I'm going to talk about one of the weirdest things that happened this campaign season.

Earlier this year, ultra-conservative activist Jack Roeser told me that his friend Bruce Rauner believed life began at conception. "I'd describe him as a guy who is a morally right-to-life guy, but not on the hustings," said Roeser, who has since passed away, about GOP gubernatorial nominee Rauner.

Roeser and many of his right-to-life allies backed Rauner every step of the way, while Rauner, who belatedly admitted that he's pro-choice, spent much of the Republican primary campaign fighting for term limits and pledging battles with the Springfield Democrats and their teacher-union allies.

The candidate has often said that he has "no social agenda" and would focus solely on cleaning up government and getting the economy running again. But in addition to those factors, he also wanted to avoid stressing the issue for fear of alienating a relatively small but still important base of Republican voters who just won't vote for a pro-choicer of any party. Every vote counts, especially if you're a Republican running in Democratic Illinois.

But the issue exploded during the campaign's final week. Local 150 of the Operating Engineers Union - one of Governor Pat Quinn's strongest supporters - spent big bucks supporting the unabashedly pro-life, pro-gun Libertarian Party candidate for governor, Chad Grimm. The idea was to siphon votes away from Rauner.

Governor Pat Quinn's new TV ad is 60 seconds of one positive message after another.

"Pat Quinn sees problems, takes action, and gets the job done," the ad claims. "Now, Illinois is making a comeback," it continues.

But the spot is being slammed by longtime campaign insiders in both parties as "spitting in the wind."

For instance, a Paul Simon Public Policy Institute poll in June found that a mere 30 percent of Illinoisans thought the state was on the right track, while a 60-percent majority thought Illinois was on the wrong track.

It turns out that Governor Pat Quinn and the two Democratic legislative leaders met privately for at least several days to negotiate details of the governor's budget address.

The highly unusual move means that most if not all aspects of Quinn's budget proposals last week have already been agreed to by the Democrats who run the Illinois Statehouse.

House Speaker Michael Madigan tipped his hand after the governor's address during Jak Tichenor's invaluable Illinois Lawmakers public-television program when he twice insisted that the governor's property-tax proposal was actually his idea.

The governor proposed eliminating the state's property-tax credit, which is currently worth 5 percent of property taxes paid, and replacing it with an automatic $500 tax refund.

That idea was apparently just one of Madigan's demands in exchange for supporting the governor's proposal to make the "temporary" income-tax hike permanent, which was the centerpiece of Quinn's speech.

Without a doubt, the most overlooked aspect of Bruce Rauner's multi-million-dollar TV-ad buy has been his advertising campaign's repeated attacks on Governor Pat Quinn.

"Career politicians are running our state into the ground, and Pat Quinn, he's at the top of the heap," Rauner says in one of his ads that have permeated the airwaves since November. "Pat Quinn, a career politician who failed to deliver term limits," a Rauner TV announcer declares in another spot.

The millions of dollars worth of ads are supposedly aimed at Republican-primary voters, but obviously everybody else in the state is seeing them, as well. And Quinn, who doesn't have a well-funded primary opponent, hasn't bothered to rebut any of Rauner's multiple attacks. Considering Illinois' persistently high unemployment rates, the hostile national climate, the never-ending negative stories about the state's finances, and Quinn's four-year history of low job-performance scores, the governor's silence seems like a big mistake.

And if a new Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll is accurate, Rauner's months-long, unrebutted attacks have indeed helped knock Quinn into a shockingly deep hole.