The last six years have been lean, sometimes even embarrassing, for Cook County Republicans.
They lost their only countywide officeholder when then-State`s Atty. Bernard Carey was trounced in 1980 by Richard M. Daley. Two years later, Sheriff Richard Elrod, Clerk Stanley Kusper and Assessor Thomas Hynes, Democrats all, won majorities in the suburbs as well as in the traditional Democratic city.
That same year, Jeanne Quinn, a Democratic Don Quixote who had tilted unsuccessfully against U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde (R., Ill.) in 1978, became the first Democrat to win a suburban seat on the Cook County Board in 48 years.
The Republican lock is gone on the seven Cook County Board seats elected from the suburbs, and the Cook County Democratic organization is licking its chops at the possibility of toppling more Republican board members in the November election.
But suburban Republicans charge that Ald. Edward Vrdolyak (10th), Democratic county chairman, is so eager to crack the GOP that he couldn`t wait until November and has infiltrated the Republican ballot in the March 18 primary.
”We all know that Vrdolyak is fooling around here,” said 12-year county board member Carl Hansen, a leader of the Republican slate that is being tested by four independents in the GOP county primary. ”Anyone who believes that their filing was circumstantial believes that Vrdolyak is Mother Goose.” It`s true that several of the challengers have Democratic backgrounds, but they argue that they have been lured by the same Republican design to win over disenchanted Democrats that persuaded former Chicago Police Supt. James O`Grady to switch to the GOP and become its candidate this year for sheriff.
The biggest problem for the Republican organization`s endorsed slate, which includes six incumbent commissioners and Winnetka attorney Joseph Mathewson, is that Glenview real estate agent Patricia Semrow and Assistant State`s Atty. Robert Brennan will appear above the slate on the GOP primary ballot.
Semrow, former wife of Harry Semrow, a Cook County Board of (tax) Appeals member, concedes that she has never worked in a Republican campaign but aided her former husband and the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley was once elected as a Republican, but Republicans insist that doesn`t count.
”I am a Republican. I identify with their philosophy,” Semrow said.
”I`m also a free thinker and a free spirit.”
Semrow, an avid equestrian and bicyclist who often rides the paths of the Cook County Forest Preserves, said that ”sexual deviates and exhibitionists are literally taking over the forest preserves,” and she called for increased security to patrol the 67,000 acres of greenery.
”People are not using the forest preserves because of that danger,” she said. ”I`d like to make those preserves unsafe for the offenders and safe for us.”
Republican Commissioner Harold Tyrrell retorted that crime reports in the forest preserves have always been low, and that the estimated 31 million visitors to the preserves in 1985 marked the highest usage ever.
Incidentally, Semrow said that the Republican leaders who question her party credentials asked her if she wanted to be slated as a Republican to run for the Board of Appeals against her former husband.
Tyrrell said the Semrow-versus-Semrow offer was made in jest.
Brennan, of Orland Park, said he was converted to the Republican Party by the Ronald Reagan revolution. Brennan may be able to capitalize on a Republican soft spot because he lives in the southwest suburbs, where local party leaders have complained that they don`t have representation on the county board.
Perhaps the largest agenda for change in county government has been compiled by attorney Gordon Hirsch of Skokie, a former wunderkind who in 1977, at age 18, was elected to the board of Niles Township High School District 219 and was elected board president two years later.
Hirsch, who said he ”knocked on my first door for a Republican candidate when I was 9 years old,” argues that the Republican incumbents ”have not acted as a watchdog for reforms and as proponents of sound, progressive government policy.”
He suggests that the elected posts of county clerk, recorder and treasurer be appointed by the county board so they could be filled by financial administrators rather than politicians, and that the Cook County regional school superintendent be elected only by suburban voters.
Hirsch also has called for a more strict accounting of the hours worked by County Hospital employees and a county job-matching program in which computer operators would help unemployed residents match qualifications with available jobs.
A fourth independent on the ballot is Tinley Park realty firm owner C. Robert McDonald, who has also hammered the Republican slate on the issue of representation for the south and southwest suburbs.
”There ought to be a balance of representation through the county,”
said McDonald, a former maintenance supervisor for the Illinois Division of Highways. McDonald has also suggested study of a proposal to turn County Hospital over to the nearby University of Illinois Medical Center.
The Cook County Republican organization is sensitive to complaints that its slate is too heavily weighted to the northern suburbs. Although the party argues that it has a reasonably well-balanced ticket, Bernard Carey is the only Republican board member who lives south of La Grange Park. And Carey, who calls South Holland home, recently bought an apartment on Chicago`s North Side.
The six GOP incumbents may not be household names, but they are banking on recognition by the 30 GOP township committeemen to carry them past the most serious primary challenge in years. The incumbents–Richard Siebel of Northbrook, Joseph Woods of Oak Park, Mary McDonald of Lincolnwood, Hansen of Mt. Prospect, Tyrrell of La Grange Park and Carey–are campaigning more actively than they have in any past primary.
”We fought off George Dunne on a corporate head tax, and a proposal for a county income tax disappeared because of us. You`re not going to get that kind of work if you put in pseudo-Republicans who are really Democrats,”
Hansen said. ”We`re the best qualified, based on experience and knowledge of the county.”
The party has filled its one open slot with Joseph Mathewson, a top GOP fundraiser and former television news reporter whose real mission is to take on Dunne in November for county board president.
While attention has focused on the wild Democratic primary race for Chicago seats on the board, Mathewson has quietly issued enough proposals on government reform to fill a slim book. Among his ideas, Mathewson has suggested that the county encourage the development of ”incubator buildings” to provide low-cost office services for entrepreneurs and a Cook County development bank to provide low-interest loans to small businesses.
Suburban Democrats have a fistful of statistics to show how they can capture as many as four of the seven suburban seats, although most observers say they more realistically can hope to hold onto the one seat they have now and perhaps pick up one more.
But first, the Democratic slate has to get past its own primary challenge.
