loyola who frowned intellectually, pondered dramatically and announced that Obama is an all-time great…Blondie herself asking slanted lefty questions…and one token, a pretty good conservative talk show host named Guy Benson.

 

Many people become bitter old cranks. Most just do it in private.

27 Percent Approval for Burris

The question being—who are the 27 %.

More interesting is that in an independent poll, Giannoulias shows a 38-26 margin over Schakowsky which is different from her poll released earlier in the week.

Schakowsky Favorability 42 – 8

Giannoulias Favorability 53 – 10

Where I would expect Jan to have the strongest numbers is with liberals, but Giannoulias leads in favorability (different from vote intention):
Schakowsky Favorability with liberals:  50 – 4

Giannoulias Favorability with liberals:  56 – 10

 

In terms of vote decision amongst liberals:
32 Giannoulias 28 Schakowsky 15 Burris

 

For Governor the vote decision is
45 Madigan 29 Quinn

and amongst liberals:

52 – 26

 

In both cases Schakowsky and Quinn and should be doing better with liberals given their past records.  In Schakowsky’s case it isn’t that great of a difference, but Quinn is showing remarkable weakeness.   In a perverse finding, Giannoulias does better with women than men, and Schakowsky does better with men than women in terms of favorability.

 

In terms of Burris he peaks at 48 % of the African-American vote in the poll meaning his first task would be to consolidate half of the African-American vote.  Despite Del Marie Cobb’s efforts, African-Americans just don’t see his election as all that vital to their interests.

We Don’t Want Nobody Nobody Sent

Carol Marin takes notice of the awful Illinois Democratic Party web site.

I swear to God that I didn’t pay her to write this column, but I would have offered.

 

On an impulse, I googled “Democratic Party of Illinois” the other day.

If you need a small, dark laugh, try it yourself.

Under the first listing, ildems .com, click on “candidates.”

Lord have mercy, what picture stares back at you but Gov. Rod Blagojevich! The address listed for Blagojevich is his Ravenswood political office, which the FBI bugged last fall, yielding some of the bleeping diatribes that led to his indictment.

And there’s Pat Quinn in a photo taken about 20 years and 20 pounds ago. He’s still listed as lieutenant governor.

Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Secretary of State Jesse White and Comptroller Dan Hynes are there, too. Hynes’ photo looks like it came from his high school yearbook.

State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, of course, was missing from the 2006 roster of candidates, thanks to Democratic Party Chairman Mike Madigan’s refusal to back him even though he had defeated Madigan’s handpicked candidate in the primary.

What’s stunning is that there actually have been elections since 2006. Just this month, a whole host of Democrats were running in municipal races. And Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley was fighting hard to win his way into Congress.

But you’d never know it by looking at information provided by the state Democratic Party.

The only contemporary posting is a reminder that Mike Madigan’s big spring fund-raiser is May 4 at the Island Bay Yacht Club in Springfield. Oh, and tickets are $150 a pop.

 

Academic papers have made fun of how bad the web site is.  Now, on the point of not allowing volunteers to easily volunteer–I think we can all agree that isn’t by accident.

Marin also made fun of the lack of Giannoulias in a June 2006 column as well.

More:

Then again, maybe Madigan’s operation has no need for all that outreach. After all, don’t Democrats control every state constitutional office, both houses of the General Assembly, run Chicago and dominate the formerly Republican suburbs?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Still, it’s curious to see such a Dark Ages setup for the state party. That is, unless you stop looking at it as a state party and see it as, in the words of one party strategist who requested anonymity, “an overgrown caucas run by the speaker of the House, Mike Madigan, to elect people Madigan sent.”

Maybe so. In recent elections, U.S. congressional contenders such as Bill Foster (14th) and Debbie Halvorsen (11th) didn’t get much of anything in the way of help from the state party. They won anyway.

But Dan Seals in the 10th didn’t win. He had to rely on the help of unions and other organizations, not the state operation, to try to unseat incumbent, Mark Kirk.

