That's a Wrap, Folks

With the dust beginning to settle on the primaries, a few observations post-mortem...

Bill Brady: Going into the fall last year, no one had run a crisper campaign than Brady. He made more with less than any candidate in the race. Inexplicably, from Labor Day through the end of the year his campaign just stopped. It became utterly invisible. In mid-January, someone there figured out they had not won this thing after all and got their heads back in the game. But it was too little, too late. With no significant ground game outside central Illinois, a comeback was not in the cards. Some conspiracy theorists are suggesting Brady made a deal with Judy Baar Topinka to stop Jim Oberweis. Nonsense. Brady allowed his fast start to lull him into a false sense of security. Once he realized his mistake, he hoped his charisma would be sufficient to save the day. It was a poorly executed campaign, not a conspiracy. Having gone through it, I suspect he will be a much more formidable candidate the next time around - and if he has learned from it, I am convinced there will be a next time. Next time, I expect the middle of the campaign to be as clean and crisp as the beginning and end were this time.

Ron Gidwitz: Though he did not capture the public imagination, Gidwitz was probably the best-prepared to take on the state's financial woes and turn them around. Though usually an engaging man in person, Gidwitz always appeared awkward on television. His commercials were uniformly bland. No particular flaws, no hard edges, but nothing much to distinguish them from a furniture commercial, either. Still, Gidwitz' candidacy may have the most far-reaching effect on the Republican Party of anything this cycle. Previously a somewhat distracted power-broker for the establishment, Gidwitz shows signs of a conversion experience. I think he is an honest-to-goodness born-again reformer. He will remain one of the top power-brokers in the GOP, but his experience this race may, indeed, make him a foe of the old-line establishment. If so, they will tremble, because he will not stamp his feet and ineffectively wave a broad-axe while shouting insults. He will wield an epee with subtlety and aplomb. His enemies will be mortally wounded before they even know they have been struck.

Jim Oberweis: Okay, I made my worst prediction ever a few months back, projecting Oberweis to come from behind and win. I based this on the belief he had learned from his previous two races and would not start swinging wildly at the end of this one. I was wrong. I have developed a lot of affection for Oberweis. In person he is charming, funny and gentlemanly. I don't know; something weird happens to him in the heat of battle. His "Pay-to-Play Polka" ad was funny, memorable, and hard-hitting. If the entire last six weeks had been cut from the same cloth, he would be the nominee. But it wasn't. As fond as I am of him, and as admiring of his genuine talents, I have concluded that he has some temperamental flaw that precludes him from being effective at high-stakes politics.

Judy Topinka: She is the nominee and the question on everyone's mind is whether she can unite the party. She's made a good start, committing to sign bills banning partial-birth abortion and enacting parental notification laws. I suspect she still underestimates how important right-of-conscience exemptions for pharmacists are. But she is genuinely working at finding out what the deal-breakers for sympathetic conservatives are. If she gets those right, and banishes the words 'nutjobs, crazies, kooks and morons' from hers and her staff's public and private vocabularies, she'll do fine.

Rod Blagojevich: If utter shamelessness wins elections, the guy's a shoo-in. His marvelous commercials, after four years of pay-to-play nonsense that would make George Ryan blush, brought to mind Groucho Marx' old question: "Who are you going to believe; me or your own eyes?"

Ed Eisendrath: What exactly was that all about? After huffing and puffing and promising to blow the house down, he did not run a bad campaign. He ran no campaign. He did run some commercials at the end, demonstrating he had the reassuring sense not to juggle chain-saws. I was wondering if Blagojevich might call his bluff. Had the guv promised to juggle chain-saws, that might have been just the thing to bring disaffected downstate Democrats back into the fold. In the end, Eisendrath had all the elements of a mortgage-blowing binge except the party and the hangover.