Al Jourdan and the
Illinois Republican party

Illinois Republican Party chairman Al Jourdan is talking confidently these days. A burly, 58-year-old man with an engaging smile and a reputation as the power-broker of McHenry County politics, Jourdan has eliminated the state GOP's $350,000 debt during his four years as head of the party's 22-person State Central Committee.

The party is solvent and looking good: Republicans have held the governorship since 1976 and the White House since 1980. Republicans are targeting two Illinois congressional seats — the 16th and the 11th. Jourdan also predicts that once voters learn more of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun's record in government, Richard S. Williamson will be elected the state's first Republican U.S. senator since 1984.

Republicans plan to win the 30 state Senate seats needed to make Sen. James "Pate" Philip of Wood Dale majority leader. Counting 48 Illinois House seats as Democratic, 46 as Republican and 24 as toss-ups, they figure at the very least to erode Speaker Michael J. Madigan's overwhelming Democratic control of the House. The new map helps. When Secy. of State George H. Ryan pulled Jourdan's name from a crystal bowl last fall, Republicans won the tie-breaking vote on the redistricting commission.

As GOP chairman, Jourdan oversees an apparatus promoting George Bush's reelection and hoping straight-ticket voters will elect Republicans all the way to the bottom of the ticket. The state party's five-person staff has swelled to 20 during the campaign season. They run Victory 92 — a generic party-building program whose activities include direct mail, voter identification, registration lists and telephone lists. This resource center links the national organization, statewide officials, legislative campaign operations and county chairmen.

Jourdan and the party's financial committee, headed by national committeeman and Illinois Toolworks CEO Harold Byron Smith, raised $1.4 million for Bush/Quayle. Gov. Jim Edgar as well as former Govs. James R. Thompson and William G. Stratton are among those who help with what Jourdan describes as "key phone calls." Now, the finance committee is poring over contributor lists, drumming up the $2.5 million needed to run Victory 92, which began with seed money from Citizens for Edgar, the governor's fund-raising organization.

Jourdan is a friendly man with a deep voice. He talks of the anti-incumbency fever sweeping the land as though campaign strategists had uncovered a rival's weak spot. Not that he believes hostility toward politics is solely the Democrats' problem. Last spring, the state GOP organized focus groups which suggested incumbency need not be a liability: Voters merely want evidence of action. As a result, this fall's mailings contain fewer pictures and more examples of what legislators have actually done and plan to do.

Jourdan works from sunrise to sundown in his office at the McHenry County Govemment Center in Woodstock, handling the routine of political problems. As McHenry County auditor, he calls himself the county's "financial director" and says working with numbers more than people in that job provides him the flexibility to start early and have time for his nonpaying political work. He allots his time "by demand," making himself available for a staff meeting or a presidential visit. One phone call may involve persuading a big contributor to write a check, the next may mean telling a candidate the party has no money to spare.

"Al's from the old school but understands the changes" that have made "people much more independent-minded," Gov. Edgar says. "He's respected by county chairmen, and because he's an elected official, they know he understands their perspective. He's brought stability to the party. He doesn't always agree with everything, but [he] respects decisions and supports them." Jourdan handles things that could be discordant for the state party, like persuading one county chairman to stop writing letters protesting the division of his county in the redistricting process and encouraging another to fill a vacancy on the ballot with

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somebody whom the House leadership liked. "Ask him to be at a 5:30 breakfast in Addison, and he'll be there," says Mike Tristano, chief of staff for House Minority Leader Lee A. Daniels of Elmhurst and the House Republican Campaign Committee's executive director.

The state GOP party is structured legally with each congressional district electing a state central committeeman. They then elect a state chairman, who runs the central office, but the traditional Republican party leader is the top state Republican politician. Gov. Edgar understands party organization and the need for unity. After becoming governor, he named Gene Reinecke executive director of both the state party and Citizens for Edgar. A 35-year-old Thompson administration veteran, Reinecke took over the state's Bush/Quayle campaign this spring. His former dual role is now filled by Andy Foster, a 28-year-old Wheaton native who worked in the White House political office for the last three years. "This is the first time anyone can remember a governor putting his key political person in charge of the party," Gov. Edgar says. "The state party isn't any longer out there in left field — that's not the right word — I mean right field."

