Opinion: The Irvin campaign for Governor begins with a whimper

Early this week, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin launched his campaign for Governor and, let me tell you, the energy was palpable. As if you could reach out and touch it. As if it were made of the very soil of this great land and imbued with the breath of life and you could mold it like clay between your fingers and see in it all the potential and possibility of the grand future all newborn souls can dare to dream.

Could you feel it, Illinois?

Are you excited?!

I CAAAN'T HEEEAR YOUUU???!!!

I SAID ARE YOU EXCITED FOR RICHAAAAAAAAARD IRVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN??????!!!!!!

(sigh)

The launch of the Irvin campaign this week was emblematic of how it feels to wake up every day as a resident of this state with certain sensibilities. I’d say it’s like being the main character in a Kafka novel but that’s not enough. It's like you’re stuck on a desert island with only a VCR and a single copy of The Neverending Story and the only scene you have to watch that’s not damaged is Artax the horse’s death in the Swamp of Sadness. It’s like you yourself are just beginning Bill Murray’s existential Groundhog Day odyssey but worse you’ve seen the movie before and you actually grew up in Woodstock where the people know your history and the story of your every fault.

You may or may not have seen the launch on local news or read about it here on this website.

If you didn't, Craig Wall of ABC7 Chicago was there to ask the potential first black governor of Illinois for comment on his Martin Luther King Day campaign launch and Irvin and had the following to say:

I mean, wow. Can you feel the excitement?!

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Say what you want about the modern necessity of network affiliated local news reporters shivering in the cold outside some nondescript suburban econo-box office building waiting for sound bites, but the reality is that Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, ostensibly, wants you to elect him as Governor of Illinois. The first black Governor of Illinois, in fact. He launched his campaign on Martin Luther King Day which I, um, guess(?) was supposed to be symbolic of something(?), um, maybe, uh, well...not sure?

Even Craig Wall was a bit taken aback and did his best to emphasize the moment and give him another go when he said, essentially, "Um...what? YOU launched YOUR campaign TODAY? You have nothing to say?"

I mean, this is Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin right? Who reportedly has the backing of major players in the Illinois Republican establishment and it's Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin who also reportedly has the backing of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, one of the only Illinoisans whose personal wealth could dwarf even that of current Governor JB Pritzker - who comes from one of the wealthiest families in American history...right?

Yeah.

Despite the innumerable decisions (or lack thereof) JB Pritzker has made over the last 3 years in his official capacity occupying the role he purchased from the Illinois Democrat Party's finest, despite the near 3 decades of political action (or lack thereof) JB Pritzker has taken in and around this city and this state while yearning to be known as something greater than rich-kid trust-fund baby, despite Irvin having the opportunity to begin to prove himself a little more intellectually adept than the low bar the current Governor has set as a man who can't handle a question from reporters more difficult than "would you like fries with that?" without his Shih Tzu-esque press secretary Jordan Abuddayeh "clapping back" for him with the same tone to her high-pitched bark as the aforementioned foofoo breed, despite having the best opportunity in decades for the Illinois opposition party to make significant and lasting in-roads with potential new constituents who may have never dreamed of voting for them before or until the events of these last two years opened their eyes to the behaviors and ideologies they now may see as a serious threat or at minimum a mistake to not only their livelihoods but their intellectual and individual freedoms, and despite the near infinite number of causes or issues or problems or sentiments or anything...anything at all...affecting Illinois residents that they hold dear he could have chosen to begin to make any manner of argument for himself to be or for the current administration to not be the persons who lead them through the snowballing masses that Illinoisans face, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin chose..."No comment."

Nope. Nothin'. Nada.

And here we are at the end of the week and there has been little more than crickets from the campaign that Illinois Republican Party establishment officials want you to be excited about. Other than them being forced to clarify things he said and positions he took in his campaign for the Aurora Mayor post compared to his fresh new market researched positions of today, of course.

And yet decades and decades and decades go by and the Illinois Republican Party establishment continues to wonder, both publicly and privately, why the only people with a more embarrassing political reputation than the Illinois Democrat Party Machine is its utterly feckless opposition.

Irvin's lackluster entrance into the field of candidates (which at this time totals 5 individuals vying for the GOP nomination) has many now questioning not how Irvin's positions or policies can match up against Pritzker, but questioning his passion for the job at all. The question becomes less, is Richard Irvin running for Governor? And more, was Richard Irvin told he's running for Governor? Does he even want the job?

And, if it's the latter, and no one in the Illinois Republican establishment actually believes they have a snowball's chance in hell, what is Ken Griffin thinking?

Ken Griffin can spend his money how he so chooses, but Ken Griffin is gonna go light his money on fire to gather the people around that camp?

Now I have no doubt Ken Griffin is a lot smarter than I am and he has the 12 figure bank account to prove it, but I’m no longer impressed by the Illinois Republican Party quadrennial welfare check he cuts that serves as little more than advertising Citadel’s quant-driven portfolio theory to all the wannabe masters of the universe dreaming of cocaine, hookers, and themselves as eloquent chairmen of UBS. And I admit I may have a little too much Howard Beale naïveté but the sad part is the utterly absurd amount of money that’s going to be spent over the next 10 months on this preposterous gubernatorial could fund the tiny little publication I’m trying to bootstrap with his pocket change for 5, 6, 7 generations, depending on how bad the Biden inflation gets.

