BY MILTON RAKOVE Author of the book Don't Make No Waves . . . Don't Back No Losers, Rakove is professor of political science at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus.

IN THE FALL of 1974, shortly after James R. Thompson announced that he would not run as the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago against Mayor Richard J. Daley, I appeared with Thompson on Milt Rosenberg's radio talk show, WGN's Extension 720. As the show drew to a close, Rosenberg turned to me and said, "Well, Milt, you've been on with Jim Thompson for two hours. What do you think of him as a politician?"

"He's very bright," I responded, "and has come a long way in a short time at a fairly early age. But he talks too much. He is still a lawyer and a prosecutor and he'll have to change his approach if he wants to pursue a successful career in politics."

My next encounter with Thompson was a few months later, at a Christmas Eve party. Thompson shook my hand and said, "Milt, my mother said you were absolutely right that night."

Thompson's yearlong campaign for the governorship of Illinois, one year later, bore witness to his development as a politician. Beginning as a neophyte candidate, relatively unfamiliar with the state of the state and its major problems, and suffering from the normal inadequacies and frustrations that plague such candidates, Thompson steadily developed his skills as a campaigner. By the end of the campaign, he had become a professional political who had clearly begun to enjoy the campaign trail. His landslide win over Michael J. Hewlett by 1,400,000 votes immediately marked him as a national figure to be seriously considered by his Republican party as a potential candidate for national office. Thompson came to Springfield in January 1977 to be sworn in as governor, having successfully made the transition from lawyer/prosecutor to politician/elected public official in one sally across the bridge between the two professions.

The politician as governor
How has Jim Thompson, the politician, performed in his new role as governor of Illinois?

According to a Chicago Daily News headline on July 1, 1977, at the end of the General Assembly's spring session, Thompson's legislative report card was an "A-." From his ostensible opponents on the Democratic side in the legislature came a chorus of praise for the new Republican governor. "I think he's successful," said Sen. Richard M. Daley (D., Chicago). According to Democratic Sen. Philip J. Rock, "The governor exhibited a pretty savvy technique with the General Assembly. To that extent he's done a terrific job." Another Chicago Democrat, Senate President Thomas C. Hynes, declared, "I'll shout it from the roof tops. He's gone out of his way to work with the legislature."

What is transpiring in Springfield when the heirs apparent of Chicago's Democratic machine, who had helped bring down one of their own party, former Gov. Dan Walker, could now be so taken by the man who had sent so many of their elder cohorts to federal prisons in the not too distant past?

The answer has to be that the professional machine politicians have recognized Jim Thompson, the prosecutor turned politician, as one of their own, a blood brother and kindred spirit who could play the game the way they did, with mutually beneficial results for themselves and for him. Indeed, the most discordant notes in the cacophony of sounds emanating from Springfield at the end of Thompson's first six months in office came from his fellow Republicans, who found themselves abandoned, ignored or sidetracked by their governor on appointments, on pa-

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tronage and on key issues of public policy.

Thompson has demonstrated a singular lack of interest in the quality of the state's programs and the state's attempt to improve services to its most needy constituents. According to Chicago Tribune columnist Michael Kilian, who helped select Thompson as one of the six least powerful people in Illinois, "One Springfield observer said he hadn't seen anyone less interested in state government since the Queen of Romania passed through Illinois in the 1920's." His only major proposal, outside of his hold-the-line budget, was his attempt to get the legislature to create a new category of felonies, "Class X," to send three-time offenders to prison for life. But this Thompson priority is a matter which is totally irrelevant to most of the major problems confronting the state of Illinois, and which, in fact, according to Rep. Harold Katz (D., Glencoe), chairman of the House Judiciary II Committee, "will no more cure the crime problem in Illinois than aspirin would cure cancer."

The Lawyer as politician
What accounts for Thompson's do-little-to-date governorship?

It could be argured that the lawyer turned neophyte politician was still too inexperienced in the ways of government to firmly grasp the tiller of the ship of state. Or that a Republican governor, confronted with a Democratic legislature, is relatively powerless to affect the course of state government. Both rationalizations, while possibly true, are probably irrelevant in Thompson's case. Thompson has had more experience in state government than some of his predecessors, and a Republican governor of Illinois can provide a great deal of leadership, even with a Democratic legislature, as Republican governors William G. Stratton and Richard B. Ogilvie both demonstrated in their terms of office.

No, the answer to Thompson's lack of leadership lies elsewhere. It is rooted in the political philosophy of Thompson, the politician, and the aspirations of Thompson, the elected public official.

Thompson is clearly a person of superior intelligence who knows what he is doing almost all of the time and who has the ability to understand and work out the most complex problems.

