Illinois Republican Party

Democrats can't say they weren't warned about Scott Lee Cohen
2/4/2010

By Mark Brown - Chicago Sun-Times Columnist

Let the record reflect that on the very day last March that Scott Lee Cohen announced his campaign for lieutenant governor of Illinois, he voluntarily disclosed he had once been arrested in what he described as a domestic battery case involving a live-in girlfriend.

It seems only fair to point that out now that Cohen is the surprise winner of the Democratic primary -- and everybody is suddenly digging into his background and trying to figure out who he is -- beyond that carefully crafted image as "the only candidate who is doing something about the economy."

The problem for Cohen was that he made his announcement to me, and I wasn't taking him very seriously.

How was I to know way back then that the Democratic voters of Illinois would be so dumb as to elect him, brainwashed by millions of dollars in advertising about his job fairs?

That's why I told Cohen at the time that nobody even knew who he was, let alone cared enough to want to read about his dirty laundry, and I didn't see the need to go into it.

I was only writing about him because of Cohen's line of work: pawnbroker. I'd never heard of a pawnbroker trying to break into politics, let alone aspiring to being a heartbeat from the governor's office.

But Cohen insisted he thought it was important to make the incident public right from the start, because he didn't want it to come up later and look like he was hiding something, a la Blair Hull or Jack Ryan.

So I duly reported the information, along with his explanation that the charges were dropped when the girlfriend failed to appear in court and with his denial that he'd done anything wrong in the first place. The whole business was tucked into a couple of paragraphs deep within the story, which I thought portrayed Cohen overall as a bit of a goof.

And that's where it stopped, until a few weeks ago, when I started receiving calls from Democratic political types as his opponents came to realize Cohen might actually win, which I'd already figured out for myself just by hearing all his radio commercials and seeing his campaign mailings.

Some hoped I would remind voters about Cohen's arrest, but I thought that if his opponents or the candidates for governor believed it was important, they should make it an issue themselves.

Instead, I wrote a column about the very real possibility Cohen could win and pointing out how he was going out of his way to hide his occupation in those campaign ads touting him generically as a successful small-business man.

I hoped that would be enough to bring voters to their senses, which was my second mistake.

Now that the Democrats are stuck with him, they might want to make the most of it.

On the plus side, Cohen has proved himself a strategic thinker -- fronting the arrest record showed as much. His entire campaign was extremely shrewd. The jobs fair idea was brilliant. Candidates from coast to coast will soon be copying it. His campaign adviser, Phil Molfese at Grainger Terry Inc., ought to be nominated for political consultant of the year, just for bringing him this far.

The problem is that Cohen has no business being lieutenant governor, not to mention governor, which will only become more obvious in the days ahead.

Don't blame me. I didn't vote for him.

SOURCE: Chicago Sun-Times

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