When the news came over the transom yesterday that William F. Buckley, Jr. had passed, I turned to pick up a 14-year-old framed photograph on the desk in my office that I had not looked at for some time.

The picture is of a strapping young man that used to be me shaking hands with the godfather of modern American conservatism as we posed for the snapshot at the base of the stairway leading from the lobby at the Omni Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois.

Through a conservative student group I had run at Northwestern University, we brought Bill Buckley to speak on campus in the fall of 1994.

Up until that evening and from that time until his death, I knew Buckley only the way in which others around the world knew him--through his work as a trailblazing intellectual and by his reputation as an authentic Renaissance man.

Those characteristics were most certainly on display for those in attendance that night in Evanston.

Buckley gleefully recounted the relatively recent demise of the Soviet Union which had the dual benefits of both extending freedom to hundreds of millions of people and of tubing the Cold War arguments of old Buckley nemeses like Carl Sagan and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Buckley had the crowd howling as he openly contemplated whether or not he would have to extend his famous edict that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty at Harvard to his alma mater of Yale, given the two Yale Law alumni that had ascended to the White House.

The best part of the night, however, was after the speech--dinner with Buckley.

For three hours William F. Buckley sat with a half-dozen undergrads discussing academia, politics, and life in general. And it was a true discussion not a monologue. Buckley solicited input, postulated questions and offered friendly advice.

After dinner, Buckley leaned back in his chair and enjoyed a snifter of brandy which elicited his signature wry smile as he shared anecdotes about his own experiences as an undergrad and what led him to found National Review, among other such insights.

I remember feeling almost as much at ease as he appeared to be. Not only was Buckley incredibly generous with his time, he was genuinely curious where others of substantially less intellect would have been patronizing.

I learned a lifelong lesson that night to appreciate the contributions of others to the thoughtful discourse from whence knowledge springs.

The 18th Century English poet Edward Young observed, "We are all born originals; why is it so many of us die copies?"

Were that it was possible to copy William F. Buckley, Jr.

A Democrat Governor proposes tax cuts, however fleeting, and Republican legislative leaders respond by asking, "How's he going to pay for them?"

These are confusing times to be a Republican in Illinois. When they are not letting the Democrats in charge off the hook for managing massive public systems into DEFCON 1 core meltdowns or for creating open-ended entitlement programs, they are rejecting tax cuts.

Nevertheless and in spite of themselves, Republicans will be presented this year with yet another opportunity to reconfigure the political balance of power in Illinois and reestablish their electoral relevance.

Against the backdrop of Governor Blagojevich's trivial, half-hearted "State of the State Address" last week, House Speaker Michael Madigan allowed House Bill 750 to begin slithering its way though the General Assembly once again.

HB 750 is the legislative Rasputin of the Democrat-controlled General Assembly, which proposes to permanently increase the state income tax by 66% in exchange for temporary property tax relief.

Where would the net increase in state revenue go? Say it with me: to fund education.

And herein lies the Republican opportunity.

Rather than getting caught in the false debate about how much money for schools is enough, Republicans should tell Democrats to name their price. Increase the foundation level by 5%? 10%? 50%? Fine. Whatever.

But Republicans must hold fast to one stipulation in return for their blank check on funding.

For the City of Chicago, those dollars will no longer be attached to the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Those dollars will be attached to the individual CPS students so that their parents may send them to the school of their choosing, public or private, within the city.

This is something that Republicans as well as common-sense Independents and Democrats from Zion to Cairo can get behind because everybody gets it when it comes to the importance of their children's education.

Illinois families understand that today more than ever education is the gateway to opportunity.

Illinois families are aware of the increasing earning gap between college grads and non-college grads in our global, digital economy.

Illinois families have come to learn what a lot of Chicago families know from experience, which is the troubling reality that only 6 out of every 100 freshmen who entered a Chicago public high school this past September will earn a bachelor's degree (source: Consortium on Chicago School Research). 6 in 100.