Gov. Edgar counts on a unified party, saying Jourdan and Reinecke "spent a lot of time putting together the delegates for the national convention so that all factions of the party are represented." The governor apparently has patched up differences with the United Republican Fund, once a vital GOP funding arm and more recently a conservative splinter group whose candidate Steve Baer challenged Edgar in the 1990 gubernatorial primary. Party regulars equated the low-key atmosphere of June's biennial state party convention in Peoria with success. "When a Tribune reporter complained of the lack of news, the governor chuckled and said this was one of our objectives." says Foster. "County chairmen and state central committee members said this frankly was the best convention in a long time. This is a unified party going into the fall."

This party harmony theme is sung by a faithful chorus. An Edgar administration official said the governor knows how to stroke county chairmen. Republican women's clubs and legislative leaders (even though his failure to get Philip to go along with the third airport bill suggests otherwise).

Albert M. Jourdan

Jim Thompson, the top state Republican during his 14 years as governor, was not a creature of the party. When he saw an opportunity to run as governor on the Republican ticket, he was a U.S. attorney whose crime-fighting, including the conviction of former Gov. Otto Kerner on bribery charges, had put him on the cover of Time magazine. Thompson didn't appreciate the party organization, party regulars contend, until his narrow win over Adiai E. Stevenson III in 1982.

"I was the first politician Jim Thompson ever flew with," Jourdan says, recalling a trip to meet county chairmen and state central committee-men in Wabash County. The rookie campaigner wasn't crazy about being in a single-engine plane. "I told him, 'you'll do this all the time until we get some money together,' " Jourdan says. "The next day, he came to McHenry County for a golf day and was on his way. He didn't have the association with the system so he had to grow into it. Jim Edgar was much more party orientated. When he started running for governor, he knew what to do. He already knew all the politicians."

Gov. Edgar is banking on those he calls "the party leaders" — county chairmen and township committeemen — to drum up new voters. With 37 of the GOP's 102 county chairmen newly elected this year, Jourdan oversaw training sessions for them in 18 locations. Dubbed "Republican Party 101," the sessions covered how to register new voters, walk the precincts and other basics. In past efforts to register voters, the GOP relied on "headhunters," who were paid for each new signature. Budgetary constraints fueled an impetus to rely on the grass-roots organizations to get volunteer registrars to sign up 200,000 voters. Jourdan said in July that he likes what he sees so far. Voter registration was proceeding at an "accelerated rate" in McHenry, he says, conceding, however, that the Chicago collar county's population growth may be part of the reason. Jourdan figures he's in the same boat as the state's Democrats; the

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two parties will find many new names on Ross Perot's petition lists.

A lifelong Republican whose political career began nearly 50 years ago, Jourdan got his start knocking on doors for a great uncle who was running for township clerk in Oak Park. In 1957, he, wife Carrie and the first of their two children moved to "the country" in northeastern McHenry County. Soon after, local party officials encouraged him to spend a few hours a year doing precinct work. "I used to hunt and fish, but the next thing I knew I was township chairman and then county chairman," he says. "As you become more involved, you become more interested and more people want you to do things. The next thing I knew I wasn't fishing or golfing anymore."

His official party biography starts in 1961 when he became McHenry Township 16th precinct committeeman, and the next year he was elected secretary-treasurer of the McHenry Township Central Committee. Chosen county party chairman in 1968, he was president of the Illinois Republican County Chairmen's Association from 1976 to 1980. In 1982 he was elected to the state central committee, and since 1988 he has been chairman of the Illinois Republican party. He is also running for his sixth term as county auditor.

