Glenn Poshard
by Jennifer Davis
Illustration by Mike Cramer
Illinois Issues talked with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Glenn Poshard August 1 on the campus of his alma mater, Southern Illinois
University in Carbondale.
Q.What is the role the governor should play in state government?
In some ways the governor has to be an educator. You know I have a standard policy in Congress in that every decision I make that has any sense of controversy or high importance to it, I come back to my district. I hold a town meeting in every county, and I go out there and explain to the people why I did what I did because I make a lot of decisions they disagree with. We have a dialogue, and I help them understand why I made the decision I made.
There's this wonderful story that John Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage about the Civil War. There's a ship trying to get into Charleston Harbor. And on this ship are all the leaders of the Confederacy, the civilian leadership, the military leadership. And the captain sends a young seaman up to the crow's nest to ascertain where these Union gunboats are that are supposed to be blockading the harbor. The young seaman yells back down to the captain that there are indeed gunboats blocking the harbor and they are in these positions. Whereupon the leader of the Confederacy says to the captain, "Don't believe him because we know where the gunboats are. Continue the present course. We're the leaders of the Confederacy. He's just a seaman." And the captain says, "Well, that's true. You are the leaders of the Confederacy, but you're on the deck of the ship. Billy's up in the crow's nest and he has a view of the far horizon that you don't have, and I'm going to trust his judgment." And he did, and the gunboats were where he said and he steered them safely into the harbor. And the reason Kennedy related that story is because that is what we're about in government. That's what a governor is about; that's what a congressman is about.
We have one obligation. By virtue of the position that the people, who are the real bosses, have accorded us, we have an absolute obligation to tell them what we see on the far horizon by virtue of all the information we get by serving in this position, by virtue of all the debates that we hear, the meetings that we have from the various agencies. We get a lot more information, a thousand times more than the average citizen. And so we have to digest all of that and make a decision according to our best judgment and our conscience. And that decision has to be relayed to the people through our votes, speeches and so on.
Now, we have no obligation to do anything other than follow our best judgment and our conscience. If we're going to take a poll every time just to figure out where everybody is, then we're not going to do justice to our job. The one thing that people cannot make me do is to lie to them about what I see. That's my responsibility. That's my obligation. They have a further responsibility of saying, "OK, I trust your judgment." Or, "I don't and I'm going to call you down from the crow's nest."
I've served 40 counties, and I just won those 40 counties with 95 percent of the vote after serving 15 years in government. At least that said to me that people trust me to be an honest person in conveying what I see and where I think we should go. And I think that's the role of the governor. To me, politics is less about projects and policy than it is about principle.
I sat right over here at Lawson Hall in one of my first philosophy of education classes. All I wanted to do was say, "Somebody show me how to teach. I want to know how to do this thing in that classroom and that thing in that classroom. I want to know how to develop this teaching style and that learning style." And the professor would say, "Wait a second. That's not the first step in teaching. The first step is to understand the principles of
education, to develop your own philosophy of life and your own philosophy of teaching. Once you understand that and you've examined who you are and what you believe, then we will start to show you how to develop a
methodology and a process.
"But if you don't understand what you believe, then you'll just go from one thing to the next, and you'll flounder from side to side." That doesn't mean you don't learn and grow and change, but it does mean you've got to have a set of principles to guide you through teaching. And that's the way I see the role of governor.
We can articulate different programs. We can discuss different approaches to health care or education or whatever. And that's important. But the first thing is to know what you believe and to help people understand that. And that's why I see the role of governor or congressman as more of an educator because we have to help people see the big picture.
Q. What about your role in shaping the future of the state as a whole?
I think the future of Illinois ought to be shaped around five different principles, and, of course, there will be disagreements among everyone about this.
First, we ought to always balance the checkbook. In the name of our
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children, we cannot do what we have done in the past and that is borrow and spend. I'm very proud at the federal level that I am part of the effort to balance the budget of this nation. When President Clinton came, we were borrowing $350 billion a year. And we sat down with the president - moderate Democrats - and said, "Mr. President, this is sacrificing the future of our children. It's untenable. If Democrats stand for anything, they ought to stand for balancing the checkbook."
Every Friday night in my home, my father gave me a very visual gift that I have been so grateful for my whole life. He sat at the kitchen table before we ate dinner, and he put his check on one side of the table and the bills in the middle and he figured out what we had coming in, what we had to pay out. And the next day we went into town and - in our southern Illinois vernacular - traded with. But the principle was you do not spend what you do not have. Period. You just don't do it. Well, that's a principle that's not only good enough for Louis Ezra Poshard's family, it's good for the United States. It's good for
Illinois.