He has chutzpah, which was well proven when he went after the almost unassailable Otto Kerner and the redoubtable Tom Keane and put them both in jail. Thompson is flexible enough to shift his gears from one career to another successfully, which few men can do. First-rate lawyers are generally incapable of making the adjustment to the realities and irrationalities of politics after a successful career in the logic and rationality of the law, while second-rate lawyers generally make first-rate politicians. Thompson is the exception to the rule, a first-rate lawyer who has become a successful practicing politician.

Politician as public official
But is he, at this stage of his political career, a first-rate politician and public official? The answer to both of those questions is "No." And the reasons for that answer must be sought in the interstices of the philosophy of Thompson, the politician, and the ambitions of Thompson, the public official.

Jim Thompson is a practicing politician who has successfully mastered the techniques of politics without having yet grasped the substance of politics. He is a politician of technique and tactic, who has yet to learn the politics of the limits of expediency, the necessity of choice and the reality of societal needs and objectives. At present, he is like a commodities broker who buys and sells carloads of soybeans without ever having seen a soybean in the field or talked to a farmer who plants and harvests the beans. He is something of a Robert Young of politics, a Dr. Marcus Welby, who practices his profession on television, but whom no intelligent viewer would consult in real life with a medical problem.

Good politics is more than technique and tactic, bargain and compromise, expediency and cutting a deal. Good politics is understanding and projecting the ideals, goals and needs of a society and marking a path to those ideals, goals and needs. Good politics is understanding that compromise, while necessary, has limitations; and expediency, while integral, must be balanced with deeply held convictions. To date, Thompson, the politician, has manifested little understanding of those essential aspects of good politics.

Thompson's weaknesses as a politician are at the root of his problem as a public official. He came to Springfield without a program for serving the needs of the people of his state. His carefully prepared position papers in the campaign were clearly little more than dusty tomes, to be offered when asked for but to be ignored when in office. He came to Springfield with essentially a negative program based on the experiences and misfortunes of his two predecessors, Dan Walker and Dick Ogilvie. He was determined not to raise taxes as Ogilvie had done or to practice any of the kind of confrontation which had brought Walker down.

His landslide electoral victory has catapulted him onto the national Republican scene as a potential presidential candidate. That premature development has led him to compromise some of his responsibilities as Illinois' leading public official. He has evinced more interest in the presidential election in 1980 and in national Republican politics than in the requirements of his position as governor of Illinois. Thompson is clearly a man who has become a practicing politician pursuing higher office, without being willing to fully accept the responsibilities and requirements of the office he holds. Why shouldn't the Democrats in the General Assembly praise him since he has, to a considerable extent, turned over the governance of the state to them?

The governor as leader
Thompson's weakness as a public official is directly linked to his lack of understanding of the realities of contemporary American government, as well as to his unsophisticated view of the nature of the political process. In the second half of the 20th century, no legislative body like the Illinois General Assembly can formulate policy or govern the state without strong and active leadership and pressure from the chief executive. Legislatures are too large, too fragmented, too diverse, too responsive to special interests and too prone to compromise the public interest in deference to those special interests. Someone must speak for and represent the interests of the state as a whole and the people as a body politic, and only the governor can do that. If he does not, the governmental process sinks to the level of the political process of bargaining compromise and deal cutting; of doing as little as possible about as much as

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possible and making no waves; and of always subordinating the public interest to the welter of private interests that make up an electorate of selfish, parochial constituencies.

But government is more than politics. Politics is the process by which the multiplicity of interests within the electorate are made manifest, are winnowed out and are represented. Government is a decisionmaking process whose ultimate concern must be not only the balancing of private interests, but, more importantly, the protection of the public interest. Thompson's Republican predecessor as governor of Illinois, Richard B. Ogilvie, understood that when he took the bull by the horns and pushed for a state income tax. It was to prove his undoing by an ungrateful electorate, but Ogilvie is recognized by most students of Illinois government as one of the best governors this state has had.

Thompson could take a leaf from the book of Ogilvie's public record and from that of another great politician turned public official, Richard J. Daley. Daley came to office as mayor of Chicago as a lifelong politician but became a great mayor because he understood the necessity for executive leadership, the requirements of public office, the responsibility of the chief executive to represent the public interest while balancing off private interests and the inability of a legislative body to perform those essential governmental tasks.

The halfway mark
Jim Thompson has come only half way in his transition from lawyer/ prosecutor to politician/ public official. He has mastered the techniques of politics as a practicing politician. But he has not yet grappled with the substance of political leadership and the responsibilities of public office. Good politics in a democracy consists not only in giving the private constituencies what they want, but also in educating those constituencies to a recognition of what the society needs and must have, and ultimately in subordinating those private interests to the requirements of the public interest. Thompson has not yet demonstrated an awareness of that essential element of political leadership in his brief tenure in office. The jury is still in session on his record as governor. He still has time to make a decent case.


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