Illinoisans families also intuitively comprehend that no matter where you live, when a system responsible for educating 400,000 children every year fails the overwhelming majority of those children every year, as CPS does, we all pay.

So, knowing all that we know, isn't a shame what we allow to occur in Chicago? No, actually, isn't it a crime?

In 2006, CPS chief Arne Duncan told the Chicago Tribune, "When students are unprepared for college or the world of work, they are condemned to social failure. We are doing everything we can to dramatically change the high school experience for our teenagers."

I do not know who the "we" are and I do not much care. Even were I to attribute the best of intentions to him, CPS will never dramatically change itself. As we have seen, doing everything they can is simply not good enough.

That is why the Illinois General Assembly stepped in to restructure CPS in 1995. It was a genuine attempt but it addressed form to the exclusion of function and so fell short of the overhaul required.

To summarize, we know CPS is an abysmal failure.

We know that we will all be held to account, morally and financially, for that failure.

We know that there is precedent for the General Assembly summoning its collective will to intervene.

We know that the once-proud Illinois Republican Party, a party founded upon the idea of extending opportunity to the disenfranchised, is in dire need of reintroducing itself to the Illinois electorate with policy solutions that embody that noble spirit.

Most importantly, we know that low-income children--of all races but disproportionately minority children--are getting a raw deal. It is not fair, it is not right and, with a smidge of political courage, it is eminently fixable

Our neighbors to the north in Milwaukee figured this out 17 years ago when they launched their opportunity scholarship program. Our neighbors to the east in Cleveland took the defense of their program all the way to the Supreme Court in 2002 and won.



And if I might paraphrase a sentiment from the late, great Ray Charles, letting the market "do what it do (baby)" has given us a national landscape where 13 states operate 21 distinct choice programs, some specifically tailored to students with particular challenges as is the scholarship program in Ohio for autistic children and as is the McKay Scholarship Program in Florida for special needs children.

I have previously and accurately described the leadership (to the extent there is evidence of such) of the Republican Party in Illinois as gelatinous invertebrates.

If ever there was a time to grow a spine, this is it.

The degree to which the Illinois GOP makes itself about the aspirations of low-to-middle-income families trapped in a discredited edu-ocracy that is robbing their children of their futures and stands up for now-proven market-oriented reforms is the degree to which Illinois will once again be a two-party state.

My commentary from September after John Stroger's godson Orlando Jones committed suicide...

http://urqmedia.com/proft/contentview.asp?c=201006

(If it comes to pass) The trial of Lacy Thomas--former director of Cook County Hospital under John Stroger before absconding to Vegas-- is something inquiring minds in Chicago should watch.

Is the Chicago Sun-Times, currently on the auction block, hoping to be purchased by either Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens?

In a staff editorial yesterday arguing that Mike Huckabee's continued presence in the Republican race for President is actually aiding John McCain by making McCain look more moderate, the Sun-Times issues the following edict, "Huckabee has no chance of being elected president. And thank God for that, too. This is a man who believes the world was created in six days." (Click here: http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/801030,CST-EDT-edit19b.article)

There are two ways to react to this.

We could demand to know which of the aspiring Hemingways penned this perspicacious real politick prose.

We could take this snide remark seriously and push back against it, pointing to the irony of thanking God in one sentence and ridiculing creationism in the next.

We could further mention that were Huckabee to be elected President, the rest of the nation would not share the shock of the Sun-Times to learn of his belief in Scripture as that would make Huckabee the 44th out of 44 Presidents of the United States to have expressed such faith in the Almighty (though admittedly some were more believable on this score than others).

But to react in such a way is to miss the point of the Sun-Times' desperate gag.

In the last two years, the Sun-Times Media Group has lost 75% of its market cap. Since April of last year, its stock price has gone down 82%. The Sun-Times is hemorrhaging advertising and employees-and that is after combining the Daily Southtown with its local Star Newspaper Group.

In other words, given its current market position, a savvy investor could purchase the Sun-Times for a handful of magic beans.

