Politics By BARBARA J. HIPSMAN and BOB SPRINGER

Dekka's mandate: jobs

IN JULY, while state lawmakers campaigned in their new districts and the rest of Illinois vacationed, mowed lawns or went to the beach, the boss of Gov. James R. Thompson's premier cabinet agency, the Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, ruffled feathers.

Peter B. Fox, 31, the blond director with an athletic physique, boyish smile and quietly assertive public manner who has managed the DCCA (called "Dekka") bureaucracy for his friend Thompson since February, "raided" his offices. Actually, he conducted a surprise inspection. Little stickers were attached to materials cluttering employees' desk tops.

Mr. Fox has a rule. Desk tops are to be cleared when workers leave for the evening or weekends. No messy papers, no family photos. Such stuff looks unprofessional. The inspections have offended many DCCA underlings, who grouse about effects on morale. But all got the boss' message: There's a job to be done, damnit. Do it.

Mr. Fox's job, and that of his employer, Jim Thompson, is to get as many Illinoisans back to work as possible. But if rank hath its privilege, it also has extraordinary risk. The preeminence given Mr. Fox's agency reveals two keys to the upcoming elections, with important ramifications for GOP legislative candidates. One is that commerce is not doing well in Illinois. The other is that Republicans expect heavy losses unless they overcome

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other, Democrat-designed barriers and convince voters that the GOP has the economy in working order, or at least will have very soon. As happens only once every 10 years, the entire 59-member state Senate is standing for election. House candidates, vying for 118 seats, are running for the first time since 1870 in single-member districts, thanks to the 1980-approved Cutback Amendment. It erased 59 seats and abolished the post-Civil War anachronism, cumulative voting, which guaranteed a representative for each district's weaker political party by electing three people per district. Consider the traditional unpopularity of the party holding the White House in nonpresidential voting years. Note the hurdle put up by Democrats who reapportioned legislative districts to maximize their own advantages.

With all these obstacles, no one needs a rotten economy — depleted factory inventories with few new orders, becalmed home construction industry, hundreds of thousands of unemployed — to boot. But that's what 1982 has given GOP legislative hopefuls, especially incumbents.

Although the comatose economy tends to shade every race to some degree, its shadow is clearer in Senate races in downstate metropolitan areas, especially those with the highest unemployment and greatest despair about things turning around soon.

In Rockford, for example, whose metro area scored the nation's highest jobless rate in July with nearly one of every five in the workforce looking for a job, incumbent Republican Sen. Tim Simms is on the defensive against his Democratic challenger, Joyce Holmberg. Democrats didn't do any favors in the new district map for Simms, a former House member. But Rockford's stalled economy — if it leads to voter resentment over Simms' less than stellar record in showing initiative on commercial issues — could easily return the district to the Democratic fold where it was when Vivian Hickey represented it in the post-Watergate 70s.

Another good example of the economy's influence is in the Illinois share of the Quad Cities along the Mississippi River. There, the Democratic challenger, Rep. Clarence Darrow, and his opponent, GOP Sen. Randy Thomas, have both courted the United Auto Workers union membership. UAW members in the industrialized Moline-Rock Island areas, although not as decimated as their union brethren in Peoria or Decatur, are, nevertheless, worried about job security.

There are other state and local issues in each of those two districts, to be sure. But the coloration of the races by Reaganomics, the faltering economy and fears of an uncertain future likely will prove a powerful influence at the polls. It's an influence many Republicans would just as soon not think about.

The search for jobs, at least insofar as the voter perceives there IS a search, has become, this campaign season, a game of debits and credits. Debits are winning.

Thompson spent the summer as the "credit" player, issuing what reporters called a "blizzard" of news releases every time a job was saved from the jaws of extinction. Some examples:

• On June 9, he announced Ingersoll Products Corp. would buy Electric Wheel in Quincy from Firestone, "saving hundreds of jobs."
• On August 2, he announced the state would commit $1 million to help International Harvester Co. shift 500 jobs from Kentucky to the Quad-Cities area in a Harvester reorganization.
• On August 9, he congratulated Northrop Corp. of Rolling Meadows for winning an $89 million defense contract "that will create 1,600 jobs in Illinois."
• On August 16, Thompson announced a Nebraska firm purchased the Dubuque Packing Co. in Rock Island, which had closed two days earlier, "allowing several hundred jobs to remain in the area."
• The same day, he announced DCCA had arranged new management for U.S. Gypsum's closed Kewanee Corp., "saving at least 80 jobs in Henry County."

Thompson, and everyone else, knew a news release couldn't outweigh the "debit" role played by the economy this summer.

Eighty jobs in Henry County, though infinitely important to the 80 people who have them and reason enough for Thompson to do everything in his power to save, don't cancel out the jobs not saved. A thousand Peoria-area Caterpiller Tractor Co. workers were laid off in September, adding to Cat's national total of 17,000 idled workers. Nor can news releases erase the 1,300 layoffs of state employees Thompson himself must institute this fiscal year, nor the 700,000 people reported out of work statewide in July.

It's those idle people whom legislative candidates — especially Republican incumbents — worry about. Reaganomics, if perceived to have caused the layoffs, or at least to have done nothing or too little to reverse them, will supply most of the October angst any candidate with a GOP lapel pin feels.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Democrats for House and Senate seats from Rockford, Rock Island, Peoria, Decatur, East St. Louis and south scream Republicans have taken them away. GOP arguments, that the suffering is the taste of the medicine, may ring hollow in new, marginally Republican legislative districts where the unemployed voter, the angry voter, makes the difference.

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