This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 29, 2010 - The rivalry between Illinois and Missouri can be intense, especially when a substandard baseball team from Chicago plays the St. Louis Cardinals.
But some Missouri Republican candidates are doing more than hurling insults at the feeble Chicago Cubs. Rather, they’re using the Land of Lincoln’s political woes to draw attention to their core philosophies and their campaigns.
It's no secret that Illinois' financial problems have become so severe that the state has struggled to pay vendors. Recently, the Illinois legislature has gridlocked on the issue of state employee pensions.
Those battles have become campaign fodder for at least three Republicans running for Missouri’s down-ballot statewide offices.
After expressing his opposition to expanding the state’s Medicaid program under the auspices of the Affordable Care Act, Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder told the Beacon earlier this month that financially strapped states – such as Illinois – were accepting federal money to bolster the health-care plan for the poor. That, he said, should be a big warning sign.
“In my judgment, you need to look no further than the states that are going in for it: Illinois, California, America’s Greece,” Kinder said. “Those states are going over the ledge, over the cliff. They cannot pay their bills. They are either insolvent or approaching insolvency. Missourians know we should not go down that road.”
State Rep. Cole McNary, R-Chesterfield, who's running for state treasurer, often cites Illinois’ pension situation as a warning sign for the state treasurer to take more assertive role in altering Missouri’s system.
“We know we have a system in our state where benefits exceed contributions,” McNary said. “So we know that we’re going to have a problem in the future. And in Illinois, the future is here. We don’t want to end up like that."
And earlier this month, Ed Martin, the GOP nominee for attorney general, embarked on a statewide tour promoting a pledge to act if the federal government provides a “bailout” to Illinois' pensions. That’s part of a nationwide movement from the conservative Illinois Policy Institute to stop Congress from intervening in local and state pension disputes.
“What I've said is, Illinois can make their decisions. They've made funding priorities different from what we did in Missouri,” Martin said at a stop in St. Louis. “That's not my job to judge them. Their pensions are funded in a different way than ours. What I'm saying is we shouldn't have to go and bail them out.”
(For what it’s worth, the venerable Capitol Fax noted in September that Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has said since 2011 that he would not accept federal assistance to deal with its pension debt.)
Using Illinois as a whipping boy is not new. Back in 2007, then-U.S. Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Columbia, and then-state Rep. Ed Robb, R-Columbia, brought up Illinois’ budgetary woes under Gov. Rod Blagojevich,a Democrat, to showcase how well Missouri'sv governor, Matt Blunt, was performing under difficult circumstances.
Needless to say, Democratic statewide hopefuls aren’t terribly enthralled with their rival’s rhetoric. Susan Montee, who is running for lieutenant governor, said that rejecting a Medicaid expansion would be shortsighted, especially for hospitals banking on the additional money and for the uninsured.
And state Treasurer Clint Zweifel says that McNary is speaking in non-sequiturs.
“One thing I find him doing a lot is using other states as examples and talking about pension problems in other states – and frankly – different continents at times,” Zweifel said, who added the Chesterfield Republican also uses “examples that really aren’t relevant in today’s world.”
Why bring up Illinois when the average southwest Missourian has "no idea what’s going on in Illinois,” as Missouri State University political science professor George Connor, put it?
Connor said that the rhetoric may have more to do with President Barack Obama – a former Illinois senator and Chicago resident – than any policy percolating in Springfield. The message, he said amounts to someone saying, “look at how bad things are in Illinois. And we transferred that machine-style politics to Washington, D.C.”
Connor adds, “It’s a code word. I think 'Illinois' or 'Blagojevich' is code for President Obama. … I guess that you’ve heard that more from Republican candidates than Democratic candidates. I really don’t think it has so much to do with Illinois, as much as it has to do with the guy in the White House.”
St. Louisans feel the Illi-noise
There may be another reason Missourians have Illinois politics on their minds these days: Ads for the respective candidates in Illinois’ 12th and 13th congressional districts have flooded the airwaves of St. Louis TV stations.
To be sure, it’s not uncommon for Illinois political ads to spill over into the St. Louis area. Still, Robby Mook, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told reporters last week in a conference call that Illinois’ long border represents a challenge for political parties.
“We obviously don’t control where the TV stations are and where the audience is in any campaign,” Mook said. “You’re going to communicate in a media market that spills out to folks that aren’t in the district.”
At some point, though, you've got to wonder whether voters tune out the nearly constant barrage of political ads -- wherever they're from.
Campaign Trail, a weekly column, weaves together some of the intriguing threads from the world of Missouri politics.
