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March 17 primary elections:
the moment of truth


By CHARLES N. WHEELER III

CHARLES N. WHEELER III

As the Northwestern University football team prepared for the school's 81st homecoming last fall, sports pundits gave the Wildcats little chance of winning. After all, the team was carrying a 1-5 record and an eight-game Big Ten losing streak into the contest. Moreover, its opponent was ranked No. 17 in the nation, with wins over two highly regarded teams, Houston and Ohio State, on its 4-2 record. So just mail this one in, right? Wrong.

To the great dismay of University of Illinois fans, the underdog Wildcats upset the highly favored Fighting Illini, 17-11. "That's why they play the games," observed one sports anchor-turned-philosopher.

In politics, the moment of truth for conventional wisdom comes when real, live voters go to the polls. Thus, the coming Illinois primary would seem to be a splendid opportunity to check out several notions that are currently in vogue among election handicappers:

• Voters are in a throw-the-bums-out mood.

• Voters will reject a candidate at any hint of personal indiscretion.

• Voters in black majority districts will elect white legislators who are backed by strong ward organizations.

For each premise, at least one test case is on the March 17 ballots. Those wishing to gauge the depth of anti-incumbent sentiment, which conventional wisdom suggests is rampant among the rank-and-file electorate, need look no further than two high-profile races in which career office-holders who epitomize inside politics are facing upstart challengers running as outsiders.

The key matchups are both on the Democratic side. U.S. Sen. Alan J. Dixon faces challengers Cook County Recorder Carol Moseley Braun and Chicago trial attorney Albert F. Hofeld; U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski meets former Chicago Alderman Dick Simpson, now a political science professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, in the 5th Congressional District on Chicago's northwest side.

The contrasts between the incumbents and the challengers are clear. Dixon has been a fixture on the Illinois political landscape longer than most of his constituents have been alive and now holds the No. 3 spot in his party's Senate hierarchy. Braun is certainly no stranger to politics, having served five terms in the state legislature before winning her county post in 1988. In seeking to become the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, however, she offers voters a radical departure from the Senate's image as a conclave of rich, white men. Hofeld, a multimillionaire personal injury lawyer making his first bid for elected office, could appeal to voters looking for an entirely fresh face.

Braun and Hofeld emerged from the liberal outrage following Dixon's vote to confirm U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Since then, they have slammed the Democratic senator for supporting the Republican president on a variety of issues. But as the primary campaign entered its final weeks, polls suggested Dixon's greatest liability could be a feeling that he has been in office long enough. Is the sentiment strong enough and widespread enough for an upset? March 17 will provide the answer.

In like fashion, voters wanting a change would seem to have an ideal target in Rostenkowski, who has been in Congress since Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House. Moreover, as chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Rostenkowski is among the very few truly influential congressmen. Simpson, on the other hand, was among the leaders of the anti-Machine, liberal independent bloc in the Chicago City Council during the

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1970s that made good copy for political reporters but had little impact on city policies. And the underdog has included a call for congressional term limits among his campaign planks, in an effort to tap anti-incumbent sentiment.

To measure the proposition that a candidate's personal peccadillos can be lethal at the polls, the obvious choice is Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nod. Once the seeming front-runner, Clinton's fortunes have waned after a supermarket scandal sheet alleged he carried on for 12 years with a woman paid big bucks to reveal the supposed tryst. The incident raises a number of profound, philosophical questions. Should the supposedly "responsible" media run unsubstantiated rumors? Should some aspects of a candidate's personal life be off limits, as Clinton himself suggested? Even if the rumors were true, should it make any difference?

While such ruminations are wonderful grist for a columnist's mill, the real question for practical politicians is whether such gossip fatally wounds a candidate. The answer is particularly critical for the 10 legislators and dozens of other party stalwarts running as Clinton delegates, who may get an answer not to their liking on March 17,

The primary also should reveal whether Democratic critics of the Republican-fashioned legislative redistricting plan were correct in predicting that minorities would lose at the polls the paper gains they won in the map room. The warning rests on the assumption that in many of the new districts with black majorities, candidates — be they white incumbents or complaisant blacks — backed by strong Democratic ward organizations are more likely to win nomination than grass-roots hopefuls running with only community backing. Thus, the Democrats claimed, the GOP map violated the federal Voting Rights Act despite creating one more black House district than the Democratic alternative. The argument has been unpersuasive to the courts, but the Democrats may get a chance to say, "I told you so," after March 17. In three Senate and five House districts with black percentages ranging from 65.2 percent to 74.6 percent, the candidates include seven white lawmakers and a white ward committeeman.•

Charles N. Wheeler III is a correspondent in the Springfield Bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times.

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