GOP Is Losing Its Grip on Illinois Governor’s Mansion

For more than a quarter century, conservative residents of rural and suburban Illinois have helped check the influence of the nation’s most famously Democratic city with a brilliantly simple, if not necessarily easy, maneuver: they have elected a Republican governor every four years.

Since 1976, Illinois has had a de facto system of checks and balances, with conservatives holding the governor’s mansion and liberals in charge in the nation’s third largest city. The era of power-sharing, however, may be coming to a close.

With less just over two weeks to go before election day, the Republican candidate for governor, state Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan, is low on cash, short on endorsements and down by double-digits in most polls to Democratic challenger Rod Blagojevich.

One of the 56-year-old Ryan’s most intractable problems has been explaining to voters that he isn’t already governor. That’s George Ryan -- no relation and no friend -- who is bowing out after one scandal-plagued term.

Blagojevich, meanwhile, a 45-year-old congressman from Chicago who has an energy and look that elicits comparisons to John F. Kennedy, has spent much of the campaign making friends with the conservatives from “downstate” who Ryan expected to be his supporters. And he’s had remarkable success in offering lessons on Serbian name pronunciation. “How do you say his name?” his Web page asks. “Bla-GOYA-vich,” it instructs, the “GOYA” pulsing for emphasis.

“Each party in Illinois has long had a sort of veto somewhere,” said Jim Nowlan, a former state legislator and longtime Republican strategist.

When Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wanted to renovate Soldier Field in the mid-1990s, then Gov. Jim Edgar refused to go along, and the plan died.

When Daley first pushed for expansion of O’Hare International Airport, which sits just inside the city limits, current Gov. Ryan supported the building of a new airport well south of the city. The result: a moderated O’Hare expansion plan that has plenty of critics but which most analysts agree will benefit the city and the state.

The two also negotiated an agreement to rebuild Soldier Field, a project now underway.

“I think Republicans are going to lose their veto,” Nowlan said. “Jim Ryan has just not gotten any traction on any issue and the party faithful are terribly demoralized.”

The last Democratic governor of Illinois took office when Richard Nixon was president. Dan Walker earned the job in 1972 despite the fact that he didn’t have the backing of the Chicago party machine. He lasted one rocky term.

People remember him as something of a pro-union politician. Other than that, most don’t recall much about the state’s political climate a quarter century ago.

They know, however, that the state and the city of Chicago have done pretty well when the governor has had to negotiate with the Windy City mayor on issues that affect both, and vice versa. And they wonder what will happen if a Democrat wins the state’s top job, especially since the party, which already controls the state House, may be able to take the state Senate as well, giving them full control of Springfield.

They also wonder how Jim Ryan, an old hand at the political game, fell so far behind an ambitious young congressman with little name recognition.

In a sense, Ryan’s problems began long before the campaign.

Current Gov. Ryan was secretary of state, which oversees the Motor Vehicles Division, before he was elected governor in 1998. After he took the statehouse it was revealed that some of his underlings at the secretary of state’s office had exchanged commercial driver’s licenses for bribes, and that some of the ill-gotten funds had made their way into his gubernatorial campaign coffers.

The so-called licenses-for-bribes scandal has dragged on throughout George Ryan’s administration.

Fifty people have been convicted thus far, though the governor himself has not been implicated.

Ryan’s administration has been marked by another notable controversy: his decision to place a moratorium on executions following revelations that since the death penalty was reinstated in Illinois in 1977, the state has executed 12 people and freed 13 who had been wrongfully convicted.

The moratorium has infuriated many in his own party -- and further colored the name Ryan among conservatives.

“Not very many voters can distinguish the fact that these are different Ryans,” said Kenneth Janda, a political professor emeritus at Northwestern University. “Jim Ryan has really been hurt by the governor and the scandal that has surrounded his administration.”

Jim Ryan’s own history has haunted him as well, however.

As attorney general when the licenses-for-bribes scandal broke, he declined to launch an investigation. The FBI has handled the case.

And it was Jim Ryan who carried out the most infamous of the wrongful death-penalty prosecutions.

As a state’s attorney in Du- Page County, he prosecuted and convicted Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez for the 1983 rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl.

Another man later confessed to the crime and the state Supreme Court overturned Cruz and Hernandez’s convictions. But Ryan insisted on trying them again, despite additional evidence that they were not guilty. Again he secured convictions, and again the Supreme Court overturned them. Evidence of the two men’s innocence continued to grow, but Jim Ryan tried the two, and convicted them, a third time.

Both were eventually freed -- Hernandez after 11 years on death row, Cruz after 12 -- when DNA evidence suggested that the man who had confessed was indeed the killer and after a police officer confessed to lying during the trials. Last week, the lawyers who helped exonerate Cruz -- including attorney and best-selling author Scott Turow -- gathered to proclaim Jim Ryan unfit to be governor based on his handling of the case.

Such problems, as well as name confusion (on his campaign signs “Jim” is about twice the size of “Ryan”), have certainly hurt the Republican’s run for the governorship. What has probably hurt him more, observers agree, has been the well-funded and nearly seamless campaign of Blagojevich.

“Rod Blagojevich has run a very good campaign,” said former Democratic Sen. Paul Simon, who lives in Carbondale, the center of anti-Chicago political sentiment. “And he has been spending a lot of time in Southern Illinois.”

As of June 30, the last deadline for reporting on campaign funds, Blagojevich had raised $11 million to Ryan’s $7 million. Blagojevich has invested much of his money on television ads downstate, where he has shored up considerable support, pollsters say. Many of the ads sought to solidify the very link Ryan has been trying to break -- the one to George Ryan.

Jim Ryan appears to have gained some ground by pointing out that Blagojevich has the kind of family history downstate voters have historically found so distasteful about Chicago Democratic politics. Blagojevich’s father-in-law is Alderman Richard Mell, a longtime ward boss.

Mell drafted his son-in-law for his first race, a winning run for the state Assembly in 1992, and has contributed $118,000 of his own money to Blagojevich’s campaigns, according to state records.

Still, as Ryan chips away at him, Blagojevich is viewed as a near shoo-in, securing endorsements from historically pro-Republican groups ranging from a powerful retailers’ association to the State Medical Society.

Their contributions to Blagojevich “are insincere,” scoffed state Republican Party chair Gary MacDougal. “They just want to do business with the state.

“Our ads are just starting to run,” MacDougal added. “The momentum is now on our side.”

Ryan had indeed whittled several points from Blagojevich’s lead in one recent poll, to a 10-point difference. Nevertheless, residents are preparing themselves to be led by two Democrats -- two Chicago Democrats -- for the first time in more than a generation, should Blagojevich win in November.

And some are a bit unnerved.

“We’ve had a balanced system here in Illinois for years, and I think it’s been good for both the Republicans and the Democrats,” said Jeff Mays, president of the Illinois Business Roundtable. “It’s also been good for Illinois. We’ll see what happens now.”