I want to shape Illinois in a way to say, "This is what we hand our children: a clean and clear checkbook." We pay as we go. That's important. And that's not always standard with the philosophy of my party.
Second, I want to shape the future of this state by helping people understand that we have a moral obligation to protect vulnerable people. That's got to be part of the future, and it's got to be an accepted mind-set by our people. So many times I think we look at the most vulnerable among us and we say, "Ah, they're on their own. Let them take care of themselves." But when I look at this state, I see 300,000 children of working-poor parents - minimum-wage earners who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but have no benefits with their job. Those children have no health insurance. That, to me, is a great lack of understanding on the part of this state about what its obligation is to people. I look at elderly people who don't understand managed care and feel threatened by it, and that's why we put forth the first patient's bill of rights in this campaign.
I want to make sure young children have Head Start and Even Start and that disabled people can count on the state when they need the help whether they're veterans or whoever they are. I want to make sure that people know we'll keep Medicaid for the poor, that people can count on government to be their brother's keeper when they need it.
We can balance the checkbook and protect the vulnerable both. And we have to. It's our obligation.
Here's what I want to do to shape the future too. Now, my father wasn't a coal miner, but we grew up in the coalfields. My father's generation saw thousands of young people go down into the coal mines in this area, come up when they were 35 years old and then die of black lung before they were 40. Terrible disease. No safety in the mines, no rules. Until the United Mine Workers came along and organized those mines, we didn't have any quality of life here. This whole area was dependent upon coal, but we saw the direct benefit for what it meant for working people to stand with each other and to insist upon decent wages, decent benefits, safety in the workplace and so on.
If you check my record when I was chair of the Labor and Commerce Committee in the Illinois state Senate, you'll find that I was very fair to business. I have the highest voting percentage of any Democrat in the Illinois delegation with the Chamber of Commerce in Congress, for instance. But, I have always stood up for balance, and I always stood up for working families. And the future of this state ought to depend on that balance of fair profit and fair wages and benefits for our workers. We shouldn't have a situation where profits fly through the ceiling and yet the average family in this state has to work two and a half jobs just to get by. We can do better than that.
I'm an educator; my wife's an educator - she's in her 26th year of teaching third grade. We have a situation in this state that has to be addressed in the future. It's an egregious sin that we have committed in that we have two-thirds of the children in this state that get less than $4,000 a year spent on their
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education, and we have another one-third that get $12,000 to $15,000 a year spent on theirs.
How is that possible? How have we let it get to this point? You know, I stood up with Gov. Edgar last year, forcefully stood up, and said, "He's right. This needs to be changed. We have to provide equal educational opportunity for our children."
What has been the past in this state, what is the present? I'll tell you: Build more prisons. Build more prisons. I have more prisons now in my congressional district than I have community colleges. And the future has to change.
I just had the president of this university send me some stats a couple weeks ago and one of them was that when a child fails to graduate from high school in the state of Illinois, he stands a better chance of going to prison than the average person does of getting cancer, which is now one in five people. That's unbelievable. Think about that. If a kid ends up not graduating from high school, what is the result to the taxpayer? The result is more law enforcement, more drug control, more gang control, more social safety net systems, more prisons. All the stuff that we pay for out of our pocket that never figures into the tax base.
So we have to invest in education to equalize opportunity just as a matter of simple justice. It makes no sense to me that the quality of a child's education should depend on where that child happens to be born or raised. Just think what that says.
And let me tell you one more thing that I believe the governor has to shape in this state. One of the ways I would do it is by changing dramatically the campaign finance laws of this state. Common Cause has ranked Illinois dead last in the nation in having any significant campaign finance laws to help the public know where the money comes from, who spends it and so on.
I went to Congress 10 years ago. You have to understand how much my father loved the government and what he taught us growing up about making a contribution. For my dad to have seen his son serve in the United States Congress would have been the greatest thrill of his life. He didn't get to. He died in 1978 before I even went to the state Senate, but when I stood on the floor of the United States Congress and watched people in both parties passing out hundreds of thousands in checks to members of their committees in behalf of special interests, it turned over something inside me. And I saw it very early, right when I went there. It wasn't unusual at all.
The lobbyists are so sophisticated that they don't give the PAC checks to the members themselves; they give it to the chairman of their committee and let him go on the floor and pass it out. So that when the bills come up before the committee that chairman has some leverage over the members to keep them in line. It's terrible.
