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Running to the Right: Winner of Republican U.S. Senate primary will have to garner name recognition

A crowd of contenders for the U.S. Senate is rising from the smoking ruins of the Illinois Republican Party. And almost all are running to the right as they aim for the seat being vacated by Peter Fitzgerald, the anti-establishment Inverness Republican who is leaving Washington, D.C., after one term.

An open Senate seat is rare — the last one was in 1996 when the late Paul Simon, a Makanda Democrat, retired. But with a selection of credible primary candidates, the GOP establishment, including Judy Baar Topinka, the state treasurer who chairs the Illinois party, U.S. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Yorkville and former Gov. Jim Edgar, say they won’t try to anoint a nominee. They would have their work cut out for them, anyway. 

As of mid-December, prior to the filing deadline with the State Board of Elections, seven Republican candidates, all men, most with business resumes, were campaigning for the nomination. 

The field breaks down roughly into three tiers: At the top is Andrew McKenna Jr., the Glenview paper company president and namesake of his well-connected father; Jim Oberweis, chairman of the family-owned Oberweis Dairy in Aurora and the president of a mutual fund and money management firm who lost a 2002 primary bid for the Senate; state Sen. Steven Rauschenberger of Elgin, the only officeholder in the contest; and Jack Ryan, the Wilmette investment banker turned teacher who had put more than $1.25 million of his own money into the race by fall, giving him the early lead. 

In the middle tier for now is retired Air Force Major General John Borling, a Rockford businessman and former president and CEO of the United Way in Chicago. Borling, a former Vietnam-era fighter pilot, spent six-and-a-half years as a prisoner-of-war in Hanoi.

The third tier is occupied by Chirinjeev Kathuria, an Oak Brook business executive with a medical degree who registered to vote for the first time in June, and former state Rep. Jonathan Wright, an assistant state’s attorney from Lincoln who is the only downstate candidate in the race.

After years of intraparty warfare between Illinois conservatives and moderates, there is no moderate in the mold of Edgar or former Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood in the mix. Six of these primary contenders are furiously courting the right. The exception is Borling, the only candidate to support abortion rights. He bills himself as a social moderate and a fiscal conservative. All seven are against more gun laws, a conservative litmus test outside Chicago.

An October poll by the Chicago Tribune — taken when Ryan was the only candidate running television spots — showed that most voters had yet to focus on the contest. Almost 60 percent of the potential Republican primary voters were undecided, with 20 percent going to Ryan; 11 percent to Oberweis; 4 percent to Rauschenberger; 3 percent to McKenna and 1 percent to Borling.

“You can’t say,” says Edgar, “that one is head and shoulders above the other.” The 2004 primary may be remembered as the year of the ambitious “Millionaire MBA.” It’s unlike any other GOP primary in the past two decades. Four candidates are very rich — Kathuria, McKenna, Oberweis and Ryan — and one of the biggest questions is how much personal money each will put into their campaigns. These four all have master’s degrees in business, and they all want to start their political careers at the top. Even Fitzgerald, who bankrolled his 1998 run with his own millions, served six years in the Illinois Senate before graduating to Congress.

This primary is remarkable, too, because none of the candidates has been elected statewide, and none has a lock on an ideological or geographic voter base. 

The race is getting national notice. In 2002, the Republican Party paid little attention to Illinois because U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, a Springfield Democrat, was ahead from the start and cruised to a second term. The little-known Jim Durkin, then a state representative from Westchester, bested Oberweis and Chicago lawyer John Cox, who each self-funded their primary contests.

In 2004, the Illinois race will be one of the marquee November contests because it could help determine which party controls the Senate. Dan Allen, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington, D.C., says his group has no interest at this stage in trying to elbow anyone out of the field. “We are pretty impressed by the strength of the field,” says Allen. “We are letting it play out.”

But Edgar and Wood are concerned that the rightward thrust of this primary campaign will produce a nominee with electability problems. Even Fitzgerald, a conservative, won in 1998 over former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, the Chicago Democrat, on a record that included support for gun control, patient’s rights and environmental protection.

“It is more than obvious that many of the Republican candidates feel they have to run to the extreme right to win the Republican primary,” says Wood. “But at what cost in November?” Says Edgar, “To win statewide for senator or governor, you cannot be too far from the center.”

