While Rockford, as I wrote last month, is becoming increasingly Democratic, Winnebago County, in which Rockford lies, remains fairly strongly Republican.  Despite the massive growth of the City of Rockford over the last two-and-a-half decades (it now pushes all the way to the Boone County border on the east and occupies over 60 square miles, over a third again as much space as Milwaukee, which has approximately four times the population), Winnebago County remains largely rural and “underpopulated.”  Farmers and small-town merchants (or the descendants thereof), most non-Rockfordian citizens of Winnebago County firmly occupy Red State America.

Thus, it is no surprise that 19 of the 28 members of the Winnebago County Board are Republicans.  Their dominance is even greater than the numbers suggest.  Winnebago County is divided into 14 board districts, and each district has two representatives.  The Republicans control eight of the fourteen outright; the Democrats, three; and three are split between the parties.

Because Winnebago County is more Republican than Rockford proper, some politicians who have failed to win office in the city in recent years—such as W. Timothy Simms, the Republican candidate for mayor in April 1997—have sought greener pastures in county-board elections.  (Elected in 2002, Simms is a board member for District 14 and the Republican majority leader.)  On paper at least, the Republicans have complete control of the county, since they have a two-thirds supermajority and, thus, could (theoretically) pass (or block) any legislation they desire.  The situation would seem quite conducive to the full flowering of the Republican vision of low taxes, fiscal accountability, and legislative and regulatory restraint.

And yet, for the past decade, the county has been anything but a Republican paradise.  For eight years, from the fall of 1996 through mid-2004, many Republicans blamed the county’s less-than-restrained taxing and spending on Kristine O’Rourke Cohn, the popularly elected full-time county-board chairman.  (In Illinois, most county boards choose their chairman from among the elected members, and the position is part-time.  In 1992, the Winnebago County Board created the position of full-time county-board chairman, elected directly by the people.)  Cohn, previously a Democrat, had switched parties, though not her political positions.  (She remained, for instance, pro-choice, although that hardly mattered, since the only abortuary in Winnebago County is in Rockford, outside of the county’s jurisdiction.)

During Cohn’s eight years in office, taxes and spending increased dramatically, as did the size of the county bureaucracy.  She embarked on an unprecedented road-building spree, which earned her many enemies when the county used special “Quick Take” legislation (a particularly virulent form of eminent domain) to seize half of the homestead of blind Army veteran Tom Ditzler.  Where rolling hills, a stream, and trees once stood, today stretches a vast expanse of asphalt—the “Harrison-Springfield extension,” completing a loop of modern roads encircling Rockford.  (In what seemed an especially nasty move, Cohn, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, christened this circuit the “Veterans Memorial Beltway.”)

With dissatisfaction with Cohn on the rise, her most vocal Republican critic (she had very few Democratic ones), Peter M. “Pete” MacKay, ran against her in the Republican primary in February 2000, vowing, if he won, to eliminate the very office for which he was competing.  MacKay pointed out (quite rightly) that the Illinois counties with the highest taxes, largest bureaucracies, and greatest spending are those that have popularly elected, full-time county-board chairmen.  It seems an obvious point, of course—give a politician a full-time job, and he will expand it as much as the limits of the law and the whims of the electorate will allow—but voters had a tough time wrapping their heads around the idea that someone would want to run for a position that he didn’t believe should even exist.

With her sizable war chest; heavy backing from local developers, such as Sunil Puri, and public-works contractors, such as William Charles Ltd. (parent company of Rockford Blacktop, whose website, rockfordblacktop.com, proudly—and without a hint of irony—displays the slogan “Paving the Planet for Over 55 Years”), both of whom benefited greatly from having a full-time county-board chairman; and endorsements from both prominent Republicans and prominent Democrats (including then-mayor Charles Box and then-state representative, and current mayor, Doug Scott), Cohn won the primary handily.  Not surprisingly, she faced no Democratic opposition in the 2000 general election.

Cohn’s second term, however, was marked by setbacks, as her desire to extend Perryville Road (on Rockford’s far east side) all the way to the Wisconsin border was stymied by years of well-laid plans on the part of Roscoe Township, which just happened to own the right-of-way on a federally protected bicycle path that cut across all possible routes that Perryville could follow.  And while Cohn, in concert with Winnebago County State’s Attorney Paul Logli and Sheriff Richard Meyers, successfully lobbied for the passage of an open-ended one-cent increase in the county’s sales tax, ostensibly to fund the building of a new county jail, the public outcry over the lavish design of the jail, the decision to place it in downtown Rockford, and the use of some of the funds to cover current shortfalls in the county’s budget put Cohn on the defensive.  By 2002, she had already started looking for a new job, and she accepted the dubious honor of being the Republican sacrificial lamb in the November 2002 race for Illinois secretary of state against popular incumbent Democrat Jesse White.  (White’s popularity had less to do with what he had done as secretary of state than with what he hadn’t: Unlike his predecessor, George Ryan, White hadn’t sold licenses to illegal aliens and truckers who had failed licensing and safety tests.  The Republican Ryan, of course, went on to become governor of Illinois—beating the last truly conservative Democrat in America, downstate U.S. Rep. Glenn Poshard—and left office under a cloud after one term, to be indicted in the “licenses for bribes” scandal.)