Until 1970 he worked full time as general manager of Jourdan Packing House, a fourth-generation family-owned sausage maker and hog cutter on Chicago's south side. Through business contacts, he became acquainted with Richard B. Ogilvie, helping out in his campaigns for Cook County sheriff and for Cook County Board president. In 1968, as McHenry County GOP chairman, Jourdan helped deliver the vote in Ogilvie's successful bid for governor. In 1970, after the family business merged with two other companies, Jourdan joined Ogilvie's administration in Springfield as a troubleshooter on financial issues. In 1972, when Jack Schaffer left the McHenry County auditor job to run for a newly drawn state Senate seat, Jourdan was elected to fill a slot he has held ever since.

"I'm a progressive," he says, meaning the suburbanizing county needs infrastructure to accommodate growth. His knowledge of the capital development bonding game helped the county widen roads and build bridges over the Fox River. Now, he's promoting construction of a Fox Valley Freeway. In his 26th year heading the county's dominant party, Jourdan has a heavy hand in slating candidates, raising money and generally making things happen in the county. He says that he's put "a few hundred people" on public sector payrolls and wishes there were jobs around for more.

When he took over the state party chairmanship in 1988, paying off the parent organization's debt had been the first priority for Senate and House campaign committees. The burden left them with less money to pour into their own races. Moreover, with Gov. Thompson stepping down, the party needed "change." Sangamon County GOP chairman Don "Doc" Adams had been state chair since 1973.

Despite a high profile inside the party, Jourdan prefers to stay out of the headlines. Instead he likes working out problems, assessing strategies and neogitating contracts. "Reporters in Springfield say [state Democratic party chairman] Gary LaPaille is a show horse, and I'm the work horse," Jourdan says with a smile. In his only high visibility task, as the tie-breaking member of the redistricting commission, he was part of the GOP effort seeking the help of African Americans through the Harold Washington Party and of Hispanic Americans through the governor's own coalition. On efforts to broaden the party's base, he quotes his boss: "As Gov. Edgar says, 'the umbrella of the Republican party is big enough to encompass all Americans.' "

The rhetoric doesn't match the reality on the state of the political parties. As William Greider writes in Who Will Tell the People, "Electoral politics, in its present format, reduces the role of citizens by attaching them to a single candidate's fortune, not to a political program they helped to develop." Gov. Edgar attributes popular discontent with politicians to the news media's post-Watergate tendency to dwell on the negative. Kane County GOP committeeman T.R. Smith, who endured abuse from Ross Perot supporters this summer in the GOP's county fair booth, says, "Professional politicians are divorced from the common man. They don't care what the guy on the street actually thinks. They just care about the polls that tell them what the guy on the street thinks."

Chris Bowman, an operative in Lynn Martin's Illinois GOP congressional and U.S. Senate campaigns and political director for the Republican National Committee in the mid-1980s, says, "The top doesn't care about the bottom, and the bottom expects more from the top than they will ever get.... The party's goal is to elect Republicans, but the vehicle is Bush getting himself elected. Parties assist local candidates by getting people registered and making lists available at the cheapest possible cost. Nowadays, the party's main role is that of a post office box and postal machine."

Illinois GOP national committeewoman Mary Jo Arndt says party leaders don't understand the sense of "mission" that may compel Republican women to help elect Braun to the U.S. Senate.

A state party should also promote citizen involvement, conservative activist Thomas Roeser says. "There's no consistent effort to beat the bushes for candidates, no vehicle for ongoing debates that animate people to work for ... something they believe in. Instead, most people are drawn to movements like prayer in schools, which don't compromise. It's a fiction the Illinois Republican party even exists."

Jourdan says it's easy for people outside the mainstream to be critical. Yet, even moderate Republicans say the party structure has gone fallow during the rise of a candidate-driven political system. "The state Republican party has almost no control over the elements of power: money, patronage and the skill to recruit and run campaigns," says James D. Nowlan, a former Republican legislator who is now executive director of the Taxpayers' Federation of Illinois. "Fifty years ago, the party organization was the only thing that knew how to run a campaign. I ran one of [Charles]

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Percy's campaigns for the Senate by simply renting the resources."

As for patronage jobs, the June 21, 1991, ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Rutan may have written the final chapter on political party influence in getting government jobs. County chairmen in rural areas where jobs are few say they've lost a party-building tool. Others call Rutan a blessing: They no longer are expected to operate an employment office.