I mean, just like JB, it never ceases to amaze me that all that money can’t buy a clue. Politically speaking, of course, because God knows both of them can buy everything else. All that money and neither of them can figure out that it has never and will never matter more than the message delivered by a man with the will, the wit, and the wisdom to see it through.

"No comment," is the best all that money can buy?

I’m hard on Ken Griffin in particular because, deep down, I do appreciate that even him doing little more than cutting a check every 4 years launches all the slings and arrows at him from a city where any comments to the right of Trotsky is cause for "J'Accuse...!" And I'm hard on Ken Griffin because I do appreciate that at least someone with his level of high-profile in this state at the very least has the stones to pick a side. No, I don’t want Ken Griffin to lose the name of action, I just wish one day that outrageous fortune of Griffin's can buy him some better advice.

Maybe Griffin's passion for politics truly is little more than a personal vendetta between him and JB Pritzker? Maybe his only intention is to toy with Pritzker's political ambition the way he toys with markets, merely because he can?

I'm sure Ken Griffin can, like Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan or perhaps worse, be as vindictive and vengeful as any other historical titan of American industry. He proved as much as recently as the end of last year when he overpaid by double for an original copy of the U.S. Constitution to beat a collective of crypto-currency enthusiasts bidding from their phones on their couches, presumably because of all that happened last summer with GameStop and the Robinhood trading fiasco that put his notoriously private personality front and center. And don't misunderstand that I mean to say he didn't deserve to win that auction.

I don't know. I'm not going to pretend I know what goes on deep within the fortress of the Citadel.

But I suspect it isn't.

I get the impression Ken Griffin does harbor some sort of love for this town and wants to see it through these trying times. After all, he hasn't left it, yet, even though he could any time he wanted. He hasn't flipped the switch on his secret Miami exchange, yet, even though he could any day he wanted.

I suspect that even if no one else on his side of the political aisle actually believes it to be possible, Ken Griffin believes in himself enough to think that he alone can be the guy to finally figure out how to fix the Illinois machine. That if this place has one savior, well, it just may be him. And why not? He's the same guy whose automated equities platform now processes upwards of 40% of all securities trades in the United States.

Again, it's only a suspicion but it's a strong one.

And if the above be true and my suspicions prove correct, I wish him well. I just hope someone is able to get through to Ken Griffin and point him in a better direction or he'll be little more than the latest to play Papa Piggybank to the Illinois Republican Party establishment and cut the check every 4 years that gets them out of trouble and this insufferable existential merry-go-round that is living in this state will continue.

Sure, sooner or later, he'll realize that the cliquey in-fighting among Illinois' oppositional leadership is a feature, not a bug, and serves as theatre solely to scam unsuspecting billionaire passers-by who let their guard down into thinking they're actually doing something. That it's all the same as it is with the party who've been in charge in this city for a century and have destroyed the reputation of both it and the state.

Sooner or later, he'll realize that the one corner's "clumsy and bumbling nerd-with-a-stack of papers" act got old long ago and that the big brains in charge of the anointing are merely taking indulgences or are the money-lenders of the temple and have never and will never be able to assemble a political ticket via analysis of micro-percentages of the urban/suburban electorate no matter how many nights they pretend they spend poring over the data. He'll realize that the other corner's "my dad's a lawyer and he'll sue your ass" approach to the world at large gets old even quicker but it never stops them from hiding behind Daddy no matter how many times they fail upward.

More importantly, sooner or later, Ken Griffin will realize that the answers and the victories he seeks will not be found buried beneath the numbers and the statistics and the latest market research. Nor will they be found in the extraordinarily high level mathematics and engineering and programming that surrounds his life's work. Nor will he be able to spend however many of his billions of dollars he likes on logic and algorithms designed to understand reason itself nor will he ever be able to quantify common sense.

Sooner or later, he'll find what all men like him and Heisenberg find at the bottom of the glass. Politics is spiritual. And matters of the soul cannot be calculated, assembled, or machined. Despite what they want you to believe, it cannot be bought and sold. And men and women must discover their true spirit of their own free will.

Sooner or later, Ken Griffin will finally begin to understand that apathy, corruption, and the ideologies of control have so seeped into the soil of this place, permeated its fertile fields, that it will never be solved by a team of high-priced over-educated number-crunchers and pencil-pushers futilely attempting to calculate just when the sun and rain and forces of nature will combine to produce the perfect crop ready to be reaped.

It will be solved by the farmer. The farmer who tills the land. The farmer who gets his hands dirty, day in and day out, planting seed by seed by seed.

Aw shucks, that was my closing line and I forgot to circle back to Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin's gubernatorial campaign...

That's okay. He doesn't seem to have much interest, anyway.

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