Local Dems need to realize they really are Republicans, say candidates 

By Patrick Butler
and Kathy Hills 

A slew of GOP candidates, each claiming to be more Republican than the other, all say they are out to reel in thousands of conservative local Democrats who do not know they are really Republicans.

“These are people who despise affirmative action, Catholics who are pro-life, people who do not want the United States of America invaded by illegal aliens, and those who don’t want the government dictating to their families what to do," said Carl Segvich, 11th Ward GOP Committeeman candidate. "They’re lifelong Democrats who feel the Democratic Party has gone too far to the left, so they’re fertile ground for conversion.”  

1st Ward

Kathleen Cordes and Robert George Girolamo Jr. are running for Republican 1st Ward Committeeman to replace incumbent John Blessing, who recently moved from the ward.

Cordes sees it as her mission to get qualified and trained Republican election judges at all election sites in the ward. She wants to ensure the polls function properly and that all eligible people get registered.

Cordes is endorsed by County Commissioner Tony Peraica; Committeemen Tom Swiss (27th Ward) and Jim Fuchs (44th Ward); and GOP Ward Chairs Eloise Gerson (42nd), Eric Polder (26th), and Steve Boulton (32nd).

“It’s important that I step up to the plate” and "take responsibility for what needs to be done," Cordes said.

Since moving to Bucktown in 1998, she has served on her condominium board. Cordes also is a founding member of the Bucktown Triangle Association and has served on its architectural committee, working closely with the City Department of Planning and Development, the alderman, and various urban planners and developers on many community issues such as green space, overbuilding, and parking.

Cordes holds degrees from both Purdue University and the State University of New York. A real estate agent, she is a member of the Chicago, Illinois, and National Associations of Realtors.

            Despite repeated attempts to contact him, Girolamo was unavailable for comment.

 

2nd Ward

Brian Swift, 2004 George Bush campaign consultant, and Charles Hutchinson, a businessman who is a stay-at-home dad, are vying for the 2nd Ward GOP leadership post, which incumbent committeeman Clark Pellett plans to give up after four years.

While Swift has 20 years of political experience, all but five years of it was in Michigan, which Swift said also was “dominated” by Democrats and where Republicans spent so much time fighting each other they did not have time to take on any Democrats.

While he agreed his first priority must be to “get people motivated,” Swift thinks that should be easy in a city where taxes are skyrocketing and “businesses are being chased away," he said.

“Here, the mayor’s main priorities are libraries," Swift said. "I talk to the average person, and I don’t know anybody who visits a library on a regular basis. And yet the mayor’s priorities are libraries. I think that’s a travesty. I don’t understand it.

“There’s a host of issues out there. The transit issue—it’s huge. Everybody wants to go into the taxpayer’s pockets. You can’t keep doing that, paying for things that should not be priorities,” he said.

“Just because we’ve run a transit system the same way for the past 25 years doesn’t mean we should continue to throw money away that same way,” he continued, adding that he believes too many Republican committeemen and precinct captains are actually Democrats posing as Republicans to keep the party from getting much done.

Hutchinson's children are his top priority now, after running for Congress last year for perennially popular Democrat Danny Davis’s 7th District congressional seat.  Today Hutchinson is after the GOP committeman’s job to make sure Republicans have some kind of voice in one of the city’s fastest changing neighborhoods.

“Hopefully, with an influx of suburbanites in the ward, we’ll get a jump start,” said Hutchinson, who agreed it usually is hard to find candidates willing to run as Republicans.

“Talk about being left out to dry—I know all about it,” he said, recalling how he tried to win his U.S. House race with virtually no support from the Republican Party.  “It’s something you have to work through. But a lot of campaigns, like the Water Reclamation District, for example, don’t need huge infusions of money” so much as moral support.

Hutchinson founded the company Trade Wind Flowers and is an alumnus of the University of Kentucky. He has been a board member of Old St. Mary's Catholic School in the South Loop.

Pellett, who served as Chicago Republican Party Chairman for the past four years and was once GOP committeeman in the 42nd Ward, one of the most active Republican wards in the city, disagrees with local Republicans who want to keep currently unpopular President George Bush at arm’s length.

