Or you could just run? That is terrible advice....

Regular visitors to this site have seen that an anonymous person keeps leaving comments here, urging people with judicial ambitions to simply run for election, bypassing the associate judge process, and possible slating, and bar association screening.

Maybe it's more than one person; there have been so many of these comments. And, for every one you've seen, I've flushed at least another. They are redundant, repetitive, and, in my view, aggravating.

First and foremost, I think "just run" is terrible, horrible advice.

I can't believe it is offered sincerely. I hypothesized, in this post, that the person offering this terrible advice must be trying to create a need for his or her services as a campaign consultant, and I further suggested that, instead of playing this game, he or she just buy an ad.

No one's buying an ad, but the comments continue, now with a petulant tone. For example:

• Or you can just run. Before you delete this comment, Jack, know that you misconstrued it. I am not [peddling] services or goods. Frankly there are no goods or services that can help most candidates. This game, and make no mistake about it being a game, is nonsense. Voters have no idea who any of us are. Politicians don't have the heft or desire to “push” us and use us as ATM machines. Our best chance is to simply run; the more the better. Bar association ratings are rigged, as is Tim Evans’ short list. So save your money, give nothing to consultants or politicians and just RUN!
• Skip the bar associations. Skip the advisors. Skip the hawked goods and/or services. Skip the committee creatures. Madigan is done. Burke is done. Grow some spines and do your thing.
• Or you could just grow some spine and run — paying nobody for a good or service.

The reason I think this is dumb, horrible advice is because I've tried 'just running.' Twice, in fact.

The first time I ran, in the 10th Subcircuit, in 1994, I didn't even know I was 'just running.' I knew about slating, of course, but Richard J. Daley had gone to his eternal reward at the end of 1976. Jane Byrne's election, or surely Harold Washington's two wins, signaled that the Machine was dead and gone, right? I could not have picked my committeeman (at the time, State Rep. Ralph Capparelli) out of a lineup; I hadn't the first clue how subcircuit slating was handled.

And I'd never even heard of campaign advisors in judicial races. Consultants. Pollsters! Such persons esisted only in far higher profile races, right? (In fairness to me, I don't believe there were nearly as many persons dabbling in judicial races in the early 1990s as exist now.)

I ran the classic kitchen table campaign -- as in Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and "c'mon kids, let's put on a campaign!" (Not even all the Baby Boomers will catch that reference. But it captures our naivete and boundless, though baseless, optimism.) My then-partners wrote checks and held a couple of fundraisers, my wife chased down parents on the parish school playground for petition signatures, I had friends and family leave doorknob hangers with flyers and refrigerator magnets (never in the mailbox -- it wouldn't do for a judicial candidate to violate postal regulations, would it?), and I went house to house, and stood at bus stops and Blue Line stations, and went anywhere were I could get in the door. I got lots of folks to send out friend-to-friend postcards. I had snazzy campaign buttons.

Not many people wore the buttons. Or paid attention to the postcards. And I didn't get into nearly enough places. I obviously didn't knock on nearly enough doors. I finished dead last. (I wrote more about my 1994 run in this 2017 Page Two post.)

What did 'just running' get me in 1994? On the plus side, I lost 15 lbs. campaigning.

On the negative side? Well, let's tally it up, shall we?:

I drained the family savings accounts, buying campaign tchotchkes and billboard spaces and newspaper ads, loaning the campaign money I would never get back;

I burnt out my wife;

I burnt out my family;

I burnt out my friends and neighbors; and

I burnt out my partners.

But I still had the bug real bad. As 1996 approached, as Adlai Stevenson III once said, I felt the sap rising.

The thing I thought I'd learned in the course of my 1994 run is that a subcircuit, though only 1/15th of Cook County, is a really big place. I didn't have enough friends and relations to make a sufficient dent. Besides, no one I knew -- except me -- was particularly interested in me running again. So, in a Wile E. Coyote genius move, I decided to bypass the two 10th Subcircuit races in 1996 and throw my name in countywide. I really, truly, "just ran." I was simply hoping for lightning to strike. Just as Anonymous now advises.

I had my pride, I thought. I took pains to dot all the i's and cross all the t's necessary to get on the ballot. My petitions were not challenged in 1994 or 1996. I appeared before the county slating committee, too. It was a Hooda Flock moment.

You know... as in the committeemen muttering hooda flock is that guy? But I kept blundering on -- just running -- just as Anon is urging my readers to do now -- going nowhere, but going there every night. I wasn't raising money, but I was still spending some... and I still had those snazzy buttons, didn't I? Not that anyone wanted them....

Meanwhile, my wife was house hunting. Our fifth child learned to walk during the 1994 primary season and our starter home was, in my wife's opinion, finished. We needed more space.

One night I came home and my wife told me she'd found our new home. I didn't want to move. I wanted to get elected judge. That was the priority. That was the quest.

"Look at it this way," my wife told me, finally, "now you will have two houses where you can put your lawn signs."

The sad, inescapable truth is that there weren't too many other lawns where I could put my signs. We bought the house. We live there still. And I finished last again in 1996.

There's a darkly humorous denouement to these campaign misadventures, one that bitter, cynical observers of Cook County politics can surely appreciate. I'll share that in my next post on this subject, coming soon.