The Corn Latitudes

Illinois has had only a few very good governors, the rest being (to borrow from Robert Howard’s 1988 history of the state’s chief executives) mostly good and competent men. However, even ordinary goodness and competence was conspicuous by its absence from the governor’s mansion in the years between 1991 and 2019. In those 28 long years, a string of crooked and/or inept governors of both parties soured an entire generation of Illinoisans on politics and government.

 

Among the authors of this disillusionment was Bruce Rauner, the vulture capitalist and political dilettante who was elected very narrowly in 2014. Nominally a Republican, Rauner was a militant libertarian who promised to lower taxes, liberate business, energize the bureaucracy, and chastise the public employee unions.

 

Promise was all Rauner did do. Uninformed, dishonest, inattentive, and arrogant, he proved to be easily the worst Illinois governor in the modern era and arguably its worst ever. He hired fools to manage the state. Public debt skyrocketed. The bureaucracy was not energized but gutted. The voters of Illinois usually require eight years to recognize a fraud when they see one but they had enough of Rauner after only two or three. He was driven out of office in 2018 by an election margin of 15 points by a man his better in every way, and fled Illinois.

 

I did not usually write much about Rauner’s predecessors, as both Illinois Times and Illinois Issues magazine had in their pages writers better informed about state government than I was. However, I found Rauner to be an uncommonly provoking public figure. The best of the pieces I did probably was the first. Sadly for Illinois, everything I feared about him on election night proved true.

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For no particular reason, these pieces are arranged by date of publication, oldest first.