Volunteer precinct workers remain a source for getting voters to the polls. Between Rutan and the popular disillusionment with politics, Kendall County State's Atty. Dallas Ingemunson sees "all the more reason to engender people who care about the issues and the principles of the party rather than those who want the jobs." Kendall County GOP chairman for 19 years, Ingemunson sensed his own failings in 1990 when the county's first-ever independent citizen group formed to oppose poorly planned land development. In the 1990 primary, voters ousted three county board members, including the chairman backed by Ingemunson.

"Parties have to appeal to the minds of voters rather than to do them favors," says Gov. Edgar, noting his campaign priorities include making appearances in key legislative districts where he is popular and helping Rich Williamson. "As party people, we have to stress that people run on records that the average citizen can see. No one is perfect, but there is a choice. If there were no parties, there'd be no choices on election day."

Yet some professional operatives are extremely critical of parties. Chris Bowman says, "The parties have gotten fat and sassy," noting campaign strategy has become formula: Get the moneyed people to throw a fundraiser, buy media and rework the same old voter lists. "We talk about grassroots organizing, but as the Perot campaign reminded us, we never really do it."

"Both parties are stagnating in a state of total self denial," says Tom Manion, a campaign operative from Elmhurst who directed field operations in Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's reelection and U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski's 1992 primary campaign. He also managed the 1990 upset GOP primary campaign of state Rep. Dan Cronin (R-40, Elmhurst), who beat incumbent Gene Hoffman in Lee Daniels' backyard, and now Manion is running Cronin's campaign against Sen. Ted Leverenz (D-Maywood) in the new 39th District. Manion says, "Parties nowadays can't even get county judges elected. If you can't control the bottom of the ticket, you can't control anything."

While the state GOP apparatus pours its energies into the Bush, Williamson and congressional races, those near the bottom aren't banking on a trickle-down effect. "We're not vesting our success or failure in Victory 92," according to Carter Hendron, Sen. Philip's chief of staff and the Senate Republican Campaign Committee's executive director. Legislative campaign committees have about $1 million in funding (60 to 70 percent from lobbying interests) for voter turnout programs, Hendron said. They provide candidates with an array of resources, including consultants, pollsters and staffers on leave to campaigns.

Senate Republicans have targeted nine races. In late July Hendron was more confident of winning a Senate majority than of President Bush's winning reelection. The former will depend, however, to some degree on the latter. The dilemma, Carter explains, will be doing what needs to be done to carry the Illinois Senate when the state's GOP is driven by the "boys on the Potomac" pushing for Bush and Williamson.

Twenty years ago a group of independent Republicans sought to broaden opportunities for participation in the state GOP party. The party was then suffering from a void at the top after Gov. Ogilvie's loss to Dan Walker in 1972, and the Watergate scandal had cast a shadow over American politics. "We were never as down as then," recalls Don Adams. Called Task Force 75/76, the group held hearings statewide, then asked the Republican State Central Committee to implement its recommendations. Some of the ideas were implemented, such as seminars for candidates, but others were ignored, such as creating a central committee independent of the governor. With Thompson's election in 1976, Task Force 75/76 was forgotten.

Bill Stratton, who served as governor for eight years in the 1950s, agrees change is needed. "The machinery is there by law and the party represented, but the problem is trying to get people interested in being involved," says Stratton, now an Associated Bank vice president in Chicago. "Maybe they could cut the campaigns in half. That would save a lot of money. A good commiteeman may get people interested in politics by inviting good speakers like Rotary Club does."

Good committeemen (or women) are needed — because even Jourdan's county lacks this basic party representation in a few precincts. "It's a great frustration of mine seeing a county with only 55 of 200 precinct committeemen positions filled," says Jourdan. The former meat merchant says that in politics, "There's no formula like two pounds of salt and one-quarter pound pepper per 100 pounds of meat. You deal with people and emotions, and you have to be flexible. . . . We try to give good candidates. We are selling a commodity and we have to market harder."

Robert Heuer is a Chicago writer.

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