(Cross-posted from
Musing's musings.)
The self-immolation of the Illinois Republican Party continues apace. Two years ago, largely as a consequence of the scandal-plagued Ryan governorship, Republicans lost control of both houses of the Illinois General Assembly and every state constitutional office except one. This year, after a bitterly contested primary campaign, the Republicans anointed Jack Ryan as their nominee for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by retiring Republican Peter Fitzgerald. As virtually the entire world knows, Ryan was forced to withdraw from the race (which he finally got around to doing formally this week, by the way) after allegations surfaced that he had coerced his wife to agree to have sex with him in several clubs.
Since Jack! slunk away under a cloud, the divisions (and the lack of depth) of the Illinois Republican Party have been far too visible, I'm sure, for the comfort of those whose job it is to run the party and ensure it remains a strong force in Illinois politics. Their best home-grown candidates bowed out early, and they have so little depth on their bench that they went shopping for celebrities and carpet-baggers to find someone to stand in opposition to the Obama juggernaut this fall.
That process continued yesterday, when the GOP State Central Committee interviewed the half-dozen people it could find who were willing to take a crack at losing to the Democratic Party's newest rising star. The field is now down to two, and the committee is expected to name its candidate this afternoon. One thing, however, is certain: the new junior senator from Illinois will be black.
I can commiserate with the committee's difficulties. They really didn't have a winner in the hat to begin with, and they couldn't afford to let the seat go uncontested, so they had to pick one or another of the losers they had on tap.
But I can't condone the cynical racism that seems implicit in the GOP's choice of running a black candidate to oppose Obama, who is also black. They tried to justify it on the grounds that choosing another black candidate would neutralize or at least minimize the impact of race on the campaign. In order to achieve that end, the committee narrowed its choice to a relative unknown (Andrea Barthwell) who is also under a cloud, and a carpet-bagging loon (Alan Keyes) with little political experience.
This is a disappointment for the Illinois Republican Party. More importantly, it is a disappointment for the citizens of Illinois, who will be deprived of anything resembling a substantive senatorial campaign. I believe I may confidently predict that Obama will run roughshod over whichever candidate the Republican Party chooses this afternoon. But he won't have to be at the top of his game to do it, and that's a disappointment, too.
Some pundits have argued that Barthwell will give Obama a run for his money on the drug issue, since her last job was as deputy White House drug czar. I'm not so sure on that score. But any edge Barthwell's experience might have in that area is overwhelmed by her lack of experience in most others and by the fact that she is currently under investigation for sexual harassment (fostering a hostile workplace environment), thanks to an incident at a colleague's birthday party where she hectored him about his sexual orientation. Barthwell herself, though not admitting guilt, has said that her actions were inappropriate.
Keyes is a political lightweight who has never won elective office. Despite his lack of qualifications (or perhaps because of it), he has a rabid following on the national scene. Unfortunately for his aspiration to be the next junior senator from Illinois, the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party is not all that strong in local politics. If Keyes in fact gets the nod, he isn't going to have anything like Obama's support base. He may even have trouble garnering support from Illinois' generally moderate Republican machine. He'll be fighting with both hands tied behind his back no matter where he campaigns, because he has no demonstrable political experience whatsoever, nor any ties to Illinois. He won't know who's who on the local scene, where the important bodies are buried, or even what issues are of the greatest concern to local voters. When he ran in the Illinois Republican presidential primary in 2000, Keyes came in third. I suspect that's where he'd finish in the Senate race this year as well: even the two no-name independents in the race have a better chance at the office than a carpet-bagger like Keyes.
The way to make race a non-issue in this contest was for the Republicans to field a credible candidate who was committed to campaigning on the issues. That would also have been the best possible way to guarantee themselves a chance (however slim it might have been) to win the election and retain the seat. Instead, the Republicans chose to field one of two token candidates, cynically playing on the fact that both are black and thereby demonstrating, presumably, that they are as color-blind as they have always claimed to be: the incredible dearth of non-white faces at any GOP event up to and including their national conventions notwithstanding.
This is not minimizing race, this is trivializing it. This choice by the Illinois Republicans is every bit as egregiously bad (and as cynically racist) as the claim made by the first President Bush when he announced to the world that Clarence Thomas was the man best qualified to take Thurgood Marshall's seat on the bench of the United States Supreme Court--when the only thing that Thomas had in common with Marshall was the color of his skin.
For shame.