“Distancing yourself from the president isn’t really as effective an approach to party building as the 'big tent' approach," Pellett said. "Ronald Reagan once said that if you agreed with him 80% of the time, you were a Republican whether you knew it or not.”

Hutchinson agreed, stating, “Just look at who we’ve got in the Republican presidential race right now. We have fiscal liberals who are social conservatives, social liberals who are fiscal conservatives, some who are conservative on both, others who are kind of liberal on both. So don’t think you’ve got to be a hard-right evangelical to be a Republican. That’s clearly not the case.”

 

3rd Ward

            Bobbie Johnson is battling Doris Ricks for the 3rd Ward top Republican post.

Registered nurse, historian, and activist Ricks wants to be the 3rd Ward Republican committeeman once again after losing the post in 2004. Born in Mississippi, she moved here with her husband and five children in 1971.

Johnson explained she “was a Harold Washington Democrat, but when he died many of us left the Democratic Party. Many became Republican. I became an independent. I still consider myself an independent, but I have met and been welcomed by beautiful Republican people and have been very active in the party myself.” 

After getting her associate liberal arts degree, her licensed professional nurse certification, then her registered nurse degree, she began her community activism full throttle.

“It’s all about setting policy," Johnson said. "It’s about education. It’s about housing. Without housing, you can’t get a job because you don’t have an address. The 3rd Ward is becoming a new community. The issue is how can we make this situation work for everybody.” 

Since moving to the 3rd Ward about 15 years ago, Johnson has worked as a home healthcare nurse caring for seniors and for children with special needs. She volunteers with Race to Knowledge, a literacy organization she initiated, and is working on a study of the Underground Railroad in Chicago that she hopes will be part of the observance of the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. She also has been active with the Grand Boulevard Federation in saving the Rosenwald, a landmark building.

            Despite repeated attempts to contact her, Ricks was unavailable for comment.

 

11^th Ward

Carl Segvich hopes to oust incumbent George Preski, who has held the 11th Ward GOP committeeman post for 11 years.

Segvich, a 46-year-old born-and-bred Bridgeporter, said he has “always been intrigued by politics and liars.” He started out a Democrat just like all his neighbors but "saw the light" with the help of “some great professors” at Richard J. Daley College and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Segvich used to be a drug counselor at Mercy Hospital and a food and beverage worker at Comiskey Park before entering politics.

 So far as Segvich is concerned, the ward’s biggest issues are skyrocketing taxes and a lukewarm business climate along the once vibrant Halsted St. shopping strip.

“They picked a horrible place for the new police station, putting more government right in your face at 31st and Halsted," Segvich said. "That’s where the old Famous David’s Restaurant used to be. It should have been another restaurant where people could meet, have coffee, and talk. Nearby is a closed Jewel."

Going up in place of the stores are “five story condos cluttering everything up," Segvich said. "Parking is getting just like on the North Side.”

“Daley takes us for granted,” Segvich said of Mayor Richard M. Daley. Segvich is heartened that "new federal rulings are taking jobs and contracts out of Democratic Ward bosses’ hands and are letting people vote their true convictions."

As he and many of his fellow Republicans see it, everyone is better off now that a ward committeeman’s job is no longer "to dispense largesse" but to promote candidates, get out the vote, and ensure honest elections.

Which is exactly what Preski said he has been doing ever since he got involved in GOP politics after retiring from the Police Department and becoming an investigator for former State’s Attorney Jack O’Malley and former Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan.

While he agreed that being the head Republican in a ward dominated by Democrats since the 19th century can be a lonely job, Preski, who always flies American and Marine Corps flags in front of his house, said, “I’m a big guy, six-foot-two, 250 pounds” with little reason to feel intimidated by anyone.

The onetime bodyguard to unsuccessful 1983 Republican mayoral hopeful Bernie Epton still suspects that race was stolen, something he believes could be harder in the future if Republicans finally learned to “pull together and become a great party.”

Preski, who is one of the city’s longest serving committeemen of either party, credits his longevity partly to the fact that he does not try to make policy—he only makes sure the election process goes as it should.

