Let the Mudslinging Begin
GOP gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey and Governor JB Pritzker.
If the Illinois State Fair political days marked the start of the fall campaign, attacks from the two campaigns for Governor Monday followed suit.
Governor JB Pritzker’s campaign accused former Sen. Darren Bailey of “nodding along” with comments they say were racist and antisemitic in a podcast posted Saturday.
Bailey and his wife, Cindy, sat for a nearly hourlong interview with suburban doctor Vijay G. Prabhakar. Prabhakar, who speaks with a thick accent, referred to minorities as “colored people” and criticized Pritzker as a “Ukraine Jew.”
Pritzker, who is Jewish, has spoken about how his family fled Ukraine in the 1880’s during a massacre of Jewish people.
Bailey did not respond to either comment directly in the interview.
“Unfortunately, this is just the latest example of the Bailey campaign looking the other way in the face of clearly racist or inappropriate behavior,” said Pritzker spokesman Alex Gough. “Through his silence, Darren Bailey failed to clear the lowest bar of moral leadership. Does he have the integrity to condemn these remarks now?”
But, Bailey’s campaign manager, Jose Durbin, condemned the podcast host’s remarks.
“Darren Bailey does not agree with or condone the offensive language used on the podcast,” Durbin said. “But JB’s desperate attempt to make this about anything other than his own record won’t work. Voters aren’t falling for it.”
Bailey’s camp, meanwhile, attacked Pritzker for “shameful” rhetoric, claiming Pritzker’s criticism of the curriculum at the Christian school Bailey and his wife founded in southern Illinois led to threats called into the school over the weekend.
Pritzker’s campaign attempted to derail Bailey’s State Fair Republican Day message last week by reintroducing claims that the school, which uses curriculum from Bob Jones University, teaches that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. Bailey had a difficult time last week deflecting the issue.
Bailey’s campaign blamed Pritzker Monday for a “threatening” message left at the Full Armor Christian Academy Friday, in which the person who left the message says the school is “a good place for a mass shooting” and includes anti-Christian rhetoric.
“It does not take an investigation to recognize how reckless it is for a sitting governor and his campaign to target a Christian school filled with children repeatedly,” the Bailey campaign said in a statement. “Pritzker cannot shrug his shoulders, hide behind his campaign staff, or pretend his words do not matter. When the most powerful politician in Illinois points his political machine at a small Christian school and the children who attend classes there, he knows exactly what he is doing.”
The Pritzker campaign was also expected to launch a WhatsApp channel Tuesday to expand its reach to with Latino voters.
