Attacks replace ideas in GOP infighting

kjellander
Maybe I'm missing something, but the furor the media make over Bob Kjellander seems part of the August doldrums. I wrote two critical columns earlier this year about Kjellander's fees, suggesting that he quit as national GOP committeeman. But the media storm causes me to rethink it. Just as national media fixate on Cindy Sheehan and Natalee Holloway in Aruba, the local media focus on Illinois politics is Kjellander 24/7.

At the state fair's Republican Day, Channel 7's Andy Shaw ordered his camera slaves to pursue Kjellander wherever he went. Which they did, starting a rush of other camera slaves to run ahead of him and walk backward while filming, capturing him doing everything but his most intimate acts. They chased him from reception to reception. Then ice cream magnate Jim Oberweis spent valuable time on the speakers' stand to demand once more that Kjellander quit. He talked no state issues, but but he landed front and center on all the newscasts.

The most glittering hypocrite was Ron Gidwitz, who seemed to say that Kjellander was a discredit to the human race but hugged him when the committeeman came to Gidwitz's lavish fair party. All the other GOP gubernatorial candidates joined in to slur Kjellander but Ray LaHood. As a serious, skilled expert and authority on the legislative process who gavels the U.S. House in Denny Hastert's stead when it's beset with tumult, LaHood withdrew, maybe embarrassed with the sophomoric tirades of his colleagues.

Kjellander has done nothing illegal and is not accused of doing anything illegal. As a lobbyist, all he did was collect fees for advising clients how to bid on managing trust and pension funds. His critics are mad because he drew hefty fees but ignore the fact that the free market they extol has decided Kjellander's worth. He has made it on his own, which is more than some of them have done.

They think a national committeeman, who does not receive a salary, should live like a Cistercian monk. But none of them do. The state chairman, Andy McKenna, lives handsomely off the Schwartz Paper Co. his daddy runs as CEO. Gidwitz thumps his chest about his success as an entrepreneur, living on a Helene Curtis legacy his daddy, Jerry, built. Oberweis built a big net worth from his grandfather's dairy. In short, they don't have to work because somebody else in their family did. Once, I thought Kjellander should quit. Not now, after hearing those who inherited their pile rattling on against him instead of talking issues.

To these single-issue-fixated Republicans, Kjellander is the Great White Whale against which they pit themselves as Herman Melville's Captain Ahab. In the climactic scene, the old Nantucket seafarer who lost a leg to the whale in an earlier encounter stands alone in his dinghy with a razor-sharp lance poised as he leers at the mammal that had smote him. Ahab devotes his life to getting even with the whale. In the end, hate consumes Ahab. The whale swallows him up. Melville summarizes the cost of unrelenting bitterness by all who substitute this for reasoned thought.

I don't know Kjellander well, but let me tell you about his friend, Karl Rove. Fifty years ago this month, I began to make my living as a Republican operative and have stayed close to this work in the public and private sectors ever since. I have not seen a strategist better than Rove.

Last May, when Rove was in town, he was approached by my friend Dr. Jim Economos, who asked him to get Kjellander to quit. Those who stood by heard Rove say this: "He's doing a good job. Those who criticize him should reconsider. He's my friend and is trusted by me and the president."

Later, Kjellander was promoted to national GOP treasurer. That's good enough for me. As for some of my fellow conservatives, here's a tip: Go to the library and check out Moby Dick. Read it again and rethink the Kjellander thing. As I have done.

Blackmun's slide into the liberal cauldron

This is the story of two once fast friends who became distant and how, serving as U.S. Supreme Court justices, they affected legal policy. Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun were reared six blocks apart in the Dayton's Bluff section of St. Paul, a blue-collar neighborhood that has seen better days -- a neighborhood I used to pass often on the way to work.

They met in kindergarten, went to grade school and Sunday school together, played softball and tennis (Burger was the better athlete), double-dated (Burger was the handsomer of the two) and went to their high school proms together. Each took pleasure at the other's good fortune. Blackmun was best man at Burger's wedding.

Both got law degrees -- Burger from the University of Minnesota, Blackmun from Harvard. Burger, a liberal Republican, worked in a small St. Paul firm and dabbled in politics. Blackmun, rather introverted, rose slowly in a prestigious Minneapolis firm. In July 1952, Burger, a Harold Stassen delegate to the GOP convention, negotiated a last-minute switch to Dwight D. Eisenhower, giving the general enough votes to win the presidential nomination on the first ballot. In return, Burger got a job in the Justice Department, and later an appellate court judgeship.

