Congressional candidates forum

Just came back from a candidates forum for the special election to replace Rahm Emanuel in IL-5, my district. The format was to ask a question and give each candidate (18 in attendance; several others weren't there) a minute to respond. So far so good-as-can-be-expected, but then somebody decided to have the 10 Democrats go first and then switch gears and do the whole things again--afterthought style--with the four Republicans and four Greens. Several of the non-Dems were justifiably upset by this arrangement, though to the organizers' credit they did manage both to keep most of the audience there for the second half and to keep the whole thing on schedule and finished in two hours.

The candidates are predictable: the Dems all come off about the same, especially when all you get is 60-second sound bytes of them all answering the same couple of questions. Several of them are old Chicago/Springfield hands. They're for jobs, support for homeowners, health care reform, and not scapegoating undocumented immigrants for problems they didn't cause. They like the president well enough. Sure, count me in--but I'm still not sure who to vote for in the only election anyone's paying attention to the Democratic primary.

Actually, I do have a favorite, though I'm very much undecided: Tom Geoghegan, a labor lawyer w/ a lot of public service experience but none of it in the Chicago Dem machine.

The Republicans, again predictably for these parts, seem mostly to fall somewhere on the moderate-to-RINO continuum. Tom Hanson called himself a "liberal Republican" every time it was his turn to talk. Jon Stewart, an "independent Republican," applauded points the Green candidates made on multiple occasions. But the other two guys, for all their common-sense-moderate populist talk, at least had the decency to pivot repeatedly to some good old-fashioned taxation-trashing.

As for the Greens, three of them made solid enough cases for their candidacies but got overshadowed by Matt Reichel, a lefty activist-journalist who just acted super angry most of the time. He's even younger, even more liberal, and even more bombastic than yours truly (calling into question my three main reasons for deciding against a run myself...). Afterwards, he stood outside the door smiling at people as they left, but he seemed even more intense than he had on stage.

The primary's in eight days.