Baer fans and blarney - Illinois gubernatorial candidate Steve Baer

National Review, April 30, 1990 by John R. Coyne, Jr.

IT'S TWO DAYS before St. Patrick's Day, five days before the March 20 Illinois primary, and insurgent Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Baer has called a press conference in a narrow corridor on the second floor of Chicago's City Hall.

Baer is tall, lean, and gangly in basketball player fashion; even in this confined space he always seems to be moving. He is only thirty, and looks even younger. His expression is animated, frequently quizzical, with a semi-surprised stare, as if he had emerged a bit too early from the egg.

The quintessential outsider, Baer is the former executive director of the United Republican Fund of Illinois, a fiercely conservative group in a state where Republicanism is increasingly equated with pragmatism. ("There are three political parties in Illinois," says Baer. "The Democratic Party, the Payroller Party, and the Republican Party in exile, which is the United Republican Fund.")

In the corridor, the man turns his camera on, and Baer begins to talk in the general direction of the Tribune reporter, stressing the essentials of his candidacy. Illinois collects more in property taxes than 46 other states; there have been some 26 tax increases in Illinois over the past two decades, most of them during the administration of Republican Governor Jim Thompson; largely as a result of the tax climate, more than 1.5 million jobs have been lost in Illinois over the last twenty years; and Jim Edgar, Thompson's ancinted successor, is from the same tax-and-spend mold.

Baer then outlines some of his proposals. He would roll back a 20 per cent temporary income-tax surcharge, which Edgar obtusely said he'd make permanent; he would require 60 per cent voter approval of future tax increases; he would freeze state spending at current levels and appoint something like the Grace Commission to recommend spending cuts. He talks a good deal about values, religion, education, and the home.

The cameraman leaves, the Tribune reporter follows, and I ride with Baer and a volunteer driver-a "Baer Fan," as the campaign calls them-to Meigs Field, where Baer boards a small plane in a high wind. One amateur driver in a Chrysler mini-van, one small briefcase, no staff, no advisors, no media. Very much an outsider, very much alone. And five days later, he pulled down 34 per cent of the primary vote and shook Springfield to its socks.

Until December, Secretary of State Jim Edgar was said to have the Republican nomination locked up. A veteran of the Illinois legislature and a former aide to Thompson, Edgar is well-groomed, quiet, careful, operating in the centrist, pragmatic Thompson mode, albeit without the Thompson style and wit. In short, a clearly labeled and well packaged candidate, ready to take the helm of the Illinois GOP and steer it through the 1990s.

It was supposed to be an easy voyage. But Edgar took certain things for granted and dismissed others-chief among them, conservative grassroots sensibilities. For instance, his consistent pro-choice position on abortion was galling. But so was the position when it could be located-of his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Neil Hartigan. The same seemed to be true of taxes.

It was a familiar conservative dilemma. Edgar's positions on a number of basic issues were unacceptable, but so were the positions of his announced opponent. In other words, for conservatives, there was nowhere to go. And so Edgar sailed on, ignoring an antitax warning that was sounding with increasing frequency.

T HAD BEGUN in earnest last

summer, when Democratic legislators

were joined by nine Republicans to vote in a temporary 20 per cent surcharge on the state income tax. Edgar not only endorsed the increase but, in a speech to the Illinois Manufacturers Association, proposed without being asked that it be made permanent. This gratuitous pro-tax position, combined with the abortion issue, sent conservative activists searching for an alternative. For a variety of personal and political reasons, no one with a big name-no Rumsfeld or Hyde-was willing to take Edgar on. Baer took the job himself, and succeeded in knocking Edgar's campaign badly off course.

True, Edgar won by a 2 to 1 margin. But that means one out of every three people who took a Republican ballot voted against him and for the next thing to a political novice-a man with no money, no organization, no name recognition, and no media. Just plain old conservative principle.

Baer is justifiably proud of what his insurgent campaign accomplished. "We did it after no one else would run," he said after the election. We did it in 77 days-like a two-minute drill in football. I was only thirty years old. I was a first-time statewide candidate. My campaign manager was a first-timer. So were my campaign workers.

"People didn't back me because I was good looking. They backed me because of the abortion and education issues. And they backed me because we were correct about the political seriousness of the tax issue."

WHAT NEXT? There's no doubt that Edgar, who had a ten-point pre-primary lead over Hartigan in the polls, has been damaged. How badly? Perhaps Phyllis Schlafly put it best in a letter written in support of Baer's candidacy: "I believe that any Republican candidate who endorses tax increases has self-destructed. Regrettably, that applies to Jim Edgar . . ."