It's official at last. The Republican nominee for governor in Illinois is state Sen. Bill Brady of Bloomington, who edged out colleague Kirk Dillard by just 193 votes from some 767,000 cast. Congratulations to Brady, and let the race against Democrat Pat Quinn begin.
Unfortunately for Brady, he hasn't come out of the gate strongly, committing multiple faux pas since he emerged as the likely nominee on Feb. 2, not least of which was his error-filled attack on Quinn regarding the latter's otherwise poorly conceived prisoner early release program.
During his Journal Star endorsement interview back in January, a confident Brady predicted suburbanites would warm to him once they discovered he was "not ... a scary conservative." We've known an amiable Brady for most of the last two decades and don't find him frightening, but he'll forgive Chicago-area GOP voters for thinking their reluctance towards him in the primary was well-founded when they hear him endorse imprisonment without prosecution for an alleged crime: "Maybe the governor wants to wait until someone's convicted. I don't." What, he'd unravel more than two centuries of American jurisprudence? He doesn't believe in due process? What's up with that?
Brady is new to this level of scrutiny, of course, and maybe he just misspoke. Nonetheless, we have some unsolicited advice of the kind state GOP Chairman Pat Brady offered recently: "The issues that people care about (are) jobs and fiscal issues," he said. "There is no real right or left in those, just right or wrong." It's a variation on Bill Clinton's "it's the economy, stupid." Bill Brady has some work to do on that score.
One of the major reasons we did not endorse Brady in the Republican primary was because we didn't believe he had a credible budget plan. Fundamentally, if you don't want to raise more revenue through higher taxes - a defensible stance, especially in a recession - how do you then cut $13 billion, the reported size of the state's looming deficit, out of a $26 billion core operations budget? And how do you achieve that without making matters worse? The scarcity of private sector jobs in Illinois is a problem, but will making thousands of teachers and social service providers unemployed improve that situation?
Brady has said he'd actually lower taxes, while compensating with 10 percent across-the-board cuts. By our calculations, that would whittle less than $3 billion from discretionary spending. He'd find $1.5 billion in savings by introducing real managed care to Medicaid programs. He'd close the State Board of Education, which amounts to $26 million, a tiny fraction of overall school spending. He'd eliminate overtime for state workers. He'd find the elusive "waste, fraud and abuse" budget line item and erase it. And he'd borrow more, obviously at higher interest rates because of the drop in state government's credit rating.
