Daniel Biss is a fraud
In case you didn’t or weren’t able to watch Biss’s interview on WCIA-TV’s Capitol Connection, the interview was just plain awful
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author of this blog post is an election judge in Vermilion County, Illinois who may be called to serve as a poll worker in the March 2018 primaries in Illinois. This blog post merely reflects the opinions of the author and is not, in any way, connected to election judge duties.
I watched Daniel Biss’s interview on Capitol Connection, a local political television show that airs in my area of Illinois on Champaign, Illinois-based CBS affiliate WCIA-TV, but, as far as I know, is not aired statewide in Illinois. In case you either didn’t watch the interview, which aired earlier today, or live in a part of Illinois where Capitol Connection is not aired, you’d probably cringe if you’d seen the interview.
Long story short, State Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Evanston), who is one of multiple Democrats seeking the party’s nomination for governor, claims to be a progressive, but he really isn’t one.
Mark Maxwell, the host and moderator of Capitol Connection, questioned Biss on his claim of being a progressive. Specifically, Maxwell pointed out instances where Biss had voted against progressive legislation as a state senator, and Biss did not have anything resembling a convincing response, to put it mildly. As far as I can remember, Maxwell didn’t mention Biss’s vote for Pat Quinn’s pension-cutting bill, although that’s clearly an instance where Biss voted for legislation that violated the Illinois Constitution and was in clear opposition to progressive values. You can’t claim to be a progressive when your record on public employee pensions is to the ideological right of right-wing Republican justices of the Illinois Supreme Court, such as Rita Garman (the pension-cutting bill Biss voted for was unanimously struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court).
While Biss does have a legitimate gripe about Democratic political power brokers in Illinois stacking the deck in favor of neoliberal billionaire J.B. Pritzker, whose family ran a failed bank, who deliberately let a house in Chicago fall apart so that he could pay less in property taxes, and who has done virtually nothing to distance himself from Mike Madigan other than not take any campaign donations from anyone other than himself, Biss is not doing so from a position of strength. Biss cited the example of Bernie Sanders attempting to run against the Hillary Clinton establishment in the 2016 presidential primaries (which included Bernie narrowly losing the Illinois primary to Hillary), but everything Bernie did was from a position of strength, since he had extremely deep support with his base voters because of what he stood for: lifting Americans out of poverty, reducing income inequality, making health care coverage a human right, reversing climate change, and so on. Biss on the other hand, comes across as a fraud and someone who just panders to progressives.
Although I’m not a big fan of Chris Kennedy for a number of reasons, he comes across as more of a progressive than Biss does. Whereas Biss seems to lack much of a political agenda at all, at least Kennedy has a detailed agenda outlining how he wants to reform how Illinois government operates. As a matter of fact, if Bob Daiber, who I currently intend to vote for in the gubernatorial primary here in Illinois, were to drop out of the race for whatever reason, I’d seriously consider voting for Chris Kennedy. However, I’d never consider voting for Daniel Biss unless he were to somehow win the Democratic primary.
