The Corn Latitudes

Politics & government:      The Rauner years 

2015–2019

Illinois has had a few very good governors, but the rest have been, to borrow from Robert Howard’s 1988 history of the state’s chief executives, mostly good and competent men. Even ordinary goodness and competence was conspicuous by its absence from the governor’s mansion in the years between 1991 and 2019. In those 28 long years, an entire generation of Illinoisans were soured on politics.

 

Among the authors of this disillusionment was Bruce Rauner, the vulture capitalist and political dilettante who was elected very narrowly in 2014. Rauner promised to lower taxes, liberate business, energize the bureaucracy, and chastise the public employee unions. Promise was all he did do. Uninformed, dishonest, inattentive, and arrogant, he proved to be easily the worst Illinois governor in the modern era and arguably its worst ever. He hired fools to manage the state. Public debt skyrocketed. The bureaucracy was not energized but gutted. The voters of Illinois usually require eight years to recognize a fraud when they see one but they had enough of Rauner after only two or three. He was driven out of office in 2018 by an election margin of 15 points by a man his better in every way, and fled Illinois.

 

I did not usually write much about Rauner’s predecessors, but he was an uncommonly provoking public figure. The best of the pieces I did probably was the first. Sadly for Illinois, everything I feared about him on election night proved true.

Revising a Revision

Are the Rauners giving Illinois a mansion it really wants?

"Dyspepsiana"  Illinois Times  July 28, 2016

Fixing the Wrong Problem

Term limits are bad politics and worse government

"Dyspepsiana"  Illinois Times  September 26, 2013

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