Thus, the Huckabee piece in question was nothing more than a pathetically, frantic effort by the Sun-Times editorial board to be provocative in the hopes of being relevant. Maybe another commuter or two buys a paper to find out if Drew Peterson could be a flower, what kind of flower he would choose to be.

I concede that it is difficult to figure out where the ignorance of the Sun-Times management ends and their desperation begins.

But, in spite of some very good investigative journalists and political reporters, what is crystal clear is that the Sun-Times ceased to be a journalistic enterprise long ago.

The ethics of its decision makers are as much for sale as everything else in the building that isn't nailed down, except for Richard Roeper's secret for how he stays so gosh darn contemporary.

A selection from the evidence room includes:

·  After the 2006 election, former Sun-Times Publisher John Cruickshank explained that the Sun-Times endorsed Todd Stroger for Cook County Board President for "business reasons" to pander to its alleged black readership.

·  Did someone say Todd Stroger? Speaking of patronage hiring, Cruickshank's wife, Jennifer Hunter, was given a spot on the Sun-Times' editorial board and a reoccurring column devoted to reprinting Barack Obama's press releases during Cruickshank's tenure. You'll remember Hunter's pieces on Obama as those that would have been more appropriate for her Hello Kitty diary.

·  Most incredible of all: Current Sun-Times Media Group CEO Cyrus Friedheim is facing possibly extradition to Colombia for prosecution in connection with financing paramilitary death squads (designated by the U.S. State Department as terrorists) in Colombia while in his previous position as CEO of Chiquita Brands International. (Chiquita pled guilty in U.S. federal court last year and agreed to pay a $25 million fine). The families of the victims of these death squads want and deserve justice.

The next time you choose to subject yourself to the condescending prattling on about "social justice" from moralizing, self-styled good government "progressives" at the Sun-Times like, say, Carol Marin, keep in mind who they have obediently worked for and the corporate culture to which they have dutifully submitted, with nary a word of public disclosure much less protestation.

Soon the thrashing will stop and this sickly paper, ravaged by intellectual vacuity, liberal orthodoxy (I repeat myself), rank hypocrisy, and managerial stupidity will be laid to rest.

In His Name, I pray.

Dan Proft is a Principal of Urquhart Media LLC, a Chicago-based public affairs firm and political commentator for the Don Wade & Roma Morning Show (5-9am) on Chicago's number one news talk radio station, WLS-AM 890. He can be reached at dan@urqmedia.com.

For other Dan Proft commentaries (radio & print), please visit: http://www.urqmedia.com/proft/

For other recent Don Wade & Roma interviews, commentary, and discussions visit: http://www.wlsam.com/sectional.asp?id=16410

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In recent years, Americans have been forced to deal with a rash of senseless, inexplicable school shootings such as that which occurred at Northern Illinois University last week leaving five innocents dead.

Part of the unhappy search for explanations in the wake of these gruesome events has invariably included inane pronouncements from the media.

After Virginia Tech, Lisa Ling used her platform on the Oprah Winfrey Show to openly worry about a backlash against "anyone who looked Asian". Of course, this did not happen. Ling, you see, was unable to wrap her mind around the concept that the rest of America did, which is that it was a single, deranged person who happened to be South Korean who was responsible for the carnage, not the Asian community.

Group responsibility is no responsibility. Thank goodness regular Americans have the common sense that seems to regularly evade so many of our media drones.

But Ling's politically correct pabulum paled in comparison to the offered explanation for the NIU shooting by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell.

I know what you are thinking and the answer is, yes, the Sun-Times does technically still produce something akin to a newspaper. If you look online, it is the outlet that bears a strikingly similarity to Barack Obama's MySpace page.

To that point, Mitchell's column entitled, "Shooting shows why Obama strikes a chord--So many of his supporters are tired of feeling hopeless". (Click here: http://www.suntimes.com/news/mitchell/798119,CST-NWS-mitch17.article).

It was hopelessness that led Steve Kazmierczak to kill 5 students at NIU, a hopelessness to which Obama is uniquely speaking, according to Mitchell.

