CHICAGO, Ill. -- At tonight's debate, JB Pritzker launched hollow, hypocritical attacks against Daniel Biss, the only progressive middle-class candidate in the race with a record of supporting working families.
Biss on Pritzker’s hypocritical pension reform attacks
“It’s a matter of struggling with a difficult issue as I did from day one in the legislature instead of shirking away from it … I’ve acknowledged that it was a false choice and I think that that learning lesson has been clear from my record, but here’s the most important part of this: nobody on this stage will be a perfect governor in January of 2019. What I think my wrestling with this difficult issue—working through a series of attempts, coming out with the right point of view—shows is that I’ll be a better governor in February 2019 than I am in January, and yet a better governor in March of 2019 than in February.
“By contrast, JB Pritzker was funding an organization that took much more extreme positions in 2011, but instead of acknowledging it and talking about what he learned, he pretended that it didn’t happen. That is a failure of character.”
Biss on Madigan’s tenure
“Mike Madigan should step down as chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois. I said that before that list of nine cases was published—a list that raised way more questions than it answered. If we believe in zero tolerance, it has to start there. It’s not surprising that JB Pritzker won’t make that same call; he’s Mike Madigan’s candidate, he’s waiting for Mike Madigan’s permission. That’s not the governor we need.”
Biss’ closing framed the choice voters have, either by doing the same thing and expecting different results or by electing a middle-class progressive to actually get things done.
“We are facing a unique moment in American politics—a time when fewer and fewer people have more and more and more. And we’re facing a critical time in Illinois where Bruce Rauner has taken the state apart, brick by brick, over three years.
“The question facing us as Democrats right now is: is it enough to only beat Bruce Rauner and go back to whatever we had before and call that good enough? Or is it time to build a different kind of political movement to transform our state?
“We have a fundamental choice in this election. We can look at a situation with Bruce Rauner in the Governor’s Mansion and Donald Trump in the White House and say inexperienced wealthy businessmen who buy their way into office must be the solution, or we can look at that and say it’s time for a middle-class progressive, it’s time for an organizer to build a movement to make change, it’s time for us to cast off the straitjacket of the past and actually create the Illinois that we have known for these last years that we could have, but has been inaccessible because of a cramped vision and a politics that shut most of us out.”
