This is an interesting choice for Jim Edgar, the former governor who decided not to throw his hat in for the latest U.S. Senate run in Illinois. On the upside, Illinois is expected to go Democrat on the national ticket, so he has a chance of beating expectations. On the downside, Illinois is expected to go Democrat on the national ticket, so he has a chance of meeting expectations, but at least he won’t be blamed for it. Edgar has a moderate record which should help Bush-Cheney in the state, but you would think for that very reason he might have been smart to stay away. Is he trying to prove his bona fides with the Republican right? And if so, why? Does he see a vacuum in the state Republican Party that he thinks he might help fill as a power broker? It will be interesting to see where he goes from here, especially given worries about his health in the past.
Read an excerpt of The State Journal-Register article about Edgar below.
Edgar considers Bush campaign post
Presidential adviser Rove speaks at Illinois Republican convention
By MIKE RAMSEY
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
COLLINSVILLE - Former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar on Saturday said he’ll chair the Illinois re-election campaign of President Bush if he can work out details with national organizers.
The big question for some Republicans is whether the Bush campaign will spend significant resources in Illinois, which the GOP candidate lost to Democrat Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes in 2000. Some say Bush’s strategists have written off the Land of Lincoln.
“I’m not going to get involved in something that’s just symbolic,” Edgar said in Collinsville, where he appeared at the Illinois Republican Party’s state convention. “I think we’re still working out some of the fine points. If I do it, then I would expect that that’s a clear indication that they’re going to play in Illinois - and they will.”
Recent attempts to get the popular two-term governor back into Republican politics, even as an organizer, have fizzled. He reportedly passed on chairing the state GOP organization in 2002 because his bosses at the University of Illinois, where he lectures, weren’t receptive to the idea.
“State party chairman is a little more of an ongoing thing,” Edgar said, “but I don’t think anybody could question my constitutional right to be involved in the (Bush) campaign. I’m not in an administrative position. … I’m more a faculty staff than I am administrative staff.”
Edgar’s remarks came as Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, made a rare public appearance to tell the convention that Illinois can be won. Rove said “the smart people at the RNC,” or Republican National Committee, calculate 57,000 Republicans have moved into Illinois since the last election, and he estimated there were 949,000 Illinoisans who were unregistered or non-voting Bush supporters four years ago.
“We’ve got a lot of people we’ve got to identify and get to the polls,” Rove told the more than 900 state delegates who assembled at the Gateway Center near St. Louis.
Rove praised Bush for the way he has handled national security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America and defended the United State’s war with Iraq. He did not address the prisoner-abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison or the beheading of American Nicholas Berg. Rove left after his speech and did not make himself available for questions.
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