- Seth Perlman/Sun-Times Media
- The Trib and Governor Rauner are still in their honeymoon phase.
I can’t look inside the heads of the members of the Tribune editorial board. If they write that Bruce Rauner impressed and excited them when he visited the board for an hour last week, then that must be what he did. But I wonder what reservations, if any, got swallowed as they approved his message.
I’m not saying it was the place of the editorial board to hold up a hand and say to Rauner, “Your so-called economies are bullshit.” But did this thought flutter through anyone’s head: “And so, for now, in the name of the greater good, the ones who always get screwed get screwed some more”?
And a day or two later, when Rauner told the Daily Herald that Illinois’s supreme court judges—the ones who will soon decide if desperately needed changes in the state pension system are constitutional—are part of a “corrupt system” and he didn’t trust them to be “rational,” I wondered if any of those Tribune editorialists entertained the notion that this guy might be his own worst enemy and again felt the unease common to honeymooners who have just begun to entertain the possibility that they married a maniac.
The first is that he was selling a smart new program that deserves public support. The second is that Lurie flattered the Tribune. A hospital spokesman told me the Tribune had put out a call for new ideas for saving public money, so Lurie called the Tribune and said we’ve got a good one—check it out! The third is that a new program is a lot more exciting than an old one. Advocates of mental health programs also say slashing their budgets will cost Illinois more in the long run; but mental health advocates have been around forever and are easily tuned out.