And just ask Tammy Duckworth how much assistance she got from the state party in 2006 against Peter Roskam. None. The state GOP provided a flood of campaign literature for Roskam. Madigan’s crew was missing in action for Duckworth.

“There is no Democratic Party of Illinois,” strategist Kitty Kurth said by phone Tuesday. “When I talk to my friends at the Democratic National Committee, they say our state chair won’t return their calls.”

 

And this is why many candidates have to recreate the wheel.  In fact, Durbin has created a semi-functioning shadow operation in the form of the County Chairs organization, though it’s obviously limited in what it can do.  State parties receives particular benefits under federal campaign finance law as well as better postal rates (the real reason Madigan wants to control the party).

Let’s be clear though, Mike Madigan doesn’t care about Members of Congress other than Lipinski and his dislike of Schakowsky.

From what I can gather, Madigan’s people have largely given up on any sort of improvement because they cannot figure out how to control it enough.  Which is too bad because Lisa could benefit greatly from a strong netroots operation.

Too obvious there?

 

Here are some suggestions I made back in 2005 about the web site.  Some of it is dated and I’d certainly put more emphasis on social media, but much of it stands up.

Steve Brown still isn’t including bloggers on the press release list (that should get me a smart ass response at least).

Most importantly though, the State Party has no e-mail database which is really the currency of campaigns.  The web site is primarily important in being a place to attrack people to visit a couple times and have voters offer up contact information.  Then the real value is being able to contact them again later for donations, help, GOTV, and the such.

 

Ahhhhh….it was nice to see that Republicans aren’t the only ones to set up a nice circular firing squad when Rich mentioned he might post some suggestions.

The first rule of Illinois Democratic politics is that if you want to get something done, don’t attack The Speaker’s people. You can cajole, maybe make some jokes, but make sure the message isn’t that the Speaker sucks. He doesn’t–and more on that later. But the second rule in this case is don’t be expecting the Speaker to be doing any blogger conference calls anytime soon. He doesn’t talk to the regular press very often, so let’s be realistic here.

I’m one of the loudest critics of the current complete lack of on-line presences for the Illinois Democratic Party, but I’m also keenly aware that a party that is in power such as the Democrats are in Illinois face a different type of challenge in on-line activism.

The first thing that needs to be figured out is what the hell is the online strategy supposed to accomplish. I’d love for the Party to become more inclusive in decision making, but let’s not get carried away here–fixing the on-line presence is a baby step on that issue. If successful, it might lessen concerns about grass roots activism that concerns some of the Party Leaders.

So what should the strategy be? The primary issue is how to frame the debate on issues. The perfect example of this is how Democrats in general and Trial Lawyers were outmaneuvered on tort reform. Madigan saved the day with a not bad bill, but the point should be to not get to that point and a big part of the way the Republicans did that was by setting the agenda. There was little talk of insurance regulation during the debate when that is one of the three legs of the issue, but instead ‘out of control’ litigation became the story.

The specific on-line methods are not as important as understanding the goal is to take control of the public debate and thus control the legislative agenda.

Blogs are often seen as the ultimate solution, but I recommend against it for the Party, at least for now. Blogs are hard to work out an interesting message especially when you are in power. Parties that have unified control of a State Government inevitably have several centers of power all with different policy agendas so trying to hard to set up a unified message on a Party blog is very complicated and what is likely to result is unlikely to be interesting.

Blogs work because they pull people in with consistent content that is worth seeking out. Instead, the Party should focus on making a serviceable site that is functional and pushing information through e-mail and other push technology.

To do that it will have to make a far better site–one that attracts people to it for functional reasons.

Let’s start with keeping it up-to-date. Every person visiting should be able to find their State Legislator in a list with a link to their official office, their e-mail posted and their campaign web site linked. Every Democratic candidate who wins a primary should get the same for their campaign web site. There should be a function or quick link to finding what Districts voters are in–sure other sites may do that, but the point is to make the place functional.