Having lost her race for secretary of state, Cohn sent mixed signals about her desire to run for a third term as chairman.  In the 2002 general election, Tim Simms, Dave MacKay (brother of Pete), and Rockford Township Clerk Chris K. Johnson were elected to the county board, strengthening the anti-Cohn contingent of Republicans.  Dave MacKay declared it his mission in life to make his brother’s dream a reality by eliminating Cohn’s office, and—initially, at least—he seemed to have the support of Republican Majority Leader Simms.  But when the committee Dave MacKay headed passed a resolution to end the office, Simms decided not to bring it to the full board, claiming that the time wasn’t right.

With Cohn still trying to decide whether to announce her bid for a third term, the head of her own campaign committee, Scott Christiansen, himself a former chairman of the Winnebago County Board (back when the chairman was chosen from among the elected members of the board), announced that he would run for the Republican nomination.  And then, if the rumors are to be believed, Republican Majority Leader Simms, just days before the deadline for filing nominating petitions, informed Cohn that he would bring Dave MacKay’s resolution to the full board if she ran again—and he had the votes to pass it.  Facing the possible humiliation of winning a third term only to have her office eliminated, Kris Cohn stepped aside.

And so, his Machiavellian maneuverings successful, Simms brought the resolution to the floor.  It passed overwhelmingly; the MacKay brothers were vindicated; and, after 12 aberrant years of big government, Winnebago County returned to the Republican vision of lower taxes, modest spending, and limited government.

And, if you believe that, you are obviously a first-time reader of this column.

With Cohn’s departure imminent, Simms acted in the grand tradition of the Reagan Republicanism he so proudly proclaims.  Just as candidate Reagan promised to eliminate the federal Department of Education only to expand it, by the end of his eight years in office, to three times the size it was on the day of his first inauguration, Simms quietly killed the MacKay resolution.  After all, think of all that could be accomplished by having his candidate—Scott Christiansen—in the office!  What good is Machiavellianism if you’re simply going to renounce the spoils?

When Cohn received a federal appointment (a little payback for actively supporting George W. Bush in 2000), she resigned the chairmanship, and the Republican majority appointed Christiansen to fill out the rest of her term, essentially allowing him to go into the November election as an incumbent.  He closely aligned himself with Winnebago County Circuit Clerk Marc Gasparini, a Republican whose father, Don Gasparini, had simultaneously been a longtime sheriff (elected as a Democrat) and a well-known poacher of deer.  Gasparini transferred almost $5,000 from his campaign to Christiansen’s, and the two shared campaign headquarters and billboards.  Facing a poorly funded opponent in a Republican county, Christiansen looked like a shoo-in, and he and his allies on the board set about consolidating their power.

Earlier in the year, Dave MacKay had passed away after an extended battle with cancer, and, at a Republican caucus shortly after his death, a grave figure declared, “One MacKay down, one to go.”  Several of those in attendance interpreted that remark as indicating that the speaker intended to bury Pete MacKay (politically, that is).  Even though it meant potentially losing the Republican supermajority on the board, Christiansen, Simms, and Simms’ right-hand man, Chris K. Johnson, not-so-quietly offered support to Pete MacKay’s Democratic opponent in the November election.  (Johnson literally sits at Simms’ right hand at all board meetings, even though they do not represent numerically sequential districts.)  The Republicans stripped MacKay of his chairmanship of the county’s zoning committee and gave it to Johnson.  MacKay—a principled conservative who actually believes what the Republican Party professes to believe and, worse yet, acts on those beliefs—was no longer welcome in the Winnebago County Republican Party.

Three-and-a-half years before, MacKay had been elected to the post of Rockford Township Highway Commissioner, beating, in the primary, incumbent Republican Ron Swanson, whose tenure had been marked by nonstop scandal.  As the November 2004 election approached, similar allegations of corruption were leveled against MacKay by a former employee of the township highway commission—and an ally of Swanson.  MacKay demanded a state-police investigation, which found the allegations to be baseless, and Winnebago County State’s Attorney Paul Logli—a political ally of Christiansen, Simms, Johnson, and Gasparini—was forced to issue a press release clearing MacKay of all wrongdoing.

Still, the Simms-Christiansen-Johnson juggernaut kept barreling along.  But then an odd thing happened.  On Election Day, Paul Gorski, the Democratic candidate, came within a few hundred votes of beating Christiansen.  The support of Pete MacKay (who easily won reelection) and other disaffected Republicans helped Gorski, a relative political novice, almost pull off the upset of the year, despite the fact that Christiansen outspent him about ten to one.

MacKay himself was not out of the woods yet.  In early December, Chris K. Johnson announced his intention to run against his fellow board member in the Republican primary for Rockford Township Highway Commissioner.  At the same time, Ron Swanson, the corrupt Republican MacKay had defeated, announced that he would run for his former office as a Democrat.  And soon, Jeff Havens of the weekly Rock River Times discovered that Johnson had notarized some of Swanson’s nominating petitions.  Rumors swirled round of a pact between the two men—if each won his respective primary, one would step aside—but both, not surprisingly and not convincingly, denied the obvious.  (Havens—the best local investigative reporter in Rockford—wrote several very good articles, available on RockRiverTimes.com, on the attempt to embalm MacKay prematurely.)

In the Republican primary on February 22, Pete MacKay easily defeated Johnson, by a margin of three to one, and Swanson was denied the nomination of his newfound party.  The story, however, may be only beginning: According to the pre-election financial-disclosure forms that he filed with the state, Chris Johnson received $2,600 in contributions in his run against MacKay.  William Charles Ltd. pitched in $1,000.  Tim Simms, running for mayor in 1997, vowed never to accept money from the parent company of Rockford Blacktop.  He may have laid that promise to rest: Something tells me that his left hand knows what his right hand has been doing.