Biggert vs. Foster for Congress to be an aggressive race to the middle

In an era where polls show voters believe Congress is becoming more and more defined by partisan politics, the race to become the first representative in Illinois' new 11th Congressional District may be about who is more successful at running away from his or her party identity.

The contest - sure to be one of the top congressional races in the country - pits two people with experience in Congress who both have claims of already representing the district despite both having a degree of carpetbagger status.

Judy Biggert of Hinsdale does not live in the district, nor is she legally required to even if she wins. Bill Foster only recently moved to Naperville as Democrats drew district boundaries that appear to be tailor-made for his candidacy.

Both Aurora and Joliet are typically Democratic strongholds. Naperville is comparatively more conservative, but Foster deftly moved there in hopes of wooing votes from the many Fermilab employees who live there and mark Foster as their former colleague.

Yet even with those advantages, about half of the 11th Congressional District is territory Biggert represents in her current 13th Congressional District seat. Foster represented only a quarter of the new 11th during his time in Congress as the 14th District representative.

Democrats showed recently how serious they are about Foster winning the seat. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee selected Foster as one of five Illinois congressional hopefuls for its "Red-to-Blue" program, essentially guiding the party's financial supporters to where their campaign contributions will do the most good.

Kent Redfield, a political science professor at the University of Illinois in Springfield, said he expects the money in the race will be huge, particularly for Foster.

"The national Republicans have some hard choices in terms of where they are going to spend their money," Redfield said. "But the Dems don't take control of Congress unless they run the table in Illinois. The 11th District is not a slam dunk for them. It's a competitive race."

Foster is an attractive candidate for the party, Redfield said, because he has a track record of recruiting big dollars in his favor. Indeed, Foster narrowly outraised Biggert in every quarter in 2011 that he was on the ballot.

Heavy backing from the party sets up a tricky balancing act for Foster as he plans on running on a centrist platform. Yet, in becoming a member of the Red-to-Blue team, Foster echoed comments frequently made by DCCC Chairman Steve Israel during this campaign season about the Republican stance on Medicare.

"Instead of strengthening Medicare, the House budget would end Medicare as we know it, turning the guarantee of retirement security seniors have into a low-value voucher that will shift higher and higher costs to seniors over time," Foster said in a written statement. "That's Judy Biggert and the Republicans - balancing the budget on the backs of seniors and middle-class families struggling to pay for college."

Biggert's campaign already jumped on that quote as way to paint Foster as a rubber-stamp for the Democratic Party.

"We've already seen Congressman Foster echo national Democratic talking points when (two weeks ago) he joined two other candidates' scare tactics on Medicare in an effort to conceal the fact that Congressman Foster himself voted to cut $500 billion from Medicare (by voting for the Affordable Health Care Act)," said Mike Lukach, Biggert's campaign manager. "We expect Congressman Foster will dump millions of dollars into the same partisan playbook of negative attacks, which Illinois voters rejected in 2010."

Redfield said he expects the attacks will start early from both sides and only intensify closer to November.

"You do have new people in this district, so if you don't define yourself early, your opponent is going to define you," Redfield said. "Both the stakes involved and the way the campaign is evolving on the national level with high-profile races and independent expenditures indicates this is going to be a very aggressive and very negative campaign season. You're going to see just a ton of money."

If so, that would be a more aggressive turn for Foster than seen in campaigns of the past. While that worked in his favor against Jim Oberweis, who was coming off a nasty Republican primary, a nice guy approach couldn't win him a victory against Randy Hultgren.

This time, Foster set a tone early by largely ignoring his two Democratic opponents through much of the primary. During debates and interviews, Foster took jabs at Biggert for her promotion of the Keystone XL Pipeline while owning TransCanada stock that may benefit from that project, and for voting against an extension of the payroll tax cut.

Part of those attacks involved the subtle turning of a negative into a positive. Instead of being the guy a portion of the new 11th District voted out of office in 2010, Foster came after Biggert on emotional votes that divided the parties and spawned record low approval ratings for Congress - at a time when Foster wasn't a member of Congress.

Foster's campaign manager, Patrick Brown, said he doesn't see it that way. Brown said Foster's aggressive posture early on is about establishing contrasts for voters between Foster and Biggert.

"Bill has a different profile," Brown said. "Voters are looking for something different. He's not another lawyer. He's not another career politician. Bill has this almost independent streak. He really did spend time thinking about everything he did. He's not your standard, party-line voter."

Brown's comments are part of the road map for the general election, according to a Foster campaign memo. The memo lays out all the areas the Foster camp sees as weak points to go after Biggert: weakening Medicare, only soft support for the Stock Act that curbs insider trading in Washington, D.C., Biggert's support for the Keystone XL Pipeline, her support of the bank bailouts, and a general painting of Biggert as a Washington insider whose votes and ideology have ruined the economy.

Biggert's campaign showed a similar race to the middle, though a somewhat less aggressive strategy, in a statement it released a couple weeks ago. The plan is to cast Biggert as the most centrist and independent candidate in the race, and as a representative who already has brought benefits to portions of the new district.

The campaign even made a move to pull the rug out from under Foster's centrist positioning efforts by pointing to a recent statement fellow Democrat Tammy Duckworth made in an interview with the Daily Herald in February. Duckworth said Biggert is one of the first Republicans she'd reach out to if they both win their contests, and indicated Biggert is a Republican with a willingness to work across the aisle.

But Biggert's campaign is also planning a strong push to sell voters on what Biggert already has done, Lukach said.

"Voters in this area know that Judy Biggert's work has never stopped at the old district line," Lukach said. He pointed to Biggert's work with Hesed House, a homeless shelter in Aurora, and her efforts to bring the Silver Cross VA outpatient clinic to Joliet as proof.

"Neither of those initiatives was in the old 13th District, and neither was an exclusively Republican project, but Judy knew they were the right thing to do," Lukach said.

There is at least one more factor that may play a major role in the race, Redfield said. If there's any state where Barack Obama being at the top of the ballot will make an impact, it's Illinois. Democratic enthusiasm would translate into a large Democratic turnout, which almost fueled a Biggert loss the last time Obama was on the ballot.

In 2008, she received only about 54 percent of the vote in defeating Democrat Scott Harper. The rematch was not nearly as close in 2010 with Obama off the ballot and the traditional midterm blowback against the party in the White House in full effect. That was the same blowback that helped push Foster out of office.

"Assuming the Republican nominee is Mitt Romney, it all depends on what the enthusiasm level is for him versus Obama," Redfield said. "If Obama can get the enthusiasm back in terms of the base, and if Romney is trapped in some of the social conservative rhetoric that's been dominating parts of the Republican presidential campaign so far, that's going to be helpful to Democrats on the ballot. But if we have $6-per-gallon gas and everyone is talking about the economy going in the wrong direction over the summer, that's going to generate enthusiasm on the Republican side. If that happens, Obama on the ballot could turn out to be a huge negative for Democrats."