The front page should have a page to capture e-mail addresses and at least zip codes though preferrably snail mail addresses. Those e-mail addresses then go into a database that can be accessed by any Democratic Nominee as well as regular updates from the Party. There should be a volunteer sign up page–where someone can sign up to volunteer for Party activities whether it be phone banking or whatever. With that should be a series of options about how they can best participate.

There should be a donation page with suggested amounts and an amount identified as being a Democratic Party Member between $10 – $25. The point here isn’t to raise a lot of cash, but get Party activists to feel like they are a part of the Party. Belonging is important.

A section on recent news stories that make the Illinois Democrats look good. This is part of the messaging issue–highlight successes and make visitors realize something is going on and the Dems are responsible for it.

An issues page–and no not some ridiculous and useless page on the ‘Party Platform’. Platform, Schmlatform. Many issues cut differently in different areas so the key issues should be stressed here including things like economic security, health care, working families–that kind of thing–but with updates to them as stories evolve. A key aspect of this sort of page is making sure it isn’t just a placeholder, but actively updated with news stories or just updates on key bills.

An area that is designed to highlight key lege members. And when I say key I do mean leadership and such, but more importantly those in targeted races. Set up a system whereby they are given some space to highlight their activities—a good move here to create some buzz would be the use of Podcasts. I know–most people who use the internet still think Podcasting is something out a War of the Worlds or a new fishing fad. But the idea is simple–have a lege member talk about a key issue to their district and highlight it and perhaps incorporate it into their specific campaign site as well.

A calendar is also essential. Updating it regularly–with more than relatively big dollar fundraisers is critical. It’s a key reason for people to keep coming back to the site. I’d first suggest syndicating the calendar from affiliated groups like Illinois Democratic Network and Democracy for Illinois. This has a double advantage of covering far more events than the State Party can concentrate upon and including those groups in an important function while not giving away message control for the State Party. The State Party calendar should focus on Lege Member activities, federal officeholder events, Statewide Officeholder events and State Party Events.

In line with this–host more events that aren’t big dollar events in conjunction with such groups. Again, it doesn’t require the loss of message control, but it makes people feel a part of the party and it’s mission.

On messaging, if there aren’t good issues to focus on at the State level, there are always issues to tackle at the federal level. The Illinois Republicans are pretty good at using such issues to paper over local fights–and this should work with Democrats as well. If the State Party were to call for action on Karl Rove or to call for action on Social Security it can reach out while not necessarily aggravating differences within the Party when there isn’t a consensus for state issues.

Create a set of resource pages to local parties that are organized by region or some other intuitive manner so those looking to get involved at the County level can. In fact, combine this with the original e-mail intake and have an autoresponder that sends out an e-mail with the local information to the person who just signed up. Web links and e-mail when available, phone numbers and addresses when they aren’t.

Included in the resources should be activist groups also grouped by region–they should be secondary to the County Parties (this is after all the Democratic Party Web Site), but still prominent. Again, this creates goodwill without a lot of effort. Adding blogs and news sources isn’t a bad idea, though there are some downsides when someone jumps off a cliff with a crazy idea.

With Party Committee Members include pictures and brief bios–it personalizes the site. Just no pictures of Madigan with gavels (thanks for changing that at least).

Voting information–links to how to register, deadlines and election dates. Make this the place voters come to figure out such things. Needs to be very user friendly.

Include photos of Democratic events. It’s a small thing that people love.

Think about a letter to the editor page that allows party members to look at a prototype letter, write their own, and send it to their local paper—all without more than a few clicks.

Then do the requisite press release and e-mail archive page.

Get some graphics with people in them besides Barack Obama and a bunch white stiffs. And remember—No Gavels!

Too often, the discussion over on-line activism focuses on blogs. Blogs are one method, but for a State Party often very hard to pull off. The key to whatever is done is to give party activists something to do like
1) write a letter
2) Volunteer
3) Donate
4) attend an event
5) or something else.

and make it a resource when they have a question. Voters don’t know what district they are in so the current organization is virtually meaningless to the average person visiting the site. And people don’t know where to find information about voting, make it easy and they come back to the site for more information–and get the Party’s message thrown in for good measure.

