Illinois is neither blue nor red. Scott Lee Cohen just made everyone a libertarian. One hard look at the permanent record of the Democratic Party’s new nominee for lieutenant governor—a look that might have been more profitably taken a week before the primary rather than the day after it—and all voices rose as one. Why do we even have this useless office? We need to get rid of it!
When the Democrats nominated Lyndon LaRouche acolyte Mark Fairchild for the post in 1986, it wasn’t because the LaRouchies were masters of deceit. But until it was too late, neither the press nor anybody else gave Fairchild a thought. It wouldn’t have taken a team of reporters plus a grant from the Knight Foundation and a helping hand from ProPublica for the press to have rooted out the colorful facts and allegations about Cohen that were readily available in police and court records. But if any reporter intended to do that, he or she intended to do it tomorrow.
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And here’s Mark Brown in the Sunday Sun-Times: “We in the news media failed the voters by missing the story, and now we can’t let up until we have atoned for our sins by pounding him into submission.”
But if they knew any more about Cohen than Brown had already reported, they didn’t mention it to Brown. They wanted Brown to rewrite the column he’d written the previous March, but this time, instead of mentioning Cohen’s arrest down low, mention it up high, and instead of writing to chuckle at Cohen, write to destroy him.
But it wasn’t a problem for Cohen. It was a problem for Brown. Brown raked up his past with Cohen on Thursday, and by the time I talked to him Friday afternoon he’d been through the grinder and come out the other side. “I was more combative about it yesterday,” he said. “I was getting a lot of nasty e-mails from people yesterday saying it was my fault, and so I was more inclined to fight with them. But as I thought about it overnight, I wish I’d done more.”
There are good reasons why a newspaper—had it come across the video—might not have used it. It was 23 years old, Washington is dead, and who’s to say Quinn hasn’t changed over the years, or that Washington might not have spoken differently of Quinn on another day? (Though Alton Miller, Washington’s press secretary, recalls Quinn as a “showboater” who “kind of broke Harold’s heart.”) And we can only imagine what Washington was saying at the same time about Hynes’s father, Tom Hynes, a Democrat who ran against Washington for mayor in ’87.
