Daily Herald opinion: Jim Edgar, 1946-2025: In these dark political times, we all may miss the former governor's legacy of decency more than we know

The general wisdom always has viewed larger-than-life Gov. James R. Thompson as Jim Edgar's mentor, and certainly, Edgar learned a lot working as Thompson's legislative liaison and later as Thompson's anointed secretary of state before succeeding him as governor.

But Edgar lacked Thompson's glad-handing joy of politics and, for that matter, the personal insecurity and backroom dealing of his eventual successor, George W. Ryan.

While a close colleague of both, Edgar in actuality was a protégé of long-ago legislative power W. Russell Arrington.

When as a young man Edgar interned for the suburban president pro tem of the Illinois Senate, Arrington famously counseled him, “We're not here just to get reelected. We're here to solve problems.” With a record of historic legislative achievement, Arrington embodied those words, and they inspired Edgar throughout a half-century career in Illinois politics.

Edgar's roots were downstate. At his passing Sunday at age 79, we remember him as unpretentious, not flashy; as a governor who worked across the aisle before today's partisan polarization made that all but extinct. We remember him fondly as calm, stable, decent, kind. Edgar was charm without showmanship. He represented a sort of moderate Rockefeller-McCain conservatism that seems no longer to exist. He was, perhaps anachronistically now, a politician who got things done without insults, without noise, without duplicity, without calling attention to himself.

He took office in 1991 just as the country was falling into a recession and the state faced almost a half-billion dollars of debt, the largest at that time in state history. He responded with spending cuts, negotiated over months with a Democrat-controlled General Assembly, and by making a temporary income tax surcharge permanent along with property tax caps.

“It wasn't always pretty,” he remembered later, “but we got a lot done.”

During his administration, the state adopted tougher penalties for drunken driving; required parental notifications for abortion; drove through Chicago school reform; and adopted a 50-year “Edgar ramp” to put necessary amounts of money aside to pay the state's public pensions through the middle of this century — a ramp that has largely been shortchanged since.

While in office, the far right of the Republican Party was as much a critic as the Democrats across the aisle, largely because of his moderate social views and his willingness to compromise. But it was a different atmosphere, before social media and cable news idealogues poisoned out politics, and he easily turned back right-wing primary challenges. In 1994, he won a landslide reelection victory in the general election.

It has been more than a quarter of a century since Edgar left office, but he remained active behind the scenes trying to groom future leaders and, with less success, to combat the anger of this era's politics. He broke with his party in 2016 when it first nominated Donald J. Trump for president and he endorsed Democrats instead of Trump in 2020 and 2024 because of what he described as the “chaos” of his approach.

After retiring as governor, he became a resident fellow at the John K. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and in 2012 established the Edgar Fellows Program, which works to develop future public servants and to foster understanding and respect between the political parties.

In a memorial observation, his onetime chief of staff Kirk Dillard of Hinsdale said, “In a world of polarized political times, everyone should step back and take a lesson from Jim Edgar's legacy of compassion, decency and cooperative collaboration.”

In eulogies, it often is said, “His like will not come again.” Given the acrimony of our times, we hope that will not be true of Jim Edgar.