Blackmun was moving ahead, too, but not in politics, becoming general counsel to the prestigious Mayo Clinic. The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse was given posthumous private access to Blackmun's papers. In her brilliant book, Becoming Justice Blackmun, (Times Books, 2005), they show a torturously insecure but pettily oversensitive man as he fights depression and chafes at his inability to write quickly.

Burger wangles an appellate appointment for the introverted Blackmun, and both of them dream of serving on the Supreme Court together. Then President Richard Nixon names Burger chief justice. Burger contrives to get Blackmun named to the court. Before he names him, Nixon asks Blackmun a strange (to Blackmun) question: Is your wife likely to be influenced by the Georgetown liberal crowd? Blackmun says his wife is unconcerned about Georgetown's praise. But Harry?

In the first court session, Blackmun was happy to vote with Burger 80 percent of the time. Then his law clerks told him his nickname was ''Hip-pocket Harry'' because Burger could always count on his vote. The media called them the "Minnesota Twins." Deftly, slowly, liberal Justices William O. Douglas, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall suffused Blackmun with praise, encouraging him to dissent from his old friend. Greenhouse treats the issue gingerly, but Bob Woodward spells it out explicitly in The Brethren (Simon & Schuster, 1979). Then comes the abortion issue.

In the abortion conference, the liberals favor striking down state abortion laws, but Burger favors keeping them. Blackmun favors tinkering with them on more narrow grounds. Burger tilts toward pro choice, and by that act can give the assignment to write the decision on Roe vs. Wade to Blackmun. The Douglas-Brennan-Marshall trio is pleased, telling Blackmun that only he has the towering intellectual prowess to write it. Now it's clear that Blackmun sees Roe vs. Wade as his main chance to separate from Burger. Blackmun flies to Rochester and writes slowly in the Mayo Clinic library.

In that opinion, Blackmun writes: ''The constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy." But there are ''emanations'' and "penumbras" in the Bill of Rights, the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth amendments. Voila! He has composed a freshly invented right! With that decision, the break with Burger becomes complete.

Writes Greenhouse: Blackmun's ''the person American women look to -- the champion not only of abortion rights but of women's rights in general." Burger dies and Blackmun doesn't go to the funeral. Roe vs. Wade is the "law of the land" or, as scholar Mark Levin says, the methodical seduction of a chronically insecure man by flattery, of a man who desperately wanted to be loved by all those who adore the New York Times.

There's a name for it: the Greenhouse Effect.

Affordable electricity didn't come cheap

A tribute? That's right. Someday Chicago should recognize the compassionate genius Samuel Insull was. He gave us cheap electricity. Born in London, he was the first operator of Thomas Edison's telephone exchange there, when Edison sent for him in 1881. A very circumspect, stiff Jewish son of lower-class parents, at 22 Insull became Edison's top assistant. The only man who worked harder than Edison, he had mastered shorthand by taking down sermons at Westminster Abbey. Laboring until 4 each morning with Edison's chaotic finances, he mastered them and persuaded J.P. Morgan to fund three factories to build dynamos, lamps and underground conductors for the world's first central power station in New York.

Soon Insull was controlling the entire Edison empire while the great man invented in seclusion. Armed with power of attorney, he organized the credit to build more than a thousand "Baby Edison" power plants in hotels, factories and department stores. As America grew with electric power, Insull was the baton-waving orchestra conductor; he insisted on learning all there was to know about the infant electric industry. He never took a drink, wore natty clothes and kept his formal manner with pince-nez. This non-engineer, non-scientist built a complex that supported 6,000 workers in five years: the acorn for General Electric.

At 25, when he perceived the Morgan interests were conning Edison, Insull gathered enough proxies to force Morgan out and keep the company for his boss. That was a mistake. The Morgans vowed to even the score -- with Edison and particularly the little Jewish dandy with the cockney accent and pince-nez.

At 37 Insull came here as head of a small generating company, Chicago Edison, serving only 5,000 customers in a city of more than 1 million, determined to make power cheap. In those days electricity was so expensive it was turned on only for guests in parlors, in posh restaurants and hotels. He floated a $250,000 bond to finance a new power station, and built it in an unused rail yard on Harrison Street along the river, accessible to coal barges. At his beckoning, the shoreline of Lake Michigan came ablaze with 93,000 incandescent lights, and by the time of the World's Fair, electricity was a major component of the statement this city made after the fire that had decimated it only 22 years earlier. Between 1893 and 1898, Insull bought up all the competing central stations in the Loop, cutting a deal with GE for exclusive rights to electrical equipment.

