-By Warner Todd Huston
The nonsense going on in the DuPage County GOP is a perfect example of all that is wrong with the Illinois GOP. It all rather shows why the GOP is useless in the state of Illinois. The DuPage party organization took what could have been a great public relations opportunity and turned it into yet another secretive, back-room dealing that cut out voters and proved that even its own party rules make no difference to party powerbrokers. Worse, this isn’t the first time DuPage GOP has mishandled the same situation.
On July 18, a Monday, DuPage GOP Party Chairman Dan Cronin abruptly resigned from his post as chairman. It doesn’t seem to have been a long planned resignation — though Cronin had mentioned he would not run for reelection to the chairmanship — and it certainly was not one enacted with public note. In fact, no one outside of Cronin’s inner circle even knew it was coming until several hours beforehand when Dave Diersen reported the coming resignation the Sunday before Cronin stepped down.
After Cronin left his post that Monday evening, the nine GOP township chairmen in DuPage County unanimously voted to replace Cronin with Randy Ramey, the state representative for the 55th district as well as Wayne Township GOP Chair. Ramey is also the stepson of famed GOP politico Pate Philip, onetime powerful leader of the Illinois senate.
Of course, the problem here is that Cronin resigned and within hours the DuPage township chairmen simply replaced him in a closed-door session. No other candidates were discussed, no one was given any notice, no open discussion among Republicans was had. It all turned over before most were even aware a resignation even occurred.
What did DuPage Republican voters think? These powerbrokers sure didn’t care.
Now, Doug Ibendahl looked up the rules for such a situation and found that the secretive, backroom method employed by the DuPage Party bosses violated their own rules.
When Cronin stepped down, so did Pat Durante, his Vice Chairman. The rules say that Durante would have taken over in the case of the Chairman’s resignation. Obviously they convinced Durante to quit just so they would be able to anoint Ramey as Chairman. But Ibendahl found that if both the chairman and the vice chair were to resign, party rules say that the next chairman is to be appointed by the same method as the one that stepped down.
Cronin, the one that stepped down, was appointed by a vote of all the precinct committeemen in DuPage. He did not get his seat by a secret vote of only the nine township chairmen like Ramey just did. Yet, the precinct committeemen were not given the opportunity to have a voice in Ramey’s immaculation.
This isn’t the only time this has happened, either. Secret deals abound in DuPage County GOP history.
Naturally this is all a missed opportunity. The DuPage GOP really missed the chance to show Illinois that it was the party of the people by arranging a public show of its fairness and desire to do things in an open and transparent manner. They could have made this quite a show to attract voters in a county that has been losing its Republican voter base for some time.
But what did these people do? They picked a crony Republican that is connected back to decades of insider deals, they ignored their own party rules to anoint him chairman, and they did so in secret without any input even from their own committeemen much less the voters.
This is yet one more example of everything that is wrong with the Illinois GOP. It shows that the Illinois GOP is a closed loop of inside dealers, a tiny coterie of connected cronies, an insular group of out-of-touch, toothless good ol’ boys that simply aren’t interested in fixing what’s wrong with their party. And they most certainly aren’t interested in sharing power with nobody, nobody sent.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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