So to extend Mitchell's logic, I guess Kazmierczak was an Obama voter.

But the real absurdity of Mitchell's column is not her contorted logic; it is her homage to mindless abstraction.

Maybe Kazmierczak was not a tortured existentialist, but rather chemically imbalanced and off of his meds as some in the adult media have reported was a possibility?

Maybe he was a just a narcissistic monster who decided that his gripes with the world justified doing harm to others?

We don't know. We don't know why it happened and we don't honestly know how to prevent it.

But, of course, Mitchell does.

She laments, "While young people are dying as martyrs, adults with the power to make a difference are still arguing over the merits of gun control."

Apparently that includes adults like Barack Obama who said Friday, "I think there is an individual right to bear arms."

For the Mary Mitchells of the world, however, emotion trumps both reason and evidence.

So blame is ascribed to the amorphous, like hopelessness, and, salvation is to come from the patently ridiculous, like a politician's rhetoric.

If my erstwhile protection against the depravities that spring from the darkest places of the human mind is Obama's speechifying, I think I'll stick with my 9mm.

"Obama is surging ahead because a lot of people are tired of believing they are powerless to heal an ailing nation," Mitchell presumptuously declares.

This is bilge, high-minded bilge to be sure, but bilge nonetheless. Obama is surging ahead because a lot of Democrat primary voters have finally figured out what the rest of America did about two decades ago--namely, that the room gets warmer when Hillary Clinton leaves it.

On the matter of "hope", Mitchell also has it wrong. Hope is not about putting one's destiny in the hands of another, not even the Archangel Barack Obama. Just ask the 12,000 children in failing schools in Obama's former State Senate district.

To the contrary, it is what writer and former Czech President Vaclav Havel described it to be, "Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope (is) rather an ability to work for something because it is good."

Hope is not waiting to be delivered from on high, it is about fulfilling one's promise. The "healing" comes from the associated goods that flow from individual private action in that spirit.

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Republicans ought to be thankful that two-thirds of the American electorate is consumed with finding out how many Democrat delegates (and super-delegates) can dance on the head of a pin.

The Clinton-Obama catfight as to who is Jimmy Carter's true heir provides much-needed cover for John McCain to get the GOP house in order.

Amid Ann Coulter's repeated self-immolation on cable news networks and the more legitimate hue and cry of rank-and-file conservatives harboring long-standing enmities for him, McCain needs this time to recast himself and refocus his party's base to the task before them in November.

Conservatives should not either forget or even forgive McCain for his well-established and oft-repeated list of offenses against free minds and free markets.

But they must get hip to the realities of this election.

First, not only is John McCain not Ronald Reagan, no one else is Ronald Reagan either. Instead of demanding McCain do his best karaoke of Reagan, the effort should be made to ensure that McCain learns the lessons of Reagan and applies them. That begins with a focused message that speaks to the pressing issues of the day and provides a clear contrast to the Democrats.

Second, conservatives would be wise to resist the siren song to punish McCain for past bad acts. The time for vengeance was the primary and McCain survived it fair and square.

The arguments about teaching McCain a lesson remind me of those that were made in 1992 against George H.W. Bush for breaking his tax pledge.

Some conservatives contended that the play was to let Bill Clinton win and come storming back in 1996 to reclaim the White House with a true conservative.

How'd that work out?

Hillary Clinton should have been sent back to Little Rock to over-bill clients and fetch Webb Hubbell's coffee. Instead, 16 years later, she is the likely Democrat nominee for President.

Our military shouldn't have been allowed to atrophy during the 1990s, suffering under a 30% budget cut in an uncertain post-Cold War world. Instead, America was caught under-prepared for the global threat posed by Islamo-fascism.

The country paid a high price for George H.W. Bush to be taught a lesson.

This is not to blame conservatives for the Clintons and what they have wrought but rather to highlight that history is non-linear. Conceding a Presidential election for what you hope will occur four years later is dangerous business.