Insull's radical step was to cut rates below the estimated cost of production. Build it and they'll come, he told the Morgans with a touch of arrogance. He was right, and they hated him for it. He installed meters showing peaks and valleys of consumption: Chicagoans asleep from midnight to 6 a.m. (using only 10,000 kilowatts), rising and rushing to work on the streetcars from 8 to 9 a.m. (46,000), slackening off at lunch (36,000) and going home (46,000). His goal was to find customers whose demand cycles would fill the valleys: The higher the diversity, the greater the profit.

His generosity was legend. He paid his workers for their 46-hour weeks more than most companies paid for 60 to 70 hours, and his personal phone number was available to all. Insull cut household electricity rates by 32 percent in 1898; hired black workers and shamed business to do the same; gave workers free medical insurance and free education benefits. He bypassed -- and angered -- the big banks by selling bonds locally when there were few stockholders. By 1929 Insull was supplying an eighth of all electricity and gas power in 32 states.

The 1929 stock market crash didn't faze Insull. He opened an $80 million pipeline in Texas; he raised $100 million to help Chicago pay its teachers, police officers and firefighters, and built the Civic Opera building. But every time the stock market fell, the New York banks got more of his empire. When the Morgans turned him down for a $10 million loan, they evened the score from long ago: In a single day Insull was forced out of 60 presidencies and directorships. Tried unjustly for fraud, Insull was exonerated but died a pauper. Summarized the old Chicago Times: ''Insull: not guilty; the old order: guilty.''

Read his story in They Made America (Little Brown & Co., 2004) by Harold Evans. Did anti-Semitism play a role? Of course. Insull needs at least a statue. Out of guilt alone for a genius who brought us cheap power and was persecuted unjustly, we should build it.

Governor deserves credit for helping needy

Recently on my WLS Sunday night radio program, two Republican candidates for governor, appearing individually, attacked Gov. Blagojevich. No news in that. But what struck me was their statements that the governor had actually added to the welfare rolls. As if that were bad. Is it?

I double-checked and found out they were right: Blagojevich indeed has added poor families and poor children. A bad thing? Not if they indeed were needy. What's bad about allowing 50,000 poor parents and children to get state health coverage this year if it's done without raising taxes, which would further depress the economy? For that's what Blagojevich is doing. And rather than praise him for this, the Illinois media are silent, while across the border, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is contrasting this governor with the Missouri governor and praising Blagojevich.

''In Missouri,'' says the Post-Dispatch, ''Gov. Matt Blunt is pressing hard to cut 90,000 poor people from Medicaid coverage. In contrast, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich plans to add 50,000 poor parents and children to the state health coverage this year. And he's proud of it.'' Call me mushy, but I think a governor should be proud to add deserving poor to the program.

While in Springfield recently I talked the matter over with a man I very much admire: a state fiscal wizard, Budget Director John Filan (In fact, a Democrat who is thinking about running against Blagojevich told me he'd keep Filan as budget guy -- he's that good. Filan's answer is at the bottom of this column). Both Illinois and Missouri are fighting budget deficits and have been for three straight years.

The Missouri governor, says the Post-Dispatch, responds to the problem with ''cold indifference.'' Unlike Blunt, Blagojevich's instinct is to consider health coverage for the poor and ask, ''How many people can we add?'' My gut tells me that Republicans ought not criticize Blagojevich unless they want to be viewed as unfeeling, which is what they have been accused of since the Great Depression. I wince when I hear Republicans blister Blagojevich for this statistic, much as I groaned when one of my earliest heroes, Sen. Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio) declared that since inflationary food prices were caused by people spending too much for food, they should eat less. He said it with his hands shoved deeply into his pockets as his vest and gold watch chain spanned a rather ample belly. I admired Taft for many things, but not that time.

Blagojevich has managed to set a good record on health care for the poor, and Republicans ought to recognize it and concentrate their fire somewhere else. Illinois ranks first in KidCare across the Midwest in the number of new children enrolled: 11,600 from June through December 2003. During that period, Illinois ranked first in rate of enrollment growth in the Midwest. Among all the states in that time frame, Illinois ranks first.

From April 2003 to July 2004, Illinois was one of 26 states that did not make enrollment in KidCare and FamilyCare more difficult by raising premiums, freezing enrollment or complicating the registration process. And among the 10 most populous states in that period, Illinois was one of six that didn't make it more difficult for parents and children to sign up.

You can be reasonably sure I will vote Republican for governor next year as I have in the past, but it depends on who the GOP nominee is. There are two candidates whom I would not vote for and for whom I very well might not vote in the general election; people with whom I disagree on key social issues: Judy Baar Topinka and Ron Gidwitz.

Oh, and when I told Filan about that Democrat's pledge to keep him on in another Democratic administration, the budget director said, ''Now go ahead and ask me if I would stay.'' Meaning he wouldn't.

I like Filan. He's independent. Sorta like me.