It is a measure of the central role of Illinois and its politics in American life and in presidential elections that Chicago will host the 1996 Democratic convention.

After all, when the Democrats last met in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley I presided over what an official investigation branded as a "police riot"; the victims, whatever their politics, certainly were not Republicans. And Daley, long dead, still lingers in many Americans' minds as that face on the television screen, out of control, screaming F-words at a distinguished Democrat on the convention rostrum, a speaker who had dared to question the handling of anti-war protesters by Chicago's Finest. Daley's son, almost a dead ringer for his father, is now, of course, "Da Mare" II.

Who were the Democrats then and who are the Democrats now? What has happened to them, nationally and in Illinois, and to the soul of their party?

By coincidence, the week the Democrats announced they would return to Chicago, a friend and former colleague of mine, Dan Balz, once a child of Illinois and now a veteran national political reporter for the Washington Post, turned up on the University of Illinois campus where I teach journalism. He was showing his old alma mater to his high school-age son. We got to talking about those questions over lunch in the student union as we discussed old times and the prospects for Americans of his son's age.

Dan and I had worked together in the summer of 1968 at the Freeport Journal-Standard. I was still early in my career, then an editorial page editor after a few years of reporting about state government. Dan, fresh out of the U of I, did some brilliant reporting that summer of 1968 as an intern, including covering the Chicago convention.

I was curious what Dan thought of the party whose turmoil and soul-searching he had covered so well 26 years ago in Chicago at the start of his career. Having taken a few moments to collect his thoughts about what he has seen in his reporting around the country, Dan talked a bit about what Democrats had become. They are, he said, the party that has a little more confidence in government to do things. But, he added, they're not all that confident. And, he noted, political party organizations these days really don't function as vessels of policy ideas or political ideals. They are more headquarters for the logistical machinery of modern politics: polling, fund-raising, mailing lists, computers and the like. Office holders and candidates are pretty much the party, he said, and the party really is what their collective whims and ideas of the moment are.

Dan is a few years younger than I am, enough to be on the other side of the what was known in the 1960s as the generation gap. I asked him what had become of his contemporaries, once so passionate and given to protests about injustices they perceived. Are they still idealistic? I thought I detected a wince and he said that those who had ideals mostly still do; those who didn't, don't.

That lunch conversation got me thinking about the politics and the soul of Illinois, especially of the state's liberals and Democrats, of whom I am one, for better or worse. In one way or another, most of my adult life has been spent observing the politics of this state, researching, writing and teaching about it, fumbling around trying to be a good citizen. I am increasingly concerned about the failure of this state, in which I have lived my entire 54 years, to become a better place than it is. I am worried about the loss of soul in the Democratic party as the only counterweight to the orientation of most Illinois Republicans to preserve the status quo.

As a young person, I was first awakened to politics by Adlai Stevenson II and the urbanely inspiring rhetoric of his two futile presidential campaigns against Dwight Eisenhower, then by the progressive urban agendas of U.S. Sen. Paul Douglas, of the original Mayor Daley in his early years of power and of Gov. Otto Kerner. All were Democrats.

But by 1968, when the Democrats last convened in Chicago, Stevenson was dead, Douglas was a hawk on Vietnam, Daley had fallen victim to the racism of his white ethnic political base, and Kerner, who had taken some courageous stands against racism, was soon to face trial and conviction for incredibly petty profiteering in race track stocks while governor. Also dead were John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, victims of assassins. All three had campaigned in Illinois and stirred the consciences of many in the state about the dangers of bigotry and the importance of social justice for low-income people whatever the color of their skin, whether they lived in Chicago, Decatur, Springfield, East St. Louis or deep southern Illinois.

Despite the fallen and felled Democrats, though, there was hope in Illinois politics for such causes in 1968. The ideals remained alive in the values, rhetoric and risk-taking of Adlai Stevenson III, Paul Simon, Abner Mikva, Tony Scariano, Alan

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Dixon and others. They pushed and prodded Mayor Daley, daring to challenge him and to risk their ambitions in the name of social justice, fairer treatment of average working people, a more sensitive response to dissenters, environmental protection, a better financed and honest state government and a better statewide educational system — open to all regardless of wealth.

That was the promise of the Democratic party in Illinois in the 1960s. It was a great contrast to the Illinois branch of the Republican party, controlled mostly in the mid-1960s by those who were followers of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, beside whom even Richard J. Daley seemed, if not a humanitarian and civil libertarian, then at least relatively enlightened and open-minded.

