IN FROM THE FRINGE
Carlson, Tucker
IN FROM THE FRINGE by Tucker Carlson Palatine, III. FOR MAINSTREAM REPUBLICANS from Illinois, Al Salvi is the archetypal right-winger. He achieved this standing in 1996, when, as a little-known...
...As significant, Fitzgerald doesn't come across as an extremist...
...Peter is a thoroughly modern political candidate," explains one of his advisers, which in this election means he has spent relatively few days on the road giving speeches and a great deal of time on the phone raising money...
...salvi was a fanatically anti-abortion lapel-grabber with a fetish for guns—a perfect candidate, in other words, for the activists who decide Republican primaries, but an unacceptable wacko in the eyes of party moderates and the general electorate...
...At this point she and Fitzgerald are virtually tied in the polls...
...What does move numbers is political advertising, and Fitzgerald is prepared to pay for lots of it...
...senate...
...Moseley-Braun has denied any wrongdoing, and so far the Justice Department, at the behest of a Clinton-appointed assistant attorney general, has declined IRS requests to open a criminal probe into her finances...
...A former editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, D'Souza says that Fitzgerald "had far too much sense" to join the famously belligerent paper...
...Kustra was a pro-choice moderate and the favorite of state party officials...
...By all accounts, Fitzgerald has gotten craftier, or at least more politically sophisticated...
...Which is to say, he couldn't be more different from Al Salvi, who in one particularly spectacular display of recklessness shortly before the 1996 election wrongly accused gunshot victim and Durbin ally James Brady of having been a machine-gun dealer...
...peter Fitzgerald, this year's Republican nominee in the race against Sen...
...But the lack of an indictment hasn't eliminated the ethical odor that surrounds her office...
...And while Fitzgerald has expressed enthusiasm for liberalized concealed-weapons laws, he has also endorsed the assault-weapons ban and the Brady Bill and has made a point of accepting no money from the NRA...
...Even in those days, he was a crafty fellow, looking ahead...
...During the primary, former senator Bob Dole did his best to prevent a conservative from running at all...
...While stumping around the state for Fitzgerald's opponent, Dole described Fitzgerald as a "fringe" candidate from the "far right" and predicted that Carol Moseley-Braun would be "saying a few prayers" for his victory...
...He was very level-headed, mainstream, not given to wild schemes," says author Dinesh D'Souza, who knew Fitzgerald at Dartmouth...
...A 37-year-old married lawyer from suburban Chicago, he majored in Latin and Greek at Dartmouth and has the calm, slightly dorky demeanor of the bank executive he once was...
...Most recently, a Chicago television station reported that Moseley-Braun has been the subject of two separate IRS investigations stemming from the 1992 election...
...Tucker Carlson is a staffwriter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Salvi often came off as rash, and if there is one lesson from his defeat it is that temperament matters to Illinois voters, probably even more than ideology...
...Carol Moseley-Braun, is another socially conservative state legislator...
...If we lose this one," a Republican political operative explained to the Chicago Tribune, "then we lose the right to run a conservative statewide for a generation...
...Fitzgerald strongly opposes both abortion and gay marriage...
...During the campaign, investigators discovered, Moseley-Braun and her boyfriend, a former African National Congress operative from South Africa named Kgosie Matthews, spent close to $300,000 in what appeared to be campaign funds on personal items...
...History, they fear, is repeating itself...
...Salvi lost not because he was perceived as a wild-eyed right-winger, but because he just seemed wild-eyed...
...He is in favor of term limits, wants to fix Social Security, supports more federal funding for highways, and in general appears to have perfectly mainstream Republican views on politics and government...
...And fund-raising is the least of the senator's problems...
...He looked on our activities with wry amusement, but he knew better than to be publicly associated with us...
...on the other hand, so do many Illinois Democrats, including gubernatorial nominee Glenn Poshard, who frequently campaigns with Moseley-Braun...
...When Fitzgerald did win this March, an Associated Press headline described his nomination as "badly needed good news" for Democrats...
...Federal investigators would, however, like to speak to Kgosie Matthews, but he has disappeared, reportedly back to South Africa and his two wives...
...If she does, Peter Fitzgerald will not only defeat one of Washington's greatest mediocrities, but also lay to rest the legend of Al Salvi...
...so, at any rate, goes the conventional wisdom...
...It's been almost two years since Salvi lost that senate seat to Dick Durbin, but illinois Republicans can't stop talking about him...
...Her final visit drew scolding from the State Department and human-rights groups when it emerged that she had conducted her own, unauthorized diplomacy with the late homicidal strongman Sani Abacha...
...Agitated party elders, who had hoped to put an Illinois Republican in the Senate for the first time since 1984, think they know what's going to happen next...
...The charges included $12,000 worth of stereo equipment, $18,000 in jewelry, and $70,000 for designer clothing...
...The old-fashioned Rotary Club, press-the-flesh technique," explains the adviser, "doesn't move the numbers very much...
...Like Salvi, Fitzgerald defeated his pro-choice opponent in a nasty primary campaign and now faces a liberal Democrat popular with women...
...Like Salvi, Fitzgerald is young, ideological, and rich enough to finance his own campaign...
...Fitzgerald is indeed conservative, but his views are hardly the political millstone the headline-writers imagine...
...Democrats shouldn't start celebrating just yet...
...He achieved this standing in 1996, when, as a little-known state legislator, he beat illinois lieutenant governor Bob Kustra in the Gop primary, then went on to lose the race for an open seat in the u.s...
...In the primary alone, the Fitzgerald campaign spent more than $7 million, most of it from the candidate himself...
...Days after her victory, Matthews and Moseley-Braun flew to Hawaii at the campaign's expense, dropping $4,000 at a Maui hotel...
...By the beginning of this year, her campaign had less than $370,000 in the bank, pathetic for an incumbent...
...As things now stand, Carol Moseley-Braun may well lose the election...
...No one, by contrast, is going to accuse Fitzgerald of lacking polish or self-control...
...Turns out that was a different Jim Brady," Salvi explained to reporters the next day...
...Moseley-Braun, meanwhile, struggled until recently just to settle her 1992 campaign debts...
...Complaints from former supporters about Moseley-Braun's behavior began almost immediately after her election and reached wide currency in 1996, when she made the last of at least six trips to Nigeria...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 46