When I first ran for Congress and met with all these groups, signed statements that I would support their issues, they gave me their money. And then I get to Congress and I'm sitting in committee and I hear these issues from a national perspective, not just a surface understanding that you have when you're running for Congress. And I'm thinking, "Gosh, I don't believe this anymore. I told them a year ago that this is what I really believed and this is where I'd be. Now I understand from hearing people from all over the country talk, all these professionals talk, that it's a different thing." But, you're roped in. You've taken all this money. They've backed you with all their support, all their people, and you're thinking, "Oh, wow."
What a storm that goes on in your gut over this sort of thing. And I made the decision in May of my freshman year that I could not handle that. And I made a decision right then never to take another penny of PAC money. And I haven't for all these years. And I'm not in this race. It's very important for me to maintain, as much as I can, my sense of independent decision-making. And I've tried hard to do that, and I'm going to continue to try and do that. But I'm the only candidate that I know of in this country that has
adopted the Simon-Stratton report.
Former Gov. Stratton and Sen. Simon have studied for two years with a commission of impeccable integrity what we need to do in Illinois in terms of putting on restrictions and limitations. We've adopted all of that. In fact, we've gone farther than that because I see [people] in both parties at every
level admit what money is doing to our system. It is buying access, access leads to influence, influence leads to laws that are not always the best for all of our people. And it has to be stopped.
You know, Mr. Lincoln said 130 years ago, "Here's the bottom line in all things. Right makes might." Period. Not presidents, not governors, not armies. Right makes might.
Q. What do you feel is the most pressing issue for Illinois and how would you address it?
I think undoubtedly education, because of the disparity in funding, because of the inadequacy of so many districts to provide a good educational opportunity for our children. I stood in a school district, about 40 miles from Chicago I'd say, and watched for half an hour this fifth-grade teacher with her students. And that whole half-hour I didn't hear one single word of English spoken, just fluent French. And when I went over and asked the teacher, "How is this possible?" she said to me, "Well, it's not hard to understand. Our kids start foreign language here in the first grade."
Do you know when every child in my 27 counties that I represent gets their first opportunity to study foreign language? High school. And now most of our high schools can only offer two years. We don't even have the ability to offer third and fourth year now. So, that's a disparity that's incredible to me
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because two-thirds of those children that are in first grade today, at some point in their lives are going to be working for a multinational corporation. And one of the requirements they're going to have is to be able to be bilingual. And yet we don't have the opportunity to close that gap in our current situation.
I can take you to school districts where there are computer labs in every wing of every school from the elementary on up. Computer pods in each classroom. And I can take you to classrooms all over this state where the school buildings are 70 years old with 60-year-old electrical systems and we couldn't accommodate a computer in the classroom if we had them.
That's how great the disparity has grown, and it has all kinds of implications for the future of this state. For our children there is only one real pass for the future and that's the best education we can give them. That's the most important issue facing this state, and it has to be resolved.
We put forth a very serious and precise proposal. First of all, establish the best accountability. I'm a teacher. I know where education takes place. It takes place in that classroom. When you close the door and you've got one person standing there in front of 25 children, that's when education begins to take place. We put forth a proposal to do lots of things like reduce class size for one thing, especially in the early elementary grades, K [through] three. But start with those schools that are on the target list who are floundering the greatest. They need the most help.
Increase the number of teachers, especially in the elementary grades. We've addressed that at the federal level. The president has put forth a proposal with our backing to put 100,000 more
teachers in the classrooms. But that won't get it in terms of all the needs that we have. We've got to do better than that. This is the thing. Our teacher training programs at the university levels need greater support.
The most difficult years of a teacher's life are when they start, those first two or three years. I know. I've been through it; my wife's been through it. We developed a whole program for mentor relationships between experienced teachers - teachers that are meritorious and have proven themselves over years - to work with that beginning teacher in the classroom.
But my approach to education is to equalize the opportunity by making the classroom environment the most productive that we can get it. And you have to have resources to augment that. You know, we need more computers in the classroom. Those kind of things. That's the emphasis: classroom high standards, great accountability, the best teacher training that we can bring to bear. And making sure we team up those teachers with master teachers who can help them become the best teachers they can be. That's the shape that I want to see education take in the future.
Q. We have chosen five key issues for the future of Illinois: education, transportation, crime, technology and economic development, and welfare and workforce. We'd like to listen in on your thoughts about these issues.
