Monday, December 15, 2008

Lake County Sheriff Changes Sides

Lost in the Blago mess is some major local news. Sheriff Mark Curran who ran as a Democrat two years ago and won, is switching parties to become a Republican. Curran defeated long time Republican Sheriff Gary Del Re who was tainted by all sorts of scandals during his terms in office and Curran ran an effective campaign to oust him.

Heres what I would speculate happened. Its hard to beat an incumbent, and its even harder to beat him in a primary. So republicans who were unhappy with Del Re encouraged Curran to run as a Democrat, so durring a general election you would have the Dem turnout coupled with the Republican's disenchanted equaling a Curran victory, which is what happened. What suprises me is the switch took two years to take place.

The only reason I can see for the switch is that Republican States Attorney Mike Waller needed Curran to undermine his Democratic opponent in the 08 general Mike Jacobs, which Curran did by endorsing Waller and denouncing Jacobs while doing so, effectively torpedoing Jacobs in the election. I would then predict that when Waller steps down, Curran, a lawyer, will run for States Attorney. You heard it here first!

Article in Daily Herald is here.

Article in News Sun is here.

2 comments:

Crazy4glf said...

Sheriff Curran's interview on WKRS shows that he stands for nothing. He cited operation Greylord and Silver Shovel as reasons to defect as well as the Cook County machine.

As Libby Collins said, most of those things occurred -before- he ran as a Dem.

Sheriff Curran is an opportunist who probably would have switched from the GOP to the Dem's after Ryan was convicted, after Keyes was slated as the GOP Senate candidate, etc.

He has no reason to have switched and to a degree he is no better than the people of Cook County that he slams, taking advantage of people to get what he wants, to get attention, and who have no real business representing anyone!

Team America said...

Interesting blog you guys have here; I will add a link at Team America.

Bemused, you get credit for thinking outside the box, but I can tell you from the inside that the Lake County GOP was solidly behind Del Re, and there was no effort to run Curran as a Dem, with the thought that he'd switch at the right time and 'return' to the GOP.

Frankly, we're not that smart, or organized, or devious, as a group. And you can see by Terry Link's reaction in the news, and on WKRS, he truly believed that Curran was his guy, who betrayed him.

BUT, we will take advantage of serendipity when it occurs.