Statehouse

Quincy’s Bayview Bridge provides both a path across the Mississippi River and a metaphoric glimpse across the globe. The cable structure bears a striking resemblance to the bridge that stretches across the Yangtze River Delta just outside Jiaxing, China, Quincy’s new sister city.

The Illinois Trade Office helped bring the two river cities together during a Quincy-focused foreign trade mission that still makes local officials ecstatic.

Don’t expect the glitz of a rock concert or the fervor of a tent revival, but the Illinois House’s Budget 2006 road show could be a top draw in coming weeks.

What might the future look like? And how can Illinois prepare to meet it? These are a couple of the questions our editors and writers will attempt to address over the coming year, the magazine’s 30th Anniversary.

Philosopher George Santayana famously said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We might say, also, that those who don’t prepare for the future are condemned to chase it.

Illinois Issues’ Statehouse Bureau Chief Pat Guinane sat down with the four legislative leaders to discuss some topics, new and old that will confront the 94th General Assembly.

We covered the basics — budget woes, medical malpractice, gambling expansion — and let each address his own agenda for the spring session, which begins January 12. We tailored some questions to each individual.

The interviews took place in Springfield in mid-November. We edited the transcripts for clarity.

Among the time-honored traditions of the holiday season, perhaps none is as hopeful and yet as depressing as the practice of making New Year’s resolutions.

Someone in China opened Illinois Issues. Someone in Mexico did the same. Add France and Israel, South Africa and Japan. In fact, over the course of the past several months, individuals in 38 countries spent some time with — the term of art now is “visited” — an electronic edition of the magazine.

Are the majority of Illinoisans indifferent to virtue? That inference might be drawn from post-election punditry that credits President George W. Bush’s re-election to the rising up of righteous voters alarmed by the nation’s decades-long slide into perdition.

Analysts pushing the vote-for-godly-living scenario point to exit polls indicating moral values was the key issue for a plurality of voters — some 22 percent — four out of five of whom marked for the president over his Democratic challenger, U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

The late state Sen. Aldo DeAngelis may have put the matter most succinctly. In the summer of 1989, he was listening none-too-patiently to criticism of the state's decision to grant Sears, Roebuck & Co. a $61 million financial incentive package, sweetened by tax breaks and development benefits, when the company threatened to move its Merchandise Group to North Carolina or Texas. Critics, we reported then, were suggesting to the Legislative Audit Commission that Sears might have snookered the state out of a good deal of public cash.

Once again, November presents legislators with a cornucopia of issues steeped in urgency. And, as in past years, lawmakers say it will be the leftovers that fill their plates on six session days this month.

Last year, major policy overhauls spilled into the fall session as legislators rewrote death penalty and government ethics reform packages. This year, old business is again on the agenda.

After seeing colleagues in target legislative districts roasted throughout the just-concluded campaign season for supposedly voting against their constituents’ local interests, Illinois lawmakers may be tempted to approach their work from a decidedly parochial perspective.

That’s understandable, of course. No incumbent wants to provide ammunition to a future challenger intent on playing to the long-held regional animosities that characterize Illinois politics.

An echo from the 1964 Republican National Convention has reached Illinois. The state’s Republican right controls the party podium; voters face a clear ideological choice in the U.S. Senate race; and, though there is little doubt as to the outcome, the campaign promises to become one of the more fascinating set pieces in Illinois’ already-storied past.

It was partly a matter of chance.

As an especially close election enters its final stage, George W. Bush and John Kerry are courting a small but increasingly significant minority: undecided voters. In most polls, they make up about 5 percent of likely voters, comparable to the single-digit gap between the two presidential candidates.

Is justice for sale in Illinois? A lot of people think so. That worries folks like Cindi Canary, and it ought to worry all of us.

“I think there’s a growing perception that’s the case,” says Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. “In 2002, people expressed a lot of concern about conflicts of interest, about the players in the campaign ending up being the players in the courtroom.”

In late 1982, Carolyn Marvin, a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, was working on her book about how people of the 19th century imagined the communications of the future. But when Illinois Issues invited her that fall to write an essay for our pages, she responded with what is still one of the more thought-provoking analyses of the communications technology that emerged in this era.

As Labor Day approaches, and with it the traditional beginning of the fall campaign season, Illinois Republicans might be tempted to replace the party’s longtime elephant symbol with Joe Btfsplk, the Li’l Abner character always drawn with a dark cloud over his head.

Already on the wane, GOP fortunes took a real nosedive after Jack Ryan, the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate, bowed out following disclosure of embarrassing allegations of sexual high jinks contained in child custody records.

The conservative icon, the only native Illinoisan to become president, died June 5. He was 93.
Reagan, who was plagued by Alzheimer’s disease in his final years, energized the country with his 
man-of-the-people image and love-of-country message.

U.S. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, whose district covers the region of Illinois where Reagan was born and raised, said it was there that Reagan “learned the common sense values and virtues that helped him reshape not only our nation, but also the world.