Just how long until he goes up in flames?
A Gidwitz family company manages a hellhole of an apartment complex in downtown Joliet. Gidwitz also partially owns the building. Congressman Jerry Weller, a fellow Republican, recently told the Daily Southtown that the property is an “unsafe, unhealthy, crime- and drug-ridden, outdated public housing project.” Weller has been working with Joliet to shut the place down and turn it into a mixed-income development.
Gidwitz is a well-known philanthropist, and he seems defensive when questioned by the media about the project, claiming that he is trying to do good for the poor of Joliet. But the place is obviously a mess, and Gidwitz admitted to the Daily Southtown recently that he hasn’t even bothered to visit the apartment complex “in a long time.”
With the Joliet paper, local ministers and prominent civic leaders condemning the building as a rat hole ? enough to fill hours of negative TV ads with amazingly frank and damaging quotes ? you would have thought that Gidwitz would have dumped the dump long before he decided to run for governor. But that would have been the easy way out, not to mention the politically smart thing to do.
Instead, Gidwitz, like Hull and Ryan before him, believes he can go his own way. Perhaps he’s hoping that his money will extricate himself from this mess. Money solves a lot of problems in this life, but as Hull and Ryan discovered last year, all the money in the world can’t buy an unknown candidate out of big-time media trouble.
Seriously, what should the pool look like on when Gidwitz drops out? Not that I have any prizes to give out other than bragging rights, but we need to get one going here, before he finds himself on the verge of tears about how politics isn’t accepting of such a simple millionaire.
I can’t predict a date, but it seems that his run ends on the morning after a shooting or big drug bust goes down in the building.
And if the media reports are accurate, that appears inevitable.
I don’t think it was such a priority for Weller to be so helpful with Evergreen Terrace in Joliet until the Herald took him to task on it in a recent editorial. He responded to that editorial, and also used it as an opportunity to to keep pushing CAFTA, where he clearly has a conflict of interest, not to mention the promise he made in the last election campaign to NOT VOTE on any issues regarding Guatemala. He’s also breaking his “Contract with America” if he does indeed run for Congress again in ’06. True the legislation was never passed by the house – how clever of them – but many of the ’94 Republican Congressional freshman, including Weller, signed and touted that “Contract.” Ten years later, it’s “NEVER MIND.” Term limits? Fiscal responsibility? ETHICS IN CONGRESS??!! LOL!!!
Gidwitz?? As Bugs Bunny would say “What a Maroon”! His promos on the telie are assinine. Oh well, that’s entertainment.
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