By producing content to attract people to the site, the Party can then use the information collected to push information out. By making the site useful, people come back to use it again and get hit again with the message. Activists are given specific methods to be active at the same time message control is kept. By institutionalizing a system of support for Lege Members, targeted races can have the profiles of incumbents (and potentially challengers) raised.

Further, the party needs to work the blogs–include them on press releases and treat them as a regular member of the press. They, ahem, we aren’t, but it makes many feel special and that generates good will. Push stories to them–unlike regular reporters who get nervous that they are being used, bloggers like to do it often. I’ll have more on that later.

A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual

It’s pretty clear the purity of essence wing of the Illinois Circular Firing Squad Team (ICFST (GOP)) is fucking losing it.

Check out Roeser:

 

If Kirk decides and gets the party’s all-but-official nod, the party can kiss goodbye any hope that social conservatives will support Kirk. I divide Republican moderates as either pro-choice or pro-abort. Kirk has made no bones about the fact that he is a hard-left pro-abort. He supports not only abortion on demand but has spoken against the Born Alive bill which guarantees nutrition, comfort and medical care to babies born alive from botched abortions…which puts him squarely in Barack Obama’s pro-abortion camp. He supports partial birth abortion, public funding for abortion, total ban on parental consent and use of embryonic stem cells for experimentation. In short, where Jim Edgar could have been called pro-choice (he opposed partial birth abortion), Kirk is hard-line all the way.

It might be ameliorated if Kirk were to run for the U. S. Senate but as governor and leader of the party in Illinois, he would assuredly shut down any remaining pro-life dissent and would be a variant of Big Jimbo Thompson on the issue.

=========================

To my mind, a case could be made for Kirk running for the U. S. Senate and Gidwitz for governor. Unfortunately it appears that those who are planning a double-digit state campaign budget are not so inclined. Another possibility would be the former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Bob Thomas for governor.

Thomas is a deeply committed evangelical pro-lifer. I don’t see any great support for him either among the financial powers. They should be warned against thinking Bill Brady is the answer. All I can say is there is much to him which is faux. And much which can come out.

Evidently the powers that be think it would be a great sop if they were to back a pro-lifer well down the ticket…a Dan Rutherford for state treasurer. To them I say the role of state treasurer has nothing to do whatsoever with social conservatism. If they think slating State Rep. Jim Durkin for state AG would help, it won’t. Durkin is a pro-lifer in mien but is not known for either the intensity of his feeling or his association in any meaningful way with the movement.

The good news seems to be that the business types are on to Judy Baar Topinka who wants to run for her old post of state treasurer. Two reasons why she ought to be cut adrift and allowed to make do for herself without a massive influx of party funds. One, her complicity as state GOP chairman to cause Peter Fitzgerald to abandon any plan he had for reelection because she was cozy with anti-Fitzgerald-ites George Ryan and Speaker Dennis Hastert. On my radio show heard for 100,000 she steadfastly refused to endorse him…which she has shamelessly lied about ever since despite the fact that tens of thousands heard her.

Second: while running for governor she showed an idiosyncratic tendency to market herself as a flip, vulgar comedienne for the gossip columns…example: owner of a late pooch who, she says with her back-alley humor, “peed in 100 countries.” Her self-marketing as an attempted comedienne is based on her need to divert attention from her lamentable failure to master the fiscal issues notwithstanding her long service in the legislature and state treasurer. She is counting on her strident anti-conservatism to woo friends in the media. I could not vote for her and wrote in Stufflebeam. She has told a friend of mine that by her estimation in my writing and radio broadcasts I cost her 16,000 votes. Good. I hope so. As governor she would have shut down any conservatism, would have given us a tax increase, social permissiveness and the spectacle of her riding in gay rights parades and prattling about her doggy going wee-wee in numberless foreign countries. Gee, if I cost her the job I’ll take that Upstairs when I go as a recommendation.

 

Sir, we had to burn down the village to save it.  This level of batshit craziness is all over conservative Illinois blogs and despite Blagojevich and Stroger, it appears that such nuttiness will give Democrats a better chance than ever in 2010.

