GOP rivals see chance for upset in Cook prez race

No Republican has been elected president of the Cook County Board in 44 years, but both Roger Keats and John Garrido jumped at the chance to run against incumbent Todd Stroger, and both say the reason is enough is enough.

"You just reach the point of saying, 'Have they no shame?'" Keats said. "I mean, enough's enough."

"I'm just fed up, like so many people are, with politicians not doing the job they're elected to do," Garrido echoed. "I thought enough is enough."

As Cook County Republicans - a rare breed to begin with - they have many similarities. "We're both Republicans who believe in smaller government, less corruption - no corruption - and lower taxes," Garrido said.

"John Garrido is a nice young man," Keats said, "and frankly I'd vote for him over any of the four Democrats."

Keats and Garrido are running in the Republican Primary Feb. 2, and both hope for the chance to run against Stroger - or whoever emerges as the Democratic candidate. Both pledged to make government more efficient, to root out corruption by beefing up the inspector general's office and to cut taxes, starting with the full repeal of the 1 percent sales-tax increase imposed in 2008 and rolled back halfway last year in a move to take effect in July.

Yet they came to the point of leaping into the race from completely opposite positions.

Keats dismisses the label of "career politician," saying, "When was the last time I ran for public office?" The 61-year-old Wilmette resident served in the General Assembly from 1976 to 1992, the last 14 years as a senator.

After a decade and a half in the private sector and serving on various boards, including the Illinois International Port District board, Keats said he was talked into running by Paul Vallas after helping Vallas organize his campaign, which he eventually abandoned.

"I came back to work only because my wife said, 'As a retiree you're an abysmal failure. Get out of the house,'" Keats said.

Garrido, by contrast, is a 19-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department who has never held elected public office. He had planned to enter politics after retiring from the force, but seized on the opportunity presented by the apparent Democratic disarray, with three challengers - Chicago Hyde Park Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, Clerk of the Circuit Court Dorothy Brown and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District President Terrence O'Brien - fighting Stroger in the Feb. 2 primary.

"When I do something," he said, "I want to do it right, and I want to have an impact." Running for the county board was out of the question, as he's already firmly allied with his commissioner, Elmwood Park Republican Peter Silvestri.

Garrido is also a lawyer with a small practice on Chicago's Northwest Side, saying, "I'm going for the trifecta of unpopular professions by running for Cook County Board president."

Yet their difference in experience also yields different game plans for how to achieve many of the same ends. Keats boasts of being determinedly bipartisan and says he has a track record addressing corruption, crafting legislation along with Chicago Mayor Harold Washington to reform the Regional Transportation Authority and later to make judicial reforms after the Greylord and Gambat scandals in the '80s.

"I am different from the other five people running," he said. "I'm the only one who's ever cleaned up corruption. Other people talk about it, I've done it. And I've got the scars to prove it. I've got the knife wounds.

Garrido, by contrast, says he's never actually been to a county-board meeting and said he would govern more by shaming the corrupt. He'd cut bureaucracy from the top down, starting with Shakman-exempt employees, some 450 of whom work in the president's office.

"With any agency, the first place I'm going to start is with upper management," he said. "There are hundreds of those positions throughout every agency.

"I'm going to have no trouble shining a light on those who don't want to work together for the good of the county," he added. "... Those who are going to be stubborn, they're going to know I have no problem stepping in front of the cameras and giving them up."

Yet both would leave the county health and hospitals system independent and autonomous, and both would add local clinics, although Keats by privatizing them, while Garrido would not.

Both say they would add efficiency by rolling the forest preserve police into the sheriff's police, but Garrido proposes giving the forest preserves the same independence as hospital system, while Keats would go the other way and roll the forest preserves directly into county-board business.

Keats would put nonviolent inmates on a work-release program in the forest preserves along the lines of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Garrido would slash the county's highway department, which he says is largely unnecessary, given local jurisdictions, and is widely uneven in funding in the city and suburbs.

Yet both insist the Republican nominee has a chance to win the president's office for the first time since Richard Ogilvie in 1966.