This pits two good candidates against each other for a chance to take on Mark Kirk in the fall. You know, Mark Kirk, the guy supporting a guy for President who suggests we stay in Iraq for 100 years. That guy.
Jay Footlik has gotten a bit of a bum rap from a lot of the activists in the area and is a decent guy. I’d love to see him stick around and run for another office after this cycle as I see a great guy with good political skills and experience.
He’s been doing decently with endorsements including a very nice one from the Lake Sun News.
That said, Dan Seals has put everything into this race and ran a very tough race with very little support from DCCC last cycle. Whomever the winner is of this primary will be running for a top tier seat targeted by DCCC while the RNCC goes broke. He’s smart, has great relationships within the District, and good name recognition for a challenger. On top of additional support, all indications are this year should be an even stronger year for Democrats as we add a bad economy to an unpopular war. Add death and disease and the Democrats will be running against the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
This race also features two the most problematic named candidates in a while with Footlik being obviously a bit fun to poke at, but Seals shares the name of a crappy country singer.
Policy wise there isn’t much difference and both are incredibly strong on Israel, a key issue in the District. Seals has a lot of loyalty amongst primary voters for running a strong campaign last cycle and I expect he’ll win Tuesday and by a decent margin. Jay has worked his butt off, but there isn’t a compelling reason for most primary voters to switch.
I’ll reiterate, I like Jay and I hope he runs for something in the area again, but I don’t see it happening Tuesday.
Footlik may be a good candidate on paper. But he has run a terrible campaign, given the dough he’s had to work with. His ads have said nothing, and he’s spent bad money to say it, using low-reach cable buys.
His communications have been remarkable only for their hokiness and their near-singular focus on his faith, including the now infamous “meshuganah” mail piece, for which Neil Steinberg rightly excoriated him (12/21/07 – no longer online).
And his most recent efforts in the free press seem almost designed to give Kirk a boost for November, feeding a semantics story about whether Seals “does” teach at NU, or “will” teach at NU, and bringing up the BS residency issue, which questions whether one part of Wilmette is out of touch with the other part of Wilmette because of an artificial, political boundary, outside of which Seals lives.
They are the kind of non-issues that couldn’t possibly pick up the 40 percent-or-so difference in vote, but give Kirk diversions from his shitty record of calling himself a “Main street” moderate, while voting with Bush most of the time.
Footlik has every right in the world to run for the 10th seat and run how he sees fit. But doing so only makes him a candidate, not a good candidate.
I agree. Footlik has run a poor, substance-less campaign with terrible communications. Seals is a substantive candidate with a real shot at defeating Kirk. Footlik may be okay, but the Democratic Party will need a more than okay candidate to win this district. Footlik has not demonstrated that he is it, and Seals has.
Seals is a substantive candidate? Have you met the guy? Did you watch any of the debates between the two? He talks in soundbites. Vote for him because you think he’s obama, ok, but don’t try and say the guy is substantive.
I strongly disagree Larry and feel you’re being unfair to the activists in the area, including me I suppose. You had to be here to watch it from a front row seat day in and day out as I was. Jay’s campaign was a massive empty shell forced into the mold some consultant told him was what folks wanted to see and it was very apparent from before day one that none of it came from the heart. He never seemed to have a genuinely passion for any issue. War was a good idea to him, just not being maintained well by the Bush Administration back in the summer of 2006. In 2007, suddenly he was always against the war from the beginning. He was The Founder of SAFE and that was supposed to be his major environmental and experience credential until we discovered the real founder of SAFE was his Lieberman campaign collegue Robby Diamond, and then he disavowed SAFE when we found out it advocated ANWR drilling. He ran around at events (even parades) next to an aid with a clip board who pointed out the important people Jay needed to talk to when Dan was talking to everyone. Jay was way over-consulted and way under-internally-driven. He has too much DC in him and as I advised him on my blog, needs to do a lot of soul searching to find out who he is and where his passions lie. Then, he should run again somewhere where he really wants to live and stand for something other than just winning. The IL 10th already has a congressman who stands for nothing but his own re-election in Mark Kirk.
ellen beth response best I have seen…She got the
footlik position and his persona down to the letter.