Lots of people are having trouble getting their heads around the fact that Republican state Senator Bill Brady may well be our next governor. This is, after all, a Democratic state.

But it's way past time to consider Brady a very real probability. Governor Pat Quinn's poll numbers, along with the economy and the state budget, are in the dumper. Scott Lee Cohen will likely target African-American voters and badly damage Quinn's chances. The Green Party's candidate won't help, either. And almost $2 million spent on TV ads attacking Brady on abortion, health care, and the minimum wage haven't yet worked.

I've told you this before, but I think it's even clearer now: This campaign looks more and more every day like the 1980 presidential campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. We have the decent, honest person who can't seem to run a government up against a conservative guy who all the liberals love to hate.

Democrats throughout the country, and right here in Illinois, are pushing a two-pronged negative strategy to retain their hold on power in these uncertain times.

I was looking through Governor Pat Quinn's campaign-finance reports the other day and saw that he went way out of his way to list even the tiniest in-kind contributions.

"In-kind donations" means that instead of giving cash, somebody contributed goods or services to a campaign.

Reading through the report, I saw the $8.28 spent by a retired Chicago woman for food at Treasure Island. The $17.67 that a Springfield homemaker paid for Mel-O-Cream doughnuts. The $5.56 shelled out by a DuQuoin High School teacher for food at Kroger.

So it's quite remarkable that the governor will not admit that he ought to reimburse taxpayers for at least part of the state plane flight he took to southern Illinois the other day. Quinn flew down from Chicago to tour a facility with Southern Illinois University honchos. He also took a group of parents who had lost sons or daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan to a minor-league baseball game.

I was talking to my mom on the phone last week and just as I was about to hang up, she stopped me short and insisted that we talk about Governor Pat Quinn's big-time raises to his top staff.

If you've missed the story, Quinn gave out raises of as much as 20 percent to his senior staff while those same people were busily cutting everybody else's budgets and devising tax-increase strategies.

Unlike the state's mind-boggling $13-billion budget deficit, this is a very easy issue to understand for people who don't pay close attention to politics.

My mother does follow Illinois politics quite a bit, however, and she appears to be just as incensed about the immorality of handing out selective pay raises during one of the worst fiscal crises in history as she is about the abject political stupidity of Quinn's decision.