Banker Bill Daley will challenge Governor Squeeezy for the office.
He all but formally announced his candidacy yesterday with an-all out attack on the sitting governor, claiming Squeezy didn’t do enough to cut public employee pensions.
Son of the late Boss Daley, brother of former Mayor Richie Daley and former banker-in-chief for the Obama administration, Bill Daley had endorsed the Madigan pension bomb, SB1.
A strong governor would have found common ground between the rival pension solutions offered by fellow Democrats, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton, rather than leave Springfield with a stalemate. “They both had different ideas on this bill. So who’s the one who’s supposed to forge a compromise? The governor.”
Cullerton’s bill was supported by the We Are One coalition – leaders of the state’s public employee unions.
Although considered by many less Draconian than the Madigan bill, it also put the entire burden of the 60 years of state underfunding the pension systems on the backs of employees.
Of the three probable Democratic candidates for governor, all defend the status quo when it comes to state revenues. All target pensions and social services for cuts. None propose a revenue change that would include closing corporate loop holes, raising taxes on the rich and lowering them on the working poor.and middle class.
The probable candidates are the incumbent Pat Quinn, Bill Daley and the daughter of the Sneaker of the House, current Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
If elected, Bill Daley would become the second former Obama Chief of Staff to hold high public office in Illinois.
The other, Rahm Emanuel, has proven himself to be a disaster for the city.
It is hard to imagine Daley doing worse.
But with his announcement yesterday, imagine we must.
Fred Klonsky 
“a strong governor would have found common ground…” UNLESS he was being deliberately set up to fail. Now who might do that?
Talk about choices ???? Which one is the lesser of all evil?
I think I will run for Governor !!!!!!!!!!
You have my vote, and I don’t even know you.
Do we really have a choice here? Sounds like SOS!!
With Democrats like that, who needs the TEA Party …
We need the TEA Party to scare us into voting for Democrats like that.
We are One needs to pull their support of SB2404 and so does ASCME, since neither one
was accepted. Now, when any of the legislatures want to talk pension reform again, they need to refuse to talk about it any more. Pension reform is pension diminishment plain and simple. We are protected by the constitution. Force Illinois to pay off the money and interest they racked up by borrowing from the pension fund. The sooner they pay off this debt the better.
So what has been the history of the Daley family when it comes to their own public pensions?
Why should Chicago be the only neo-liberal bastion of heartless, corporatist, duplicitous, public policy when there’s still a shard of the middle class left statewide to decimate?