 

In another post, it gets better:

At the root is narcissism but also more than that. Barack Obama’s still largely unexamined (by the media) personal background presages deeper analysis. His is not a family tree but a bramble bush of inconclusive parentage devoid of familial or parental stability…which explains his unfeeling inability to even feign patriotism or loyalty when what is supposed to be his country is under attack by foreign enemies. Answer: it is not his country; he knows no loyalty to anyone by himself. He is a multi-layered ideological non-citizen of any country: an anomaly of confusion even to himself.

Barack Birth Certificate truthers are the new 9-11 truthers.

Purity of Essence Wing Is Happy To Get Rid of Spector

Goodbye Arlen! This is change we can believe in.

Bush, in his infinite poor judgment, backed him against Pat Toomey back in 2004. Polls show Tommey beating Specter easily in a Republican primary in 2010.

Like any self-serving rat- he jumped ship to save his useless political hide.

Will help the amnesty/pro open border advocates significantly. Yes, he was always one of them. But this will give the Dems even more power to cut off debate and shove it down our citizenry throats.

You can be assured that there will be even less of an open debate on this matter now that he is with the Democratics.

Senators Lauzen and Syverson Part of the Soros Conspiracy

Pot legalization passes Senate Public Health

Looks like George Soros has to be pleased with the progress of SB 1381 — legalizing pot for medical use in Illinois.  SB 1381 passed the Senate Public Health Committee today with Amendment #5 on a 6 to 2 vote.

  • Delgado (D)- yes
  • Noland (D) – yes
  • Schoenburg (D) – yes
  • Sterns (D) – yes
  • Syverson (R) – yes
  • Lauzen (R) – yes
  • Pankau (R)- No
  • Hunter (D) – No
If the Illinois Review didn’t exist, I’d have to invent it.  And good for Syverson and Lauzen–I expect the others to be right on the issue, but good for them too. 

Disagreeable Mediocrity as a Politician

Toobin on Burris:

 

During his long career in Illinois politics, Burris has encountered many of the state’s most influential figures, some of them principled risk-takers and some corrupt rogues. And it’s been clear that Burris belongs to neither category. He is a conventional politician, one guided far more by cautious self-interest than by ideological passion. His self-regard may be greater than that of some of his peers; he is especially known for the words of self-celebration carved into the wall of a mausoleum that is waiting for him in a Chicago cemetery. (The structure bears the inscription “Trail Blazer” and lists such accomplishments as being the first African-American undergraduate at Southern Illinois University to be an exchange student at the University of Hamburg, in Germany.) “He was a figure of fun, because he was highly egocentric,” Alan Dobry, a former Democratic ward committeeman in Chicago, said of Burris’s years as a local politician. “When he was in office, he had two aides who went around with him, and they were generally referred to as the ‘Rolaids.’ ” According to the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, a longtime student of Chicago politics, Burris “was a soldier, part of the machine. He’s not a distinguished politician. He’s not a powerful political thinker.” Of course, this description hardly distinguishes Burris from many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else.

I think the traditional view of Burris as a perfect fit in as a Soviet style functionary has given Burris a free pass for far too long.

 

At a minimum, Roland Burris was an incompetent boob.  Let’s look at how he left the Comptroller’s office (and some of the issues were never dealt with by Netsch either, but she was there for a couple years and then running for office.  Roland ran the office for 12 years with Loleta Didrickson and then Hynes cleaning the damn place up.

Auditor General Holland has been busting the chops of inept electeds for years and here is a story on the state of the Comptroller’s office in 1997:

 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)


May 31, 1997, Saturday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION 
Correction Appended

Comptroller Seeks To Regain $ 8 Million In Cemetery Funds

The Illinois Comptroller’s Office is seeking to recover more than $ 8 million in misspent cemetery trust funds that it is supposed to monitor, a state audit said Friday.

The problem is that until recently the comptroller’s office didn’t have enough control over the funds, according to the report from Auditor General Bill Holland.

