Politics By BARBARA J. HIPSMAN and BOB SPRINGER

The illness and the cure

CHICAGO'S three-way mayoral primary has captured the state's political imagination this month, but it has left Springfield in the eye of a hurricane. A false sense of quiet envelops the capital city as great expectations for the General Assembly's upcoming spring term pervade Statehouse corridors.

No recent session has held out more promise for state government, more hope that its legislature can attack its most insidious ailment — an eroding economic foundation.

The warrant does not issue from any historical suggestion that Illinois state government, at least through its legislature, routinely plays the role of healer. Precious little evidence exists for that conclusion. Indeed, recent years would prove up the contrary: The more difficult and serious a challenge, the likelier it is the assembly will be incapable of prescribing anything stronger than a placebo. This witchdoctor neglect allows the menace to fester until, inescapably, it demands a cure.

Recent examples of this approach include the assembly's refusal last spring, repeated in December, to raise liquor taxes by $50 million a year. Gov. James R. Thompson wanted the higher taxes, he said, to offset spending cuts to schools and mental health programs.

Another case is the consistent skittishness of lawmakers to raise taxes for the state's problem-plagued highway and mass transit programs. In 1979, their lack of appetite for it led Thompson and Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne to devise a pretend, four-year road and bridge repair and construction program that, not surprisingly, collapsed in 18 months. But the legislature continues to steadfastly ignore Thompson's call for higher gasoline and other road-related taxes.

The disease needing a strong legislative physic in 1983 is economic. Its symptoms are declining tax revenues and cuts in spending for government services to less than tolerable levels. The cure — higher taxes — seems obvious enough.

1983 offers a world cherishing decisions of computer micro-chip speed. But the constitutionally dictated route of the legislature is ponderous at best and paralyzing at worst. And politics, whose artistic expression is compromise, often is reduced to its most venal and obstructive form in Illinois. Lincoln's land seems content only when downstate, suburbia and Chicago each is either accusing the others of siphoning tax dollars, or two are colluding against the third. In Illinois, compromise is the genteel way to describe political throat-slashing.

The question thus becomes: Can the 83rd General Assembly sworn into

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power last month surmount the task facing it in the several months ahead?

When the assembly begins work in earnest presumably after the February 22 Chicago mayoral primary — there is no doubt Democratic lawmakers from that region still will be licking their wounds from supporting the loser or basking in the glory of having backed the winner.

That could translate into trouble for the commonweal. Democrats hold firm majorities in the House and the Senate, and Chicago Democrats are the dominant force in each chamber's majority delegation. Because Democrats control the Senate 33 to 26 and have a 70 to 48 hammerlock on the House, the party normally would be expected to easily push through its programs.

Indeed, the party will have programs to counteract Republican Thompson's hatchet cuts of state services and to cope with a failing state and national economy. House Speaker Michael Madigan of Chicago and Senate President Philip Rock of Oak Park each had their staffs fashioning proposals before 1982 drew to a close.

But the outcome of the Chicago Democratic mayoral primary could alter the tenor of the spring session. The three-way race features incumbent Byrne; Richard M. Daley, heir to the city's most famous political name; and Harold Washington, a congressman who would be the city's first black mayor.

If Democrats fall into factional squabbling, it could doom chances of the spring session's finding long-term solutions to Illinois perplexing troubles. That is not to say that a majority party's united bullying is the only way legislation can wend its way through the assembly. And it could even come to pass that the financial mess is so overwhelming it will quell the intramural bickering left over between those legislators who stayed with Byrne, paraded behind the Daley name or gambled on Washington just because he's black.

Failing a legislative solution, Illinois' greatest ill offers a clear and simple result: bankruptcy of the state's treasury and of its social compassion.□

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