Polls show that incumbent Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) is very unpopular with Illinois voters and could be in danger of losing an office he barely won four years ago over a downstate state senator, Bill Brady. Illinois Republicans had their best opportunity to win the governor's race in the past 12 years until Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is not too fond of Gov. Quinn, urged his close pal, Bruce Rauner, a billionaire investment banker from Winnetka with the business ethics of a reptile, to seek the Republican nomination for governor. So Rauner entered the Republican primary despite the fact that he's been as likely to contribute money to Democrats in the past as he has Republicans and opened up his wallet to buy the GOP nomination.
The average voter had never heard of Rauner before he entered the race. His Republican opponents included the party's 2010 nominee, Bill Brady, Illinois State Treasurer Dan Rutherford and State Sen. Kirk Dillard, who unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination in 2010 but lost a close primary race to Brady. Brady failed to raise much money from Republicans due to concerns that he ran a bad campaign four years ago. The Chicago Tribune teamed up with Rauner's campaign to dig into the personal life of Rutherford to successfully label him as a predatory closeted homosexual. And Dillard was forced to rely on the support of public employees unions to counter the millions of dollars Rauner poured into his campaign that he couldn't come close to matching by urging them to cross over and vote in the Republican primary. The result was that Rauner edged out Dillard for the Republican nomination by a 43-40% margin. So Illinois Republicans now have a candidate leading their ticket that most despise as much as they dislike Gov. Quinn. It's just another example of how the two-party system has become so corrupted by big money that voters are increasingly becoming irrelevant and are offered only false choices. Remind me of how we're different from Russia?
2 comments:
We desperately need to remove all party affiliation from ballots. Ballot access should only require obtaining a certain amount of signatories for a ballot petition.
The voter should be presented a list of names, order drawn at random, completely absent party affiliation.
Party primaries should be abolished as public elections. Parties are free to exist, of course, but no party name should appear anywhere on a ballot.
Just remember: if you vote, you have no right to complain, because you buy into, endorse and legitimize this system.
And I shall call him... mini-Bloomberg.
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