To me, education is the most important and will always be. The most important issue facing our state is our continuing efforts to improve it.
Transportation. I serve on the Transportation and infrastructure committee in the Congress, and I serve on the surface subcommittee, water resource and Environment subcommittee and the aviation subcommittee. What we have seen throughout this state is surveys that show the state has fallen behind in terms of meeting transportation needs. And they've done that even at a time when we have improved greatly the amount of money coming from the federal government back to the state.
When we passed the [transportation] bill six years ago, I sat on that committee. We have sent more money back to the state of Illinois over those past six years than we ever did before. So we've had more federal money coming and yet we have an auditor general's report that just came out three or four months ago that says Illinois is spending - I can't remember precisely how much - but so much a percentage higher for building materials and for the cost of building roads than any of our neighboring states. So you've got more money coming from the federal government, and you've got more money apparently not being spent appropriately. What we just did in the new surface transportation bill was add an additional $200 million a year over the next five years coming back to Illinois, over and above what we've been getting. Plus, we have now taken the highway trust fund off budget, which has always been held on budget. There's about $30 million out of that trust fund that will now be coming out to the states, which will give additional money to Illinois.
So we have basically said, "What we're going to do as governor is make sure that every penny is being spent effectively and appropriately in terms of of our transportation dollar."
We're going to get more money from the federal government, and we don't believe, until we see how that works out, that we need a gas tax increase to build our roads and maintain our roads. But I believe very strongly that there are areas of high priority in this state. I visited all of them that need to be addressed in addition to our normal five-year plan at the Department of Transportation. Such roads as Route 13 in southern Illinois; New River Bridge in East St. Louis; U.S. 67 in central Illinois. We put nearly $600 million in upgrading major transportation arteries. So what we have laid out is a funding source that we think is appropriate: Our roads over the next five years without a gas tax increase.
Economic development. I used to head up the southern Illinois coalition, which is the largest regional economic development group in this state. We had about 40 counties represented by that
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coalition, and the things that I want to stress as governor when it comes to economic development are these: Number one, you can't separate out education. You have to have the best-trained workforce that you can have. That starts with education and continues through job retraining efforts. No one has worked harder on job retraining than I have because I'm in an area where we've lost 75 percent of our coal mines. And we fought hard for monies to retrain these people with computer technology or whatever it is that we can get to get them a job in the future.
Let me just use the city of Chicago as a microcosm. But this applies to Peoria. It applies to Springfield and Rockford and Joliet and other places all over the state. In Cook County, we have 10,500 acres of brownfields. Abandoned factories and plants and so on. Nothing is being done to expedite the cleanup. Nothing substantial. In my campaign in the primary, every morning that I was able to campaign in the Chicago area, I stood on an El stop or a Metra stop. And I would stand on those Metra stops out in the suburbs, and this is what I would see: Here's this big parking lot, right? Here comes all of these people rushing into this parking lot in their cars, running for the train. The trains going into the city were filled with people who looked just like me. They wore suits. They carried briefcases. They were headed into the city to their high-rise offices.
Each train coming out of the city was filled with people of color. African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans. I talked to those people. What did they tell me? "We get up at 5 o'clock. We have difficulty finding someplace to take our children."
Now, these people are getting up at 5 o'clock, going 40 miles out into the suburbs to take a service industry job for seven bucks [an hour], sometimes with no benefits. Leaving their children all day long in their community in a substandard day care or child care facility where they don't know if the child is safe. They don't know if the child is being educated or anything else.
At the same time, what's going on is the state is investing money in building more infrastructure and so on in the collar counties. And I understand it, but you have tremendous urban sprawl now in Will and DuPage, Kane, Lake and McHenry [counties]. Thousands of acres of prime farmland being consumed each year, creating traffic problems and watershed management problems, flooding situations and everything else. But building jobs where people most need those jobs, in the inner city, in rural areas that have been devastated by the coal mining industry shutting down or the oil and gas community shutting down you know, we're not addressing that.
I'm going to expedite the cleanup of those brownfields. I'm going to create
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tax incentives, and we've laid out a whole plethora of those kinds of incentives if business will move into those areas, build a factory and create jobs. Hire the people where they live so that they don't have to get up in the morning and divorce themselves from their family and their community and so on. Hire them where they live with decent jobs. We'll give them maximum tax breaks. We'll help them deal with infrastructure and security around the plant and begin to revitalize those communities of hard-core, high unemployment.
