Dennis Byrne has a spot-on column in the Chicago Tribune about the woeful and helpless state of the Illinois Republican Party.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in the prospects for a GOP rebound in an important mid-western state.  This line really hit home for me:

It's time for the proven failures who are running the party to, if not step aside, then build a major league farm system. That means support the promising, bright and honest young candidates with money, organization and enthusiasm.

I have an anecdotal story to add to the mix.  I was actively involved (meaning almost every day) as a volunteer in the Illinois Secretary of State race back in 1998.  The incumbent Secretary of State, George Ryan, was running for Governor, leaving the Secretary of State seat open.  My candidate, a conservative from the Chicago suburbs, was facing off against a Chicago Democrat.   This was the year in which Republicans were confident of a groundswell of support in the aftermath of the Monica Lewinsky affair.  We had a popular Governor retiring and a popular Secretary of State running to replace him.  The tide looked favorable for our prospects to hold onto the Office of the Secretary of State.  This is an extremely important office for party building in Illinois.

My candidate was enmeshed in what we believed to be a very competitive race as the summer months wore on toward fall.  Despite having defeated the incumbent Lieutenant Governor in a 1996 U.S. Senate primary (only to lose to Dick Durbin) and having also beaten the establishment candidate in the GOP primary for Secretary of State, my candidate was never accepted by the GOP power brokers in Illinois.  Just a few scant months before the election, GOP gubernatorial candidate George Ryan took a swipe at my candidate by suggesting to the media that our Democratic opponent had more experience for the Secretary of State office.  The impact of that  statement hurt our campaign badly and seemed designed to give the GOP establishment permission to forgo support for my candidate.  Rumors, unsubstantiated to be sure, were also afloat about a deal cut between George Ryan and the Democratic candidate for Secretary of State.

As it turned out, it wasn't the GOP year we expected it to be.  That, along with changing political demographics in Illinois, denied us victory in the fall.  Still, the failure of the GOP establishment to fully support my candidate did us no favors.  My candidate was young (in his thirties) and seemed to have a bright future ahead of him in Illinois politics.  Instead, he was ushered off the state.  Meanwhile, George Ryan went on to become a scandal-plagued Governor and now sits in a federal penitentiary in Indiana.  Gravely wounded, the Illinois GOP went on to nominate another establishment figure named Ryan, this time popular Attorney General Jim Ryan (no relation to George), who was himself brought down in the General Election by a combination of George Ryan's scandals and the unfortunate coincidence of his last name.

The saga gets much worse for the Illinois GOP, but I won't post on it now.  The overall point of my post is that, given the opportunity to bring along a young, bright and charismatic GOP candidate, the party establishment instead threw him overboard...and that's but one example.  No wonder the Illinois GOP doesn't have a farm team capable of capitalizing on an embarrassing and astoundingly high level of Democratic corruption and malfeasance.   

If anyone's interested, here's a previous post I wrote about the state of the Illinois GOP.