Bailey's State Fair Message Goes the Way of the Dinosaur
Former State Senator and GOP nominee for Governor, Darren Bailey, greets the crowd on Republican Day at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield Thursday. (Photo: Chicago Sun-Times)
Former State Senator Darren Bailey, the Republican nominee for Governor, hoped a captive audience of Republican faithful, TV cameras, and reporters looking for some juice in the Governor’s race would help him lob attacks at Governor JB Pritzker at the State Fair Republican Day Thursday.
Instead, Bailey’s pivot to the fall campaign was distracted by private school curriculum, cagey answers, and dinosaurs.
Yes, dinosaurs.
The Pritzker campaign has launched recent attacks on Bailey charging the curriculum at the Christian school he founded with his wife near their hometown in southern Illinois teaches that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. Science is generally settled dinosaurs were extinct millions of years before humans.
While Bailey tried to pivot questions about the school to Pritzker’s record on taxes, spending, and affordability, he was unable to shake the question in multiple press gaggles and interviews throughout Republican Day.
The Pritzker campaign also dispatched supporters in inflatable dinosaur suits to make an even bigger sideshow out of the Fair.
Asked by Tahman Bradley in an interview taped for WGN-TV’s “The Point” Thursday, Bradley attempted to clarify if Bailey believed dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.
“Were you there?” Bailey said.
“I wasn’t there,” Bradley said.
“I wasn’t either. I don’t know,” Bailey said.
On my radio show Thursday afternoon, Bailey again wouldn’t answer the question directly, saying to “ask Fred Flintstone,” the cartoon character from the 60’s who lived a modern-for-the-time lifestyle among dinosaurs.
The Republican Day rally at the Illinois State Fair was a far more austere event than Governor’s Day the previous day, with no Bailey or Republican Party branding anywhere to be found on the Director’s Lawn stage, other than one small GOP sign on the lectern. No music played through the loudspeakers before or after the event as a better than expected crowd sipped on beers and watched the speeches from statewide candidates from a distance. For the second straight year, all three members of Congress from Illinois, Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro), Darin LaHood (R-Peoria), and Mary Miller (R-Hindsboro) were not present at the event.
Republicans attempted to convince the crowd, and the TV cameras assembled for the event, that they were in a position to break a Democratic logjam in the state, where they occupy every statewide office, both U.S. Senate seats, and hold supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in Illinois since 2014.
“Are you better off now than you were seven-and-a-half years ago? You absolutely are not, and we are sick and tired of it,” said GOP candidate for Lt. Governor, Aaron Del Mar. “We are tired of being pushed around. We are tired of being attacked. We are tired of being taxed, and we’re not taking it anymore.”
