A Machine Pol From the GOP

It’s funny to see the dismay of out-of-towners, surprised by the fierceness with which Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) is trying to throw President Bill Clinton out of office. Apparently, they viewed Hyde as some sort of even-handed, judicious and independent-minded gentleman of the House.

Well, Hyde’s performance is no surprise to anyone from around here. The rest of the country doesn’t know the real Hyde. This guy’s no Mr. Rogers. He’s Rambo, with white hair: a down-and-dirty, hit-’em-hard-hit-’em-low, street-fighting partisan, no better or worse than any other hack from Chicago. All you need to know about Hyde is that he hails from DuPage County, a collection of upscale suburban townships some 20 miles west of Chicago.

But, please, do not be deceived by the winding subdivisions and sprawling malls of this suburbia. The DuPage County Republican Party is no PTA trying to organize a bake sale. It’s ruthlessly efficient and shamelessly partisan. This is a mighty machine, much like the great Democratic one put together by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago.

Unlike the Democrats, who must satisfy competing factions of blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, straights and gays, DuPage’s Republicans are a rainbow coalition of white. They have no need to compromise, they tolerate no dissent and they’re not about to let the leader of the opposition get away once he’s trapped. In their flabby, polyester way, they’re a little like Mike Tyson--in a clinch, they’ll bite your ear off.

If they have a worldview, it’s rather simple. They see the state of Illinois and all its government resources as a giant pie, and they want a bigger slice. Or, put another way, they think Chicago gets too much. They hate Chicago. To them the city’s like some diseased bag lady, whose medical bills they must pay. They are forever whining about rising city expenses, endlessly threatening to use their enormous clout to cut state funding for Chicago’s schools and transit, or, even worse, to take a cut of the money pouring out of O’Hare International Airport (now controlled by the city).

The boss of this empire is a state senator named James “Pate” Philip, a beefy, red-faced, white-haired ex-Marine, who is always getting himself in trouble with remarks about the birthrates of welfare mothers, the working habits of minorities and other sociological observations. Philip runs the statehouse. Governors and agency administrators answer his call and kowtow to his command: “Want more money to drain your golf courses, senator? No problem.”

For all their talk about waste in Chicago, the DuPage GOP loves patronage. It’s the food that feeds the machine. They dole out jobs to friends and family at parks, schoolhouses, bus barns and the county airport. The county courthouse resembles the city’s sewer department in the glory days of old, with desks in the basement for the nieces and nephews of contractors with clout.

The Illinois State Toll Highway Authority is a particularly plentiful source of county pork, though, technically, it’s controlled by the state. Housed in an opulent glass-and-steel high rise (nicknamed the Taj Mahal), its board (which includes, big surprise, Philip’s brother), showers hundreds of millions of dollars worth of service contracts on engineers, lawyers, financiers, road builders and other well-connected hustlers, who in turn kick some back in the form of campaign contributions to the machine. It’s not necessarily illegal, just hypocritical, especially when you hear the way DuPage’s Republicans (including Hyde) denounce the tax-and-spend waste of Democrats (though one recent tollway executive director was indicted on corruption charges).

These days, Hyde’s too busy to get that involved in hometown politics. But he doesn’t have to, since one of his top aides, Patrick Durante, is chairman of the Addison Township Republican organization. Almost all the party big shots, including Hyde and Philip, live in Addison Township. Every election Durante sends out hundreds of precinct workers (most of them on the payroll) to harvest a massive GOP vote. They’d better. Durante’s a tough boss. When county board members complained about his heavy-handed slating tactics, Durante issued a rapid response: “They should run as independents if they don’t like how we do business.”

Running as a Republican is like a free franchise, say, a McDonald’s franchise, in DuPage. McDonald’s has guidelines for its franchises to follow, and there are guidelines that Republicans should follow.

It’s hard to say why Durante and his allies are so hard on Democrats, since they’re as harmless as horseflies to them. There hasn’t been a county-level Democratic elected official in DuPage since Watergate. Perhaps it’s something personal. Many DuPage fat cats are transplanted Chicagoans, raised as Republicans in a one-party Democratic town.

Such was the case with Hyde, who moved to the suburbs in the ‘60s, when it became clear he couldn’t get elected from Chicago. In fact, the first time he ran for Congress was back in 1962, when he got pounded by Roman C. Pucinski, a hack out of Daley’s machine. Poor Clinton. After all these years, Hyde’s using him as a punching bag to get his revenge.*