 

25th Ward

            Dennis DuBois is battling Billy Ying Fook Moy in the race for 25th Ward Republican Committeeman.

            DuBois described himself as a political neophyte and admitted that true Republican interest in his ward is sketchy at best. “Frankly, there have been Democrats as committeeman and as our election judges," DuBois said. "I feel a responsibility to see that the ward has Republican Republican election judges.”

DuBois worked as a volunteer in Al Salvi’s failed U.S. Senatorial campaign. Two years ago, the Chicago Republican Party recruited DuBois to run for the City of Chicago Board of Review, but he was knocked off the ballot. Undeterred, he collected 33 signatures to win a place on the ballot for the committeeman’s race—more than enough because the ward counts fewer than 150 registered Republicans.

“I’ve never asked anyone for an endorsement," DuBois said. "I’m just trying to keep my head down and talk to as many of the ward’s voters as I can. It’s difficult because I’m not multi-lingual,” a hindrance in a ward with large Hispanic and Chinese populations.

DuBois works as director of client development for a consulting company, helping business owners improve their sales processes. He holds a master of business administration as well as a master of science in accounting, both from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Moy came to the U.S. from China when he was 15 and lived most of his adult life in Wausau, WI. He retired from his restaurant business there in 1995 and moved to Chicago’s Chinatown “to be close to good Chinese food.”

When asked why he is running for ward committeeman, Moy laughed and said, “Two men from the City came to see me and asked me to run for committeeman. I asked them why I should run, and they said, 'you will be a good candidate. We’ll help you gather signatures.' So I agreed to run. 

"I admire the way freedom is carried on continuously without stiff direction in this country, and I like that we, not the party, can really select the candidate," Moy continued. "I feel honored to have served as a Republican election judge for the past six years.”

Since 2002, Moy has been director of the Chinese Community Center, where among other things he translates for Chinese senior citizens. He was inducted into the Senior Hall of Fame in 2005, and this year the U.S. Army veteran was made commander of the Chinatown Chinese American Legion.

In addition, he works with other community leaders in Chinatown and with Alderman Danny Solis. Moy thinks the ward is "in great shape" under Solis’s leadership and feels there are no serious issues in particular that need tending.

 

27th Ward

In the 27thWard, with only 400 Republican voters compared to 7,000 registered Democrats, Tom Swiss, an investment analyst who for the past two years has been executive director of the Cook County Republican Party, is fighting off a challenge by Robert Hoban, a lawyer who said he got involved in GOP politics because he likes the idea of “limited government and personal responsibility.”

“The West Side is difficult for Republicans, but we are growing because there’s a lot of new development,” said Swiss, who stays active in GOP politics because “we need to have a two-party system and the minority party has to be the watchdog.”

That vigilance is no easy task in a city where the GOP often cannot find anyone to run for Republican state representative in a primary election requiring at least 1,500 signatures to survive an inevitable ballot challenge.

“I think a lot of Democrats would appreciate the importance of a viable two-party system, said Swiss, noting that “young Democrats who want to fight for the people often find their leadership trampled by rubber stamps for the mayor.”

Conceding that the current Republican president is not especially popular, Swiss said he sometimes thinks the hardest part of the job is to make people understand that the local Republicans are not the same as the Republicans in Washington 

“We have a different agenda," Swiss said. "The party of George Bush is not the party of Republicans everywhere. He’s one Republican, not all Republicans.”

Hoban agreed on that point at least.

“There will be a 2008 presidential election, and George Bush will not be a candidate; if the Democrats want to run against him, they’re welcome to do so,” said Hoban, who like many fellow Republicans plans to move on from the Bush era.

He conceded the ward’s GOP voter turnout has been dropping. Hoban said the last election attracted only 306 Republican voters in the 27th Ward, compared to about 7,000 in the 2002 race. Hoban said he expects things to start looking up, however, as more and more suburbanites move into the gentrifying area.

If elected, Hoban said one of the first things he will do is set up a “fully functioning Republican organization and let people know it’s there. And we’ll have Republican judges in every polling place in the ward¾something I understand hasn’t always happened in the past.”