“Yes” For Illinois

Crain’s Chicago Business was kind enough to print my Letter to the Editor this week.
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Simply repeating ‘We aren’t Dems’ won’t cure Ill. GOP

“Biz leaders aim to revive Ill. GOP” (Sept. mirrors the old joke about looking for your lost contact lens where you can see but not where you lost it. Here’s why:

The Republican Party was founded as a party of ideas, not patronage. When former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson converted it to a patronage party, he appeared successful for a while but destroyed the party’s roots in the process. Therefore, Republicans will not prosper again until they re-establish a set of ideals and promote policies that put those ideals into a governing agenda.

If you want an example of the party’s lack of leadership, you need look no further than its decision to punt on the Illinois constitutional convention issue. In a year where Sen. Barack Obama draws new Democrats to the polls, the Republican Party decided to do little. They may think they are conserving resources, but in reality they have only succeeded in making themselves just that much weaker going into 2010.

Furthermore, to excite the kind of people who might consider running for office and the voters necessary to elect those people, the Republican Party must embrace bold policies. Merely saying, “We aren’t Democrats” exposes their lack of ideas.

Improving Illinois can only come from reactivating the citizenry so that they support the new ideas that will bring disaffected and/or new people into the process. If such a phenomenon occurs, it will come out of some tinkerer’s garage, not the moribund Republican Party. If you want to change the dynamics in Illinois, voting “yes” on the constitutional convention is your best bet.

Bruno Behrend
Founder
Illinois Citizens Coalition
River Forest