After working together in that summer of 1968, in the autumn Dan Balz and I went our separate ways, Dan to a career writing about national politics while I did public affairs journalism and later taught here in Illinois. The politics Dan encountered on the Potomac as 1969 began were those of Richard Nixon, promising for a few years, but headed for the ruin of Watergate. Here in Illinois, November of 1968 brought a pleasant surprise for me and a progressive era for the state, though that pleasant surprise eventually was followed by deep disappointment, too.

That November, Illinoisans elected Republican Richard Ogilvie governor. Ogilvie, one of the least charismatic politicians in the history of the United States, in just four years laid the groundwork for modern Illinois state government. He brought about competently staffed executive and legislative branches, an income tax base to permit statewide initiatives in economic good times, a truly statewide, well-financed higher education system, environmental protection agencies, an expanded and refurbished transportation system with better mechanisms for planning and financing and a new state constitution.

All those and more came from Ogilvie and some influential allies. He knew how to blend the legislative clout of Mayor Daley, Senate Republican Leader W. Russell Arrington and downstate Democrat Clyde Choate in the House to win support for a progressive, tough-to-pass program. Those Ogilvie allies were responsible and far-sighted enough to accept Ogilvie's leadership, fine-tune his program and share in the considerable political risks.

It was the golden era of Republican and Democratic competition and cooperation in Illinois. While it smelled at times like sausage being made, in retrospect it was more the essence of statesmanship, seasoned with pork and patronage, but more idealistic than cynical, more responsible, on balance, than exploitive.

Alas, what should have made Ogilvie a viable presidential prospect eventually ended his political career. Dan Walker, who also only served one term as governor and not long thereafter went to prison as a result of some private business dealings, defeated then-Lt. Gov. Paul Simon in the Democratic primary in 1972, then knocked off Ogilvie in November.

To Walker's credit, he was fighting to liberate the Cook County and Illinois Democratic parties from some of their most anti-democratic and corrupt practices and impulses. He succeeded in some lasting ways, but in doing so, he resorted to what probably were the most negative, destructive, demagogic political and governmental tactics the state up to then had known. And Illinois is a state whose history gave him some very low standards to sink beneath in those respects.

Walker appealed to some of the best and worst instincts in the Illinois electorate, with the emphasis on the worst. In four years in office, he unwittingly managed to so debase the political climate that no major figure in Illinois politics and government for years to come would feel strong enough to speak candidly about the state's finances or its social and economic infrastructure needs. Demagoguery and attack politics were harnessed to television theatrics and modern marketing devices. Selling your party and office barely within the bounds of the loose laws on campaign contributions gradually became business as usual in Illinois politics. It became known as buying access in some of its forms, pinstripe patronage in other forms. Almost anything now goes if disclosed and if the Internal Revenue Service isn't kept in the dark.

This gradually became standard practice in various mayoral administrations in Chicago, in suburban collar county governments, in downstate legislative districts, in the Thompson and Edgar administrations and in the party leadership in both houses of the Illinois General Assembly. The major state associations of both right and left, as well as the center, have fallen into line, fueling the fire with the kerosene of their campaign contributions in exchange for, at least, access and, at most, perhaps a lot more than grand juries have been bothered with.

The public and the media, for a complex set of reasons, have seemed largely to go along, in the process getting just as cynical, fearful of one another's interest groups and as jaded as many politicians have become.

Dan Walker didn't start all this — he just, for a time, practiced it so skillfully that he went from nobody politically to Mr. Big overnight, and many in Illinois politics later tried to emulate the success, thinking they could avoid the downside. The results have been lamentable.

So far, the state has been spared a descent into a Huey Long, Boss Tweed kind of political hell. But that's mainly because the larger state society is so fragmented in so many ways economically, politically, socially and geographically that no one has been able to get access to all the levers of power at once, literally because of the luck of the draws on legislative reapportionment.

The 16 years and still counting of Republican control of the governor's office, however, and the iron grip Michael Madigan has imposed on the Illinois House are not reassuring. In the Illinois Senate, Republican "Pate" Philip seems to be settling in for a long run of consolidating control as Madigan has done in the House. And the current Mayor Daley, although racial demographics are increasingly working against him in Chicago, is nevertheless becoming as adept as his father was in riding the multi-striped tiger of Chicago Democratic ethnic politics to a long stay in City Hall.

The bright side of this consolidation of power in recent years, after a long legislative paralysis in the General Assembly and the Chicago City Council, is that it eventually might

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provide enough tightly held clumps of power that there could be some major movement to modernize Illinois and address its most pressing problems, a contemporary equivalent of the Ogilvie-Arrington-Daley-Choate deals of nearly 30 years ago.

