Cook board prez hopeful Keats plots media 'ambush'

Roger Keats, Republican candidate for Cook County Board president, plans a media “ambush" of his Democratic opponent, Chicago Hyde Park Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 general election.

While holding back specifics on how much he'd be spending, Keats said that he'd launch a media onslaught Thursday including taped phone messages, billboards and radio ads aimed at Latino and middle-class black voters.

“We are making inroads," Keats said Wednesday during an endorsement interview at the Daily Herald. “If I get every single Republican vote, if I get every possible Republican-leaning independent, if I carry the northwest and southwest sides like most Republicans do, and if I get 30-plus percent of the Asian vote which I will do better than that I still lose. It's Cook County, I'm going to lose. So it comes down to two issues- Latinos and blacks."

Keats said, however, the ads would not be negative concerning Preckwinkle, but instead stress his own ties to the black and Latino communities. Postcards going out include photos of Keats with Harold Washington, the late Chicago mayor he worked with to reform the Regional Transportation Authority when Keats was a state senator from Wilmette, and his Puerto Rican political ally Angel “Tito" Medina of Chicago.

“You're tying yourself to a popular figure in both cases," Keats said. Yet he also said there is an underlying message. “There was a day when reasonable men and women could work together for the good of the state, he added. “We're letting you know in advance, we do have the ability to work together."

Keats said he also would carry the message to voters that he would immediately move to repeal the other half of the 1-percentage-point hike in the county sales tax imposed by President Todd Stroger and cut in half over the summer. Preckwinkle has said she would do so as other cuts are made and new sources of revenue are found, but Keats said he would cut the county budget $540 million immediately by freezing pay hikes, leaving 1,000 empty positions unfilled and covering county employees' health care through Cook's own Health & Hospitals System.

“People forget we have a decent health system," Keats said, adding that he would expand clinics to lower emergency-room visits and would himself get care at the county's Stroger Hospital.

Keats also laid out plans to create a Civilian Conservation Corps by putting nonviolent offenders at the county jail to work, to run the forest preserve district as a public-private hybrid along the lines of the Chicago Botanic Garden and eliminate the forest preserve police by having the sheriff's police patrol county parks.

He said he would also recruit leading business-school academics at Northwestern and the University of Chicago to create an “incubator system to nurture business growth in the county.

Keats said he had the track record of working as a bipartisan reformer in the General Assembly and pooh-poohed Preckwinkle's credentials in that area. “She says she's a reformer," Keats said. “Can you name any reform that has passed the Chicago City Council in the 20 years she's been there?" He drew parallels between Preckwinkle and previous Cook County Presidents Richard Phelan and John and Todd Stroger, adding, “This is just the latest version of the machine saying, ‘Well, I know we're a machine, but...'

Keats said his media blitz, funded by a large contribution from a friend he said does no business with the county, was meant to catch Preckwinkle unaware at the wire. “Toni's sitting there with half a million dollars in the bank," he said. “I don't want to get her where she's going to spend the money."

“If we had broken out last July, they'd kill us. They could crush us easily, and you know it."

Tom Tresser of the Green Party is also a candidate in the race.