Chicago Magazine's Pat Quinn Profile Shows Why He Gets No Respect
By Chuck Sudo in News on Feb 15, 2013 6:45PM
Pat Quinn’s approval ratings are the lowest of all of the nation’s governors, he trails Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan in polls (even though Madigan hasn’t formally announced her intentions to run for governor yet), and he can’t seem to get respect from Illinois Republicans or members of his own party, despite being an intelligent and sincere politician and a well-earned reputation as an honest man.
I’ve written before about Quinn being the governor Illinois needs at this time instead of the governor we want. Chicago magazine’s James Warren has an astounding profile of Quinn that lays out how he became the Rodney Dangerfield of Illinois politics. Warren posits that Quinn’s Achilles heel is his lack of structure as a statesman and a legislator.
”Over two and a half hours, Quinn discourses freely on politics, the departure of White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski, his father’s World War II service in the South Pacific, the 1963 championship Loyola University basketball team, Iraq War veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and his 20-something sons (a fledgling artist in New York and a fund manager in Sydney). The breadth of his intellectual curiosity, while formidable, accentuates what can be a lack of focus.”
Warren writes Quinn entered politics with an eye toward changing the business as usual nature of politics in Illinois and recounts a resume that started with community organizing and includes founding the Citizens Utility Board, his first elected seat on what is now the Cook County Board of Review and his calculated 2002 election as Lieutenant Governor, which put him in prime position to succeed Rod Blagojevich after Blagojevich’s 2009 impeachment and removal from office.
The lack of respect overshadows most, if not all, of Quinn’s achievements as governor, such as signing the civil unions law, reducing Illinois’ Medicaid liability, getting a $31 billion capital infrastructure plan passed, abolishing the death penalty in Illinois and raising the state income tax rate (which was a necessary evil). His greatest achievement as governor is arguably the stability he provided the office after Blagojevich’s impeachment. Nobody—outside of AFSCME and other labor unions—is going to call Quinn a liar. To bet on Quinn going to jail on a corruption charge after he leaves office is a sucker bet.
But Quinn’s Q rating is such that he’s now viewed as the scapegoat for everything from the income tax hike to the state Legislature’s inability (unwillingness?) to deal with a pension funding problem that’s the worst in the nation. His attempts to rally Illinoisans to pressure their representatives to take the pension morass seriously, like Penny the Pinching Python, only pile on the perception that Quinn is over his head.