If we don't do that - first of all, there's a moral obligation to do it - but, if you don't buy that, then there's also the pragmatic taxpayer reason to do it. Because if those people can't work and they can't have a decent job with which to sustain their family, then how do we ever move ahead as a society? The amount of money we will spend on the social safety net programs, addressing crime and everything else, will eventually overwhelm us. And that's the significant part of society that has to be addressed now and where we have to make progress.
And that's been a part of my whole economic development push. In locating those kinds of things, we have in place a program where the universities can begin to interact, especially the community colleges with job training. We can make contacts with those universities. Right now, there's a mismatch of skills that are needed with the anticipated kinds of business and industry that we can build there. We can begin with a vision to say, "OK, here's our goal for expediting the cleanup here, here, here. This means we're going to create these kinds of jobs in the future so we need these skills available to work in those jobs."
And we begin with the community college system and university system to say, "Here's the kind of job training programs that we need so that these skills are available when we put these industries in place." We can do that. It's a matter of priorities and how we address this problem. And that's the kind of thing I want to do as governor.
I have the poorest district in this state. Forty-seven thousand families in my district last year qualified for the earned income tax credit. This is working poor. These are people who have jobs, but as a family of four do not make more than $26,000 a year. And that, to me, is where we have to develop the economic push, to relate to those families so they can begin to sustain themselves and alleviate the taxpayer from all of that burden.
That figures prominently in the way I approach welfare-to-work. Because welfare-to-work can't be just training people for two or three years and then washing our hands of them, letting them go to work at McDonald's or someplace for barely above minimum wage with limited benefits. That doesn't get it.
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We have to create real jobs that pay enough with enough benefits that people can sustain their families. And that's the kind of job creation that I'm going to emphasize as governor of this state. And it figures into the welfare-to-work and that whole mission before the state now as a result of the federal law that passed.
Crime is very important. Being an educator, I know that children have to have a safe environment in which to study or they're not going to learn. We've advocated boot camps in schools as one of the things we need to address right away. First of all, crime is related to a lack of educational opportunity. So education is a factor in all of this. That has to be addressed.
Expanded school days where we have after-school opportunities for children to stay off the street, to stay in mentor-type programs where they continue learning, or in recreation and sports programs where they can continue to build character.
I've recommended for those children who have exhibited violent and disruptive behavior in the schools what we call school boot camps. These would be alternative settings. It doesn't do us any good if a child exhibits violent behavior in the school to kick that child out into the street. They just get worse and they take their problems into the street. And that threatens the community. If we have an alternative school setting where there are security people alongside teachers, where they don't give up on these children but continue to teach them and we develop an atmosphere of discipline, of respect for authority, and we continue to teach academics, we can recover these children. We can give them a sense of self-worth and a sense of contribution to the greater good if we believe in them. And we put forth a whole system to make sure we develop that in every school with disruptive children.
Now, there's another type of child that has caused great concern in our society and that's the kid who shows up with a gun and begins shooting everyone. I voted twice for the safe school act, to say zero tolerance for any kind of weapon being brought into the school. Zero tolerance. But
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more than that, the child psychologists tell us you do not easily observe that this child will do this sort of thing. They're usually quiet. They feel picked on. They have a very low sense of self-worth. They don't feel like they belong anywhere, not at home, not at school, not to a civic club or organization or anything like that. They're loners. We have to have a whole approach to teaching and training teachers and also to help people at home to look out for these danger signals.
And, when you have a situation in this society where children are exposed to 80,000 murders a year on television, where we're constantly being drenched in the TV shows and so on with all this violent behavior in our society, it's no wonder children get the idea that they can do this.
You go into any game parlor in any mall in this state and you'll see hundreds of games where children are actually pulling the trigger, killing people. There's got to be curbs.
We're going down the wrong path here when these kinds of things are permeating our children's minds every day. You know, I want to put together groups of people to figure out how we approach this. Not violating First Amendment rights of free speech, but having better controls over this kind of stuff that influences our children.
Now, I've supported, for instance, in this campaign and in the past, child-safety locks on guns. I was the first candidate to put forward a program on safe storage and lockup of all weapons because a lot of people are killed accidentally with these weapons. We put forward a lot of measures that we think speak to many of these issues.
I was the strongest supporter of the cops program in the 1994 crime bill which put 100,000 more policemen on the streets of this country. And we want to augment those local community policing programs with state assistance in every way that we can because I think community policing is the way to go.
And the state has an obligation to help those local communities proceed along the lines of enhancing that capability.
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