Still, the Republican Senate hopefuls “all have different strengths,” says Topinka, who is rebuilding the party after the 2002 meltdown following the scandals that surrounded former GOP Gov. George Ryan.

What they don’t have is substantial name recognition. “Nobody knows these guys,” says Michael Stokke, Hastert’s deputy chief of staff who handles the speaker’s political chores. “This is their first walk on the stage.”

The March 16 primary victor could win with less than 30 percent of the vote, which is why many of the hopefuls believe they have a chance.

Borling, who is making his first run for office, says he is targeting veterans, seniors and abortion rights voters, who, if they are interested in that single issue, will have no place else to go in the primary. “I don’t think a Republican can win who seeks to restrict the rights of women — or of men,” Borling says.

With the nation at war, Borling’s 37-and-a-half-year military career could give him traction, if he can rally veterans.

“I have to earn it one VFW at a time,” says Borling, a graduate of the Air Force Academy. The former POW has a story to tell, but if he doesn’t raise a lot of cash he may have difficulty getting heard. Borling is not wealthy enough to put a significant amount of his own money into the campaign. 

Because few major issues have yet to emerge that divide the candidates — with the exception of Borling on abortion — personality and the equally subjective “November electability factor” will likely play a role.

“Politics is a relationship business as much as an issues business,” says Ryan.

Ryan’s fast start is the result of a front-runner strategy. He decided to be the first candidate to run television ads. He could afford the October early media buy because he is throwing some of his own millions into the race. He pledged to use only $3 million of his own money for the primary, however. By November, he had spent almost half of that.

“Jack’s aggressive media strategy has opened up a lead,” says Ryan campaign manager Jason Miller. 

In a sense, Ryan has been roaming the state campaigning for the U.S. Senate for more than two years. Republicans tried to lure him into the 2002 race to face Durbin, but Ryan, after flirting with a run, saw no reason to spend his money to become a sacrificial lamb his first time on the ballot. Yet, 2002 got Ryan around the state.

A graduate of Dartmouth who went on to earn an MBA and a law degree from Harvard, Ryan left the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs very wealthy. In 2000, he started teaching at Hales Franciscan High School, a Catholic parochial school on Chicago’s South Side whose students, Ryan usually notes, are African American.

Ryan went on to join the boards of First Health Group Corp., headquartered in Downers Grove and K12 Inc., a for-profit education company in McLean, Va., that sells curriculum supplies to homeschoolers. Education, particularly school choice, is a major issue for him. 

Ryan is running a different campaign in that “we are going after traditional Democratic constituencies while in the Republican primary,” with an eye toward the November general election, says Miller. Ryan is holding town meetings among African-American voters in Chicago’s Democratic strongholds. 

“This is not a Republican electorate who is going to fall for a pretty story,” says McKenna. He’s the president of Schwarz Paper Co. in Morton Grove and is well known within Chicago-area civic and charitable circles.

His father, Andrew McKenna Sr., is the chairman and CEO of family-owned Schwarz Paper. The senior McKenna’s prominence in GOP money circles gave his son a running start in fundraising. By September, the end of the third quarter, McKenna had substantially outraised his rivals, collecting almost $1.1 million while putting up just $49,659 of his own money. “I don’t believe in self-funded campaigns,” says McKenna, who is making job creation a centerpiece of his bid.

McKenna received his undergraduate degree from Notre Dame University and a master’s degree in manufacturing management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston. McKenna launched a statewide radio blitz after Thanksgiving.

Will personality be a factor with GOP voters? “I think Republicans want a nominee they can feel good about,” says McKenna. “The party’s been through a difficult process.”

That GOP voters, particularly the conservatives who dominate the primary, will want to know what they are getting is key to Steven Rauschenberger’s strategy. First elected to the state Senate in 1992, Rauschenberger’s trail of votes means “he can’t run away from his record,” says communications director Charlie Stone. “He’s a known quantity. A lot of these novice millionaires don’t have a record.”

Rauschenberger, a graduate of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., was a salesman in the family’s Elgin furniture store before going to Springfield. He is short on money compared to McKenna and Ryan, but perhaps longer on political networking. 

