Just three months ago, Bob Kustra seemed a shoo-in for the U.S. Senate. Paul Simon was stepping down, and Democrats, divided as always, couldn’t settle on one candidate to replace him. Meanwhile, Kustra had positioned himself as a no-to-taxes conservative and was running unopposed in the Republican primary.
Chalk up another victory for Illinois Politics, a publication solely dedicated to exposing the fraud, hypocrisy, and deceit of our elected officials, some of whom despise it. Kustra’s chief spokesman Chris Allen calls it a “rag,” adding that “if Salvi loves it, all I can say is, “Wait till they get him.”‘
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
All of which is sweet music to Victor Crown and Karen Nagel, the magazine’s 30-something founders–a sign that their tiny operation, produced on a computer in the cluttered kitchen of Crown’s northwest-side house, has emerged as a significant force in state politics. “They can’t dispute our facts,” says Crown. “They can only try to put on a spin.”
Crown, on the other hand, openly admits that politics consumes his life. He greedily devours five newspapers a day as well as dozens of magazines, journals, and obscure state, federal, and local legislative reports. For his story on Kustra’s voting record he spent three months in the Cook County law library sifting through the state’s Senate Journal of Proceedings. It was in the federal Report of the Secretary of the Senate and Report of the Clerk of the House that Crown found the data enabling him to write in October 1993 that Senator Carol Moseley-Braun was “paying female legislative aides 64 cents to every dollar the males earn.” After that article, Braun’s female staffers got a raise, Crown says.
If the magazine has a fault it’s that it sometimes gets too clever with statistics. For instance, Crown and Nagel have concocted a bill-to-passage ratio, ranking legislators by their ability to propose bills that get signed into law. But what’s so bad about a low average if it means going against the flow? A low average would be a badge of courage for a civil rights proponent in the Jim Crow south. There’s no virtue in being a tyrant’s legislative floor leader.
But as Crown notes, these are the very votes Kustra and Edgar used to disparage Netsch in a series of vituperative campaign commercials. “I didn’t see them “explaining’ about conference reports and committees when they were ripping Netsch,” says Crown. “In fact, when we wrote an article revealing how Netsch’s income tax policies had no backing among Democrats, Kustra praised us. The thing about politicians is they only like the truth when it’s applied to the opposition.”
