Quinn, Hynes unveil new ads aimed at black voters

The two Democratic candidates for governor stepped up their attacks Thursday, hours before they were to face off in their second televised debate this week, with competing television ads clearly aimed at black voters.

Comptroller Dan Hynes' one-minute ad unleashes video of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, explaining why he fired Pat Quinn as the city's revenue director in 1987. The governor's 30-second spot blames Hynes for failing to catch alleged misdeeds at a historic black cemetery in suburban Chicago.

The ads began airing Thursday, less than two weeks before the Feb. 2 primary election. The debate was to be held later in the day in Carbondale.

In Hynes' ad, entitled "Dismissed," Washington said he must have been blind to have appointed Quinn as revenue director in November 1986 and calls it perhaps his "greatest mistake in government." The video is from an interview by WGN-TV in November 1987, shortly before Washington died. It's unclear if the interview, Washington's last, ever aired.

"I would never appoint Pat Quinn to do anything," Washington says. "Pat Quinn is a totally and completely undisciplined individual."

Quinn left the revenue department in June 1987. Washington says Quinn was "dismissed" for refusing to do what he was told and for using the department to further his own agenda. But Quinn insisted Thursday that he resigned over disagreements with the mayor's chief of staff and that he had a good relationship with Washington, who remains popular among black voters.

"Harold Washington was my friend," Quinn said. "The last day I talked to Harold Washington, he told me, 'Quinn, you're my friend today, you're my friend tomorrow, someday we'll have a drink together.' I always supported Harold Washington."

Quinn also fired back at a news conference that Hynes was being "phony baloney" for using Washington's words against him when Hynes and his father, Tom Hynes, had formed a third party in 1987 specifically to try to unseat Washington.

But Hynes' campaign notes the comptroller was an 18-year-old college student at the time.

"Gov. Quinn is running against Dan Hynes, not his father," said campaign spokesman Matt McGrath.

Quinn's ad features dour music and images of Cook County sheriff's officials searching the grounds of Burr Oak Cemetery in suburban Alsip, the resting place of civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till and other prominent black Americans.

Four former Burr Oak workers are charged with digging up hundreds of graves, double-stacking bodies or dumping remains, and reselling the plots in a moneymaking scheme.

Interspersed with images of investigators kneeling over graves or standing next to slabs of overturned concrete is a photo of Hynes.

"It was Dan Hynes' job to regulate our cemeteries, but despite 22 complaints about Burr Oak, he did nothing until a sheriff exposed the tragedy," the ad's voiceover said.

Hynes has said regulatory holes -- not the comptroller's office -- were responsible for the Burr Oak scandal.

The Hynes campaign held an event at a South Side restaurant Thursday for supporters who criticized Quinn's ad. They demanded Quinn pull the ad because it's in poor taste to politicize what happened at Burr Oak.

Mark Allen, a journalist and political activist, said Quinn is using the Burr Oak ad to appeal to black voters when he has decades in community service he could have used instead to get black support.

"We're demanding that he take that ad off because he knows it crosses the line," said Allen, who supports Hynes.

Both candidates deny their ads were aimed at black voters.

"I think I'm going to do well with all voters," Quinn said.