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From today’s Chicago Tribune - how the GOP is “playing in Peoria” and Lisle [links are all mine]:

“PEORIA — Inside a nondescript hotel conference room off Interstate Highway 74, about 100 people listened as state Republican Chairman Andy McKenna delivered a plea for unity to a political organization beset by strife.

Under the theme ‘We Are Illinois,’ McKenna sought to bridge a moderate-conservative split in the GOP that has left the party little more than an afterthought in the minds of voters in many state elections.

But in Peoria and elsewhere, McKenna finds his efforts to forge a new party identity hampered by questions of what a Republican in Illinois really is these days.Those questions got just a little harder last week. Hours before McKenna spoke on Monday, news broke that state Sen. Kirk Dillard (R-Hinsdale), the former head of the powerful DuPage County GOP organization, had made a TV ad for Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. That day, state Rep. Paul Froehlich of Schaumburg was defecting to join the Democratic majority in the House.

‘Ideas are important, [and] it’s the ideas that bind people together,’ McKenna said before he grabbed a wireless microphone to address the audience. ‘I’m not sure what the ideas were that drove those two decisions. I wonder about that.’

Dillard’s and Froelich’s moves highlight the frailty of the party, which was decimated in the aftermath of the corruption scandal that engulfed former Gov. George Ryan and further weakened by the divisive 2004 election that saw Obama elected to the U.S. Senate.

The Republican base, as suggested by the demographics of the crowds at the Peoria forum and another in Lisle, is aging. The party’s geographic base, measured by election results, is shrinking - particularly in what had been the usually reliable Republican suburbs.”