If there were any doubt before last week, there's zero uncertainty now: Governor Bruce Rauner won't allow anyone else to interfere with his dominance of the Illinois Republican Party.
When the party was out of power for 12 years, several independent actors were always trying to influence elections from behind the scenes, elbowing people out, putting people in. This is a diverse state, and the party has numerous factions, both economic and social. All of those factions have de facto leaders.
One of those independent actors has been Ron Gidwitz, a moderate, wealthy business executive and one-time gubernatorial candidate with a network that includes lots of his rich friends. He ran the moneyed wing of the party.
Gidwitz used his and his friends' money to boost candidates who were to his liking. He backed Senator Kirk Dillard for governor in 2010, for instance, then switched his allegiance to Bruce Rauner four years later. That move did more to hurt Dillard than it did to help the mainly self-funding Rauner, because it totally dried up Dillard's money, leaving him unable to effectively compete until organized labor finally entered the race on his behalf.
After months of public silence, Gidwitz re-emerged last week. Sources say he has been bad-mouthing U.S. Senator Mark Kirk behind the scenes for quite a while. A recent Michael Sneed item in the Chicago Sun-Times about an anonymous top Republican who wanted Kirk to step down from the Senate was widely pinned on him.
Kirk has had his problems of late, forced to apologize for - or at least back away from - some racially charged and just plain weird remarks. Numerous Republican leaders have privately expressed shock at the bad press he's generated for himself. Kirk has had to fight off rampant speculation about his future ever since his massive stroke, and his oddball statements during the past few months have kept the rumor mill at a fever pitch.
Kirk also faces the fight of his political career next year, running statewide in a presidential-election year when Democratic turnout will very likely be much stronger than during his off-year 2010 victory. National political pundit Larry Sabato's much-watched "Crystal Ball" publication recently moved Kirk's race from "toss-up" to "leans Democratic."
So it wasn't exactly a surprise when Gidwitz told Greg Hinz at Crain's Chicago Business last week that Kirk ought to let somebody else run.
"I do not believe he will be a U.S. senator in 2017 and, as top of the ticket, he could cause collateral damage" to other Republican candidates, Gidwitz told Hinz about Kirk. "I call on him to step aside and allow other Republicans to seek his seat."
If that reads like a prepared script, that's because it was. These weren't off-the-cuff remarks. It was a carefully planned hit.
Well, perhaps "carefully" is the wrong word here.
If you hadn't noticed, Rauner is a bit of a control freak, to say the least, and he has taken full command of the Republican Party's power and money structure here. "I'm the head of the Republican Party," the governor firmly declared to WJBC radio just the other day.
He allows very little to no independence. Republican state legislators may grumble about him in private (boy, do they ever), but they toe the Rauner line when it comes time to vote on the House and Senate floors. Only one GOP legislator, Representative Raymond Poe of Springfield, has ever had the temerity to vote against the governor's commands - and that only happened once.
The state Republican-party chair is a Rauner guy, as is the Cook County party chair.
Much of Rauner's top staff came out of Kirk's Senate office and Kirk's campaigns. Those high-level staffers still have a strong loyalty to their former boss, and Team Rauner is fully behind the incumbent senator.
So not long after Hinz called the Kirk campaign for comment about Gidwitz's statement, Gidwitz himself got a call. And it wasn't a very nice one, either.
"He sounded like a beaten man" after the governor's forceful message was relayed to him, declared one GOP source later that evening.
Soon after, Gidwitz called Hinz to fully retract his comments and endorse Kirk's re-election.
I should say that I've always liked Gidwitz and respected him. But the days of Gidwitz and others successfully acting independently are over.
Gidwitz's complete backtrack was one of the more humiliating scenes I've witnessed in quite a while. Others most surely took notice.
We all live in Rauner World now. Get used to it.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax (a daily political newsletter) and CapitolFax.com.