Lord knows, there is need — many needs, serious needs. For too many people in low-income areas of Chicago and increasingly in their counterparts in downstate cities of any size, the primary — almost exclusive — perceived engine of upward economic mobility is the drug trade. While many, perhaps most, young people and families do not succumb to its siren call, enough do to ruin themselves, cause great grief for their relatives and make life a living hell for those around them, for teachers, police, the courts and those trying to run the state's increasingly expensive prison system. After 18 years of "getting tough" on crime and starving public aid, family services and public school funding, it is more than clear that approach isn't working; in fact, it is probably counterproductive.

And we know that racial attitudes of whites, blacks and His- panics toward one another are behind all this. Yet our churches, our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces remain largely segregated. The segregation is rationalized one way or another, but it eats away at the state's resources and sense of civility and common humanity. Fair housing, fair employment, fair lending laws are on the books, but they are not vigorously enforced. Genuine, region-wide scattered site public housing, an obvious need, is probably up there with income tax hikes in the nightmares of most white Illinois politicians, and by far most of Illinois' politicians are white.

In fact, many in politics and many in Illinois society at large have developed a vested interest in these and related problems. Think of all the people, for example, who make money or have jobs because of suburban housing developments, suburban malls, expressway construction in the Chicago area or highway and street renovation within and between the bedroom subdivisions of downstate cities and nearby small towns. And think of how much the appeal of the urban fringes has to do with the fact that the schools in those places are newer and better funded than those in low-income areas. White flight is profitable.

Meanwhile, middle class Illinoisans, white, black and His- panics, have lived in the past 15 years with forced early retirements, layoffs, closed plants, union busting, lost health insurance, underemployment or the fear that such things as those happening to others around them may yet happen to them. These days, there are few major employers whose operations are locally owned, few local media with the heart or vested interests to tell the stories of discarded or exploited workers and fight for their well-being, few politicians instinctively in their corner.

Once, not all that long ago, within my lifetime, the problems now facing a nearly lost generation in the inner cities of Chicago and downstate and all generations dependent on multi-nationally owned workplaces were the proudly accepted business of the Democratic party and the soul that inspired its public policy agenda. When leaders strayed from doing that business, they faced strong challenges from within, had out their differences, then joined ranks again to do battle with Republicans and to pass legislation aimed at helping the powerless, the voiceless, the deprived, and the insecure among the citizenry.

No longer. Madigan, Simon, Alan Dixon, Adlai Stevenson, Roland Burris, Pat Quinn, Dawn dark Netsch, even Carol Moseley Braun, say little about such problems these days. Labor union leaders are largely silent. So, too, are many upper and middle class black and Hispanic leaders outside of government.

Meanwhile, the guns are not silent in low-income areas of Chicago, Rockford, Peoria, Decatur, the Quad Cities, Springfield, Champaign-Urbana, Danville and East St. Louis. The inner cities of many Illinois communities are dangerous to drive through, even more dangerous to try to grow up in or raise a family in without giving in to drugs, gangs, violence and crime. Many still try very hard not to give in. The odds against them mount daily.

At bedrock it is a crisis of political conscience and character, deeply damaging to the state and its ordinary people, especially children. Why have the most articulate and well-placed of our leaders, mainly Democrats but also progressive Republicans, been so silent in the face of the troubles facing so many Illinoisans? I wish I knew the answer with certainty. No one does.

Part of it, I suspect, is that leaders not only in politics, but also in business, labor unions, the universities are comfortable where they are. Well off, they are leaving bad enough more or less alone. Part of it is that our mass media largely are busy entertaining us, helping us have fun, giving us what they think we want to divert us rather than giving us what we really need to know if we are to do more than just cope with life, if we are to control the destiny of ourselves and our children. The media lack guts, and most of them are making big profits from their gutlessness.

However, much of the responsibility lies with us. As always in a democracy, with representative government, the buck ultimately stops with the people — you, me and our colleagues, families and friends. In the two-and-a-half decades since Democrats last gathered in Chicago for a national convention, our public life — indeed, virtually our entire culture — has been entrusted to the mercy of the marketplace. Public opinon polls now tell politicians how to vote just as marketing surveys tell businesses what to sell. Neilsen ratings tell television networks who to hire for the evening news, and universities and other public institutions are more engaged in selling themselves than in promoting humane values among young people or the public at large. The soul of the Democratic party has become the soul of the marketplace.

But we control the marketplace. Just as consumers demand new and improved laundry detergent, citizens can insist on new and improved — more courageous, more compassionate — political leaders. The soul of a political party is the soul of the body politic. It is the soul of ourselves.

Robert D. Reid is a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and a long-time public affairs journalist in Illinois. 

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