Editorial: Staying to fight for Illinois' lost cause
In the Frank Capra classic, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," the idealistic young Jefferson Smith played by James Stewart takes his case for a boys camp to the floor of the U.S. Senate when the cynical political establishment sets out to destroy him.
"You think I'm licked. You all think I'm licked," Smith calls out in final desperation. "Well, I'm not licked. And I'm going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause."
When Gov. Bruce Rauner visited us a few weeks ago during his Turnaround Agenda tour with editorial boards throughout the state, he bubbled with the same optimistic enthusiasm Stewart's Jefferson Smith first showed.
And he seemed to display some of the same political naiveté. Rauner's plenty shrewd and hardworking enough, but when we asked how he would get his agenda approved given the opposition party's entrenched control of Springfield, his answer seemed almost entirely built on the persuasiveness of his case.
His argument was sound, he seemed to think, and so therefore his ideas would be embraced.
Sad to say, sound arguments haven't seemed to be the basis for agreements in Springfield for a long time, as far as we can tell.
Not that we don't fall victim to some of the same Jefferson Smith naiveté. Just about a week ago, after all, we argued in this space for a new and bipartisan approach to fix Illinois' broken government. Silly us, believing our elected officials could shun power politics to actually try to work together toward the common good.
Rauner doesn't have all the answers and some of the things he suggests are downright harsh and unacceptable. But one thing's clear: The establishment that for a long time has delivered the state to vested interests doesn't have the answers. Rauner's agenda is imperfect. But worse, the establishment agenda is more of the same.
Illinois cannot survive on more of the same. It cannot prosper on more of the same.
Over the next several days, we'll all get to see what unexpected miracles the new governor can pull off. And how he pulls them off. At the moment, we're not holding our breaths.
At the moment, it looks like the power-wielding Taylor machine, to return to the Capra film, has a decided advantage, and there are agonizingly few hints that, as in "Mr. Smith," a Sen. Joseph Paine will emerge in a climactic scene to finally crack from a crisis of long-repressed conscience.
But is confrontation and stalemate inevitable? If not a crisis of conscience, could there be a rebirth of goodwill and common sense? Wouldn't that be something? In the current environment in Springfield, that ideal - goodwill, common sense, compromise - may be a lost cause.
But as Jefferson Smith's character once said, "Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for."