The comptroller is responsible for licensing cemetery operators and making sure they properly administer trust funds that people pay into for future maintenance of graves, crypts or other cemetery services.

“Prior to 1995, the Office’s Cemetery Care and Burial Trust Department placed little emphasis on the quality or accuracy of information provided by licensees,” the audit said. “As a result, several situations arose whe re, although annual reports had been filed as required, substantial sums of money were improperly diverted from trust funds.”

Comptroller Loleta Didrickson agreed with the audit’s findings and has been working to fix the deficiencies, according to the audit and a spokesman for Didrickson. Laws adopted last year at Didrickson’s urging give her office more power to oversee the trust funds.

 

Where does this become important in Roland’s political career?

As a lobbyist he has done several years of lobbying for those very cemetery owners (August 1996 Comptroller’s Newsletter):

 

When someone purchases a cemetery plot from a licensed private cemetery, a portion of that sale is required to
be placed in trust so that the care of that plot will be perpetually provided.  There are similar trust requirements for funeral homes and other providers of pre-need service. The Comptroller has had the responsibility to regulate privately held funeral home, cemetery and burial trusts (excluding religious or fraternal) since 1972, but in those 23 years, only nine licenses have been revoked within an industry that’s grown from having trust funds of $2.8 million in 1978 to $667 mil- lion today, with projections that level will hit $1 billion in 1998.

An investigation of the cemetery and funeral industry conducted by the Comptroller’s Office revealed that some unscrupulous operators have raided cemetery care trust funds, removing monies intended to provide perpetual care for the cemetery and using those funds for unauthorized purposes.

In an attempt to protect the public from the greed and mismanagement of the few “bad apples” in the industry, the
Comptroller’s reform package estab lishes a two-tiered audit process that allows the Office to use private Certified
Public Accountants to more closely scrutinize those operations showing signs of financial difficulty.  It also makes explicit the authority to conduct investigations in cases of suspected fraud, to file civil suits on behalf of consumers, and  provides for the appointment of independent trustees to oversee the largest of trust funds (more than $500,000).

 

Add that to his close ties to the Blagojevich administration and the contracts he got from the state government during that time including soliciting a lobbyist close to Rod Blagojevich for state work.

The pattern or Roland Burris’ career is certainly not one of being a dynamic agent of change, but he’s far more connected to the trough of political favors and revolving doors than anyone was pointed out yet.  Certainly his ego overshadows other parts of his life, but his efforts to cash in on his public service since leaving office and being cozy with those who can deliver jobs and money to him have been going for some time.  He never effectively regulated an industry he oversaw during a period of explosive growth.  If anything, his incompetence kept him from being more effective at wringing money out of those he sought contracts and favors from.  His efforts to talk to the Blagojevich administration largely centered on finding jobs for family members or getting some work thrown his way.


Chris Kennedy?

Really:

 

Sneed has learned Chris Kennedy, son of the late U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy, may be this/close to entering the U.S. Senate sweepstakes from Illinois.

•    •    To wit: “Right now, it’s an 85 percent chance Chris is going to do it,” a top Kennedy source tells Sneed.

•    •    Poll ’em: Sneed is told Kennedy, who runs the Merchandise Mart, has commissioned Obama pollster John Anzalone — and has talked to media consultants Larry Grisolano and John Kupper, who now run the firm once headed by David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior adviser.

•    •    Translation: The poll, which is expected at the end of the week, “will give him a better lay of the land in this ever-changing race,” the source said.

•    •    The rationale: Top Dem party sources tell Sneed a Kennedy candidacy would bring instantaneous name recognition. “He’s also lived here for 25 years, is in his late 40s, comes from a business background, and has that Kennedy magic,” the source added.

•    •    The chat: Although the outcome of the poll would not be the only factor in whether Kennedy runs, word is Kennedy is concerned about media spillover from the drubbing his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, got during her ill-fated bid to get appointed to Hillary Clinton’s seat in New York.

 

The rationale is that he’s a rich guy with a famous name who thinks he’s entitled to the damn position.  We have enough dynasties in Illinois politics without importing one from Massachusetts.