Third, as rightly unnerving as it may be to conservatives, McCain's history of placating old media by shanking conservatives in the back will benefit his Presidential prospects by giving him the benefit of the doubt that few Republican standard-bearers enjoy. Old media outlets are on the wane but they still wield considerable influence.

Following on that bitter pill, McCain's standing with old media will be quite useful for a reason conservatives will enjoy. In order to win, McCain will have to present a contrast message and therefore a conservative vision to the American public on the three main topics of this campaign-the economy generally and health care reform specifically and the War on Terror. Old media is likely to assist McCain in doing that with less than their usual level of ridicule but for the messenger if not the message.

With votes cast in the Democrat primaries and caucuses outnumbering Republican votes by more than a 3:2 ratio this year, McCain will be precluded from his worst instincts to attempt to out-Democrat the Democrats. His only viable option will be to present Americans with distinct policy choices on the big issues. If he echoes the Democrat nominee, he loses.

Given the threats we face in 2008 from Democrats who want to nationalize 15% of our economy to Islamo-facists who, at a minimum, seek to end American hegemony, we cannot concede one day, much less four years of the Presidency.

In this year, with these challenges, conservatives would do well to consider their uncertainties with McCain in the context of the certainties that would befall our country under either Clinton or Obama.

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Programming Note:
You can hear the normally "frowny" Dan Proft (as Don Wade refers to him) on Wednesday & Thursday morning at 7:20am this week as "smiley Dan" (as Don Wade terms Proft's American Idol-loving alter ego) reviews this week's installments of American Idol with Don & Roma.

Words are the currency of politics.

That currency has been devalued greatly since the days of peripatetic Aristotelian philosophers wandering the grounds at Lyceum.

Where our forefathers of self-governance sought to attach deep meaning to political discourse, today's politicos seek mainly to remove significance from the words they speak.

Locally, a Governor of Illinois can win re-election by promising that he is "getting things done for people." If Rod Blagojevich could have been more vague, he would have been. It just was not possible.

Nationally, we get the silliness of Presidential candidates arguing over who is the greater "agent for change" as if the inevitable needed an agent.

"Yes We Can" becomes a Pavlovian applause line with no one daring to ask the uncomfortable question, "Yes we can, do what?"

Hillary Clinton un-ironically promotes her back-to-the-future health care plan predicated on mandated coverage as a triumph of consumer "choice". If I understand this, Americans will be afforded the "forced choice" of "freely purchasing" Hillarycare. Call it a "jumbo shrimp" in every pot.

Barack Obama and his surrogates tell us that it is time to "stop the partisan bickering" and "get to work". What Obama means is that it is time to do what he wants to do, which oddly includes punishing people who do "get to work" by increasing taxes on that exercise. In Obamaspeak, that's called rolling back the "tax cuts for the rich."

How do you know if you are "rich" in this hazy realm of confused vocabulary?

Since 1 in 3 Americans pay no federal income tax after taking advantage of deductions and tax credits, you are "rich" by the Obama standard if you do pay taxes. But with Obama at the helm, that is sure to, ahem, "change"-you'll pay more.

Republicans have shown a similar rhetorical propensity. After Super Tuesday, the likely GOP Presidential nominee will be the guy who has said he served his country "for patriotism, not profit."

If you are wondering when making a profit became an unpatriotic act in America, you can query John McCain when he and his "Straight Talk Express" (also promoted un-ironically) campaign at a job site near you.

The only thing we can be certain about from the remaining political linguists in 2008 is that there will expressly be no straight talk.

Dan Proft is a Principal of Urquhart Media LLC, a Chicago-based public affairs firm and political commentator for the Don Wade & Roma Morning Show (5-9am) on Chicago's number one news talk radio station, WLS-AM 890. He can be reached at dan@urqmedia.com.

For other Dan Proft commentaries (radio & print), please visit: http://www.urqmedia.com/proft/

For other recent Don Wade & Roma interviews, commentary, and discussions visit: http://www.wlsam.com/sectional.asp?id=16410

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