Another season of 'hardball politics' comes to a close

What is it about politics that brings out the worst in people? Presumably, the election process is intended to help us all make things better, but it certainly doesn't help make us better people.

Plenty has been written and said about the gutter mentality that seemed to drive many political campaigns this cycle. In television and radio ads and in mailers we all received at home, many candidates considered no distortion of an opponent's position too extreme, no claim too outrageous. This, we are told, is hardball politics, as though that appellation explains the lunacy that overcomes otherwise respectable people who get caught up in an election.

Of course, no lexicon exists to explain whatever happened involving Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica and his political opponent, McCook Mayor Jeff Tobolski that led to Peraica's arrest and then his filing of a $2 million lawsuit.

Was a county commissioner actually out at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night destroying his opponent's political yard signs? Were the McCook police actually lying in wait for Tony Peraica to cross the city line so they could jump out and arrest him on trumped-up charges? Could we actually make this stuff up?

Tobolski issued a statement Sunday calling whatever Peraica did “clearly the erratic behavior of a desperate man.” Well, maybe. But in politics, it's not always easy, or even possible, to cull the desperate or erratic actors from the herd.

For example, after all we'd read and heard about Buffalo Grove Trustee Lisa Stone's outrageous behaviors, who would have thought it would be Village President Elliott Hartstein who would dress up in drag at a victory party celebrating her ouster from the village board?

In a written apology after his picture appeared in the Daily Herald, Hartstein said he meant to “vent a little built-up frustration,” “lost sight of what was clearly appropriate” and was sorry he had “wrongfully added to (the) craziness” of an election.

It's all just hardball politics, timed appropriately with the conclusion of baseball's World Series. The whole process often has been described as a game, a circus even. A political poll taker at a television anchor desk Tuesday described it as the laughable behavior of immature children for a time, the candidates all go crazy making wild claims and accusations against each other and then after the voters have spoken, they climb up to a podium and express their undying mutual respect with ludicrous euphemisms like “hard-fought campaign” and “worthy opponent.”

Today, we hear, President Obama was emphasizing “common ground” with Speaker-elect John Boehner. And I heard Senator-elect Mark Kirk declare himself to be “a fiscal conservative, a social moderate and a hawk on national defense.” The cacophony of clichés stirred memories back to the Democratic convention of 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson regaled his party with ministerial cries of “common ground” after he and Michael Dukakis had just completed a bitterly divisive campaign for the presidential nomination that helped ensure Dukakis' eventual trouncing by George H.W. Bush. And I wondered whether I'd ever heard a candidate declare himself or herself a “fiscal liberal.” And I wondered what that would be anyway. A spendthrift? Would any politician admit to such a label? And for that matter, what's a “social moderate?” The opposite, I guess, of a “social extremist,” a term that I now realize is one that candidates can apply to an opponent but never to themselves.

Hardball politics, indeed.

&bul; Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.