Rebel with a cause - William J. Kelly, Republican candidate for Congress from Illinois

National Review, May 2, 1994 by John R. Coyne, Jr.

AS A 27-year-old former seminarian who serves in his South Aside parish church as usher and lector, William J. Kelly seems miscast as an insurgent leader. But the usually soft-spoken Kelly, whose Dennis Day good looks and manner would gladden the heart of any Irish mother (his is Swedish), is a certified rebel--and a rebel with a cause.

That cause is the restoration of traditional rights and values to the American middle class. To that end, Kelly is running as the Republican candidate for the Illinois 1st District congressional seat now held by Bobby Rush, former defense minister for the Black Panthers, whose charge in those golden days was primarily to procure weapons to be used against the "pigs."

But today, in Clintonian America, the Panthers have digested the pigs, and radical chic has become the establishment ethos, with expressions of belief in middle-class morality increasingly viewed not only exotic and extreme, but at times even as criminal.

It all crystallized for Kelly last July at the Sheraton Chicago, where Bill Clinton spoke to a conference of businessmen and labor leaders. Clinton, at that time still soaring above the swamp of venalities that is now swallowing his Administration, was hammering away at gridlock.

Suddenly, he was interrupted by a voice from the rear of the room. It was Bill Kelly. "How can you claim gridlock when the House and Senate are controlled by members of your own party?" asked Kelly. "You promised a middle-class tax cut. Now you are proposing the largest tax increase in American history. What you need to do is abide by your original campaign promise of a middle-class tax cut."

Kelly was quickly escorted out, with the President lecturing his back--and the cameras: "This is not your meeting, sir. Most people have better manners than to interrupt somebody giving a speech. I might say that's another thing wrong with this country. There's not enough civility in how we treat one another."

Three hours later, federal agents surrounded Kelly's family home, put him in handcuffs, and took him to the Metropolitan Correction Center (or the Black Hole of Chicago, as some call it), where he was interrogated and stripsearched, and, as he tells it, "spent the next 27 hours moving from [a] solitary cell to the federal lock-up with drug dealers and bank robbers in handcuffs and leg irons."

Kelly was then taken to court, charged under a catchall title of the U.S. Code with being in the same area of a building as the President of the United States, and released under a general agreement requiring that he not get arrested again for a similar crime--which means, apparently, avoiding all places where Presidents may be visiting.

Interestingly enough, four months later, during a speech at Georgetown Medical Center in Washington, President Clinton was again interrupted, this time by an AIDS activist identifying himself as "Luke Sissyfag." Shrieked Sissyfag: "Talk is cheap, and we need action. You're hiding behind the [ADDS] quilts. You are doing nothing."

No lockup for Sissyfag, however. "It's all right, it's all right," said the now tolerant President. "Part of my job is to be a lightning rod.... To lift the hopes and aspirations of the American people, even though there's no way I can now keep everybody alive who already has AIDS."

Thus, in Clinton's America, the Sissyfags get the lightning rod, the Kellys get the slammer.

And the Panther gets the office. After recovering from what he admits was a bad case of both fright and shame, Kelly looked for help. Where? Call your congressman, he was told. But who was his congressman? Bobby Rush, who since the happy Panther days has been involved in a series of brushes with the law, including the invasion of the Chicago Art Institute, where he seized an unflattering portrait of the late Mayor Harold Washington and then asked for $100,000 in taxpayer money to pay for his defense in the subsequent civil suit. (As alderman, Rush refused to make child-support payments to his estranged wife, who was forced to go on welfare.) Hardly the rock for a troubled son of the traditional middle class to lean on.

The very idea that he had been put in prison devastated Kelly. Then, he says, it hit him. "What did I have to be ashamed about? When he was my age, Bill Clinton was doing his protesting in Moscow." And, Kelly might have added, at a time when our soldiers were dying in the war he was protesting. (In fact, some have called it treason.)

"And when Congressman Bobby Rush was my age," Kelly continues, "he was advocating the overthrow of the U.S. Government."

Kelly sums it up this way: "I got charged with a federal crime because I had the audacity to remind Bill Clinton about his campaign promise. Yet it's legal to burn an American flag. That's why if you want to be a rebel today, you have to stand up and talk about traditional American and religious values."

And that is what Kelly has set out to do, running against Rush in a recently redrawn district that is home to about half of Chicago's South Side black community and includes the predominantly Irish neighborhoods of Morgan Park and Beverly, where the South Side Irish St. Patrick's Day Parade is held.