The former chair of his legislative chamber’s Appropriations Committee and an expert on state budgeting, Rauschenberger has the support of 23 of his 25 GOP state Senate colleagues and an endorsement from Republican U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde of Wood Dale, which he hopes to use to raise national money.

Oberweis says he learned a lot from his 2002 Senate run. This time he started months earlier. He is planning a “significant” field operation and is determined to put at least a million of his own dollars into his bid.

An Aurora native and an under-graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who received an MBA at the University of Chicago, he oversees Oberweis Securities, which runs two top-ranked mutual funds, and Oberweis Dairy. Oberweis’ rookie run got his name around — the family-run ice cream firm had 18 stores in 2002 and now boasts 32 outlets.

The Oberweis campaign believes it has a name I.D. advantage and some different issues: The dairy chairman is talking about agriculture and has latched onto an anti-immigrant proposal. 

But he may be called on the abortion issue. In his 2002 campaign, he said he was supportive of abortion rights. Citing the Taliban, he said government should not impose religious beliefs on people. Now Oberweis is running as an abortion foe.

“Two years ago I did not believe I should use the government to support my views on the sanctity of life,” Oberweis says. He says he changed his mind after “giving a lot of thought to the issue.”

A political newcomer who has never even bothered to vote, Chirinjeev Kathuria is getting attention only because he has pledged to pour millions of dollars into his first bid for office, though he did not spend any serious money in the first months of his campaign. 

If elected, Kathuria, a native of New Delhi, India, would be the first Sikh in the Senate. Concerned that his turban and beard may puzzle voters, especially in this post-September 11-era, Kathuria’s Web site offers a primer in Sikh traditions.

“We present a unique opportunity for the Republican Party, which talks about diversity, to demonstrate it,” says Kathuria’s campaign manager, Jon Zahm.

Kathuria, an entrepreneur with a string of high-tech companies, received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and an MBA from Stanford. He says with six other candidates in the race, he could win if he unites the Indo-American and Southeast Asian-American vote. 

His campaign was damaged when a Chicago Tribune story raised questions about Kathuria’s resume and business dealings. He has filed suit against the newspaper. 

Former state Rep. Jonathan Wright was remapped out of a district in 2002 after 18 months in the Illinois House. He is now a Logan County assistant state’s attorney. He has no paid staff, must keep his day job and has raised hardly any money. Wright says his political base includes Evangelical Christians.

Fitzgerald, whose departure from the Senate touched off the contest, has not ruled out making an endorsement. He is disappointed that none of his would-be successors has embraced his zeal for reform. “I think most conservatives in Illinois will be looking for a reformer,” Fitzgerald says. And that, he laments, is “a hunger none of the Republican candidates have tapped into.” 

 

 

Filing
This edition of Illinois Issueswas in progress as candidates were filing petitions with the State Board of Elections. The ballot status of some of them could be challenged. 

We will keep you posted on the status of the U.S. Senate candidates in future issues and on the magazine’s Web site. 

For more information, also visit the State Board of Elections’ Web site at www.elections.state.il.us

The editors

John Borling
Hometown: Rockford
Profession: chairman, Performance Consulting Group; Major General, U.S. Air Force (ret.)
Past offices/races run: none
Webwww.borlingforsenate.com

Chirinjeev Kathuria
Hometown: Oak Brook
Profession: medical doctor; owner of several high-tech businesses

Past offices/races run: none
Webwww.kathuriaforsenate.com

Andrew McKenna Jr.
Hometown: Glenview
Profession: president, Schwarz Paper Co. 
Past offices/races run: none 
Web:www.mckennaforsenate.com

James Oberweis
Hometown: Aurora
Profession: owner, Oberweis Dairy and Oberweis Securities
Past offices/races run: unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 2002
Web:www.oberweis2004.com

Steven Rauschenberger
Hometown: Elgin 
Profession: former furniture retailer
Past offices/races run: state senator since 1992 
Webwww.steve2004.com

Jack Ryan
Hometown: Wilmette
Profession: former investment banker; high school teacher
Past offices/races run: none
Webwww.jackryan2004.com

Jonathan Wright
Hometown: Lincoln
Profession: attorney; assistant stateØs attorney, Logan County
Past offices/races run: former state representative
Web:www.wright2004.com

 


Lynn Sweet is the Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times. 

Illinois Issues, January 2004

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