The 14th Congressional District of Illinois stretches west from the fast-spreading sprawl of Kane and Kendall counties past Northern Illinois University in De Kalb and the Ronald Reagan home in Dixon to the eastern suburbs of the Quad Cities on the Mississippi. Like congressional districts everywhere, its boundaries were drawn for one purpose only: to help the incumbent win.
Laesch favors national health insurance over expensive and complicated partial fixes like the Republicans’ Medicare prescription-drug plan (which Hastert got through the House in November 2003 by holding the 15-minute roll call vote open for an unprecedented three hours until enough arms were twisted). A position paper says next year’s Democratic Congress–that’s Laesch’s prediction–should take the lead in turning the nation’s energy policy around by sponsoring a “$5 million contest for scientists, students, inventors and engineers to design an alternative fuel energy efficient engine.” Locally, he opposes the proposed Prairie Parkway, which would run north-south through farmland in western Kane and Kendall counties for about 30 miles and link I-88 and I-80. Usually local pork is a winner, but Laesch believes this issue will be Hastert’s Achilles’ heel.
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His strategy’s been pieced together from a stint as a labor organizer for the Service Employees International Union, from reading the blogs of political activists across the country, and from the Republicans’ technologically sophisticated get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004 battlegrounds like Ohio. Earlier this year he helped overthrow what he calls a “stagnant” Democratic Party leadership in Kendall County. The new party machinery now claims to have precinct committeemen in 47 of the county’s 64 precincts, though bad feelings linger from the changeover and from Laesch’s primary battle with Zamora. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, an NIU alum and the uber-blogger of dailykos.com, has described Laesch as a “living example” of the recommendations he and Jerome Armstrong made in their book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. Zuniga summarized them on his blog: “Organize locally, take over moribund Democratic Party organizations, and leave no district behind. Challenge everyone, everywhere.”
Illinois has two popular Democratic senators who aren’t facing reelection campaigns in 2006. Dick Durbin and Barack Obama have campaigned with Laesch’s fellow “fighting Dem,” L. Tammy Duckworth, who’s running for an open seat in the adjacent Sixth District. Their political action committees each gave her campaign $10,000 in December, before she’d even won the primary. That doesn’t mean they’ll help Laesch.
Doing his job but no fan of this particular war, he began snapping pictures wherever he happened to be in Iraq. He sent John an image of a disarmed bomb in an Iraqi junkyard that might once have been attached to a MIG aircraft. On it someone had spray painted, “WEAPON OF DESTRUCTION.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Flynn, Peter Laesch.
