Can Democrat John Laesch Take Down Hastert?
News:
Last week, he was an obscure no-hoper on a quixotic bid to unseat the Speaker. But then came Foleygate...
By Josh Harkinson
Listen to John Laesch talk about Bush's failed War on Terror (Stream | Download) and on missed opportunities for diplomacy with Iran (Stream | Download).
October 5, 2006
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Before this week, John Laesch was one of the most obscure congressional candidates in America. His fanciful bid to unseat the most powerful man in the House had drawn a yawn from his own party, barely 100 grand to match his opponent’s war chest of $3.6 million, and scarcely a mention in the national press. A carpenter, former soldier, and erstwhile gas station manager, Laesch, 32, has never held elected office. And 2006 didn’t look like any sort of year to start, until, that is, a political firestorm erupted around House Speaker Dennis Hastert on Sunday and Laesch’s campaign against him took off.
Since then, phones at Laesch’s Yorkville, Illinois headquarters have been ringing so often that he’s installing two new lines. Emails fly in faster than his volunteers can read them. People mob his office with $100 checks and requests for yard signs. Some $20,000 streamed in over the weekend alone and Laesch’s handful of staff hasn’t had time to tally the rest. They’ve brought on so many new volunteers over the past four days that they’re having a hard time keeping track of them. “I called the office a couple of minutes ago looking for a staffer and talked to someone I’ve never spoken to in my life,” Laesch spokeswoman Lisa Bennett said yesterday. “It was like, ‘Oh, who are you, and can you find me someone I recognize?’”
A progressive Democrat, Laesch is still adjusting to the new face of his campaign, which is inevitably evolving into not just a referendum on Iraq and healthcare policy but on morality in Washington. Since the news broke on Friday that Congressman Mark Foley of Florida sent sexually explicit emails to teenage congressional pages, numerous Republican staffers have alleged that Hastert knew of the emails for months or even years and did nothing in his capacity as speaker to confront the congressman. Foley resigned his post on Saturday and some conservatives have joined Laesch in his call that Hastert follow suit. The campaign “is going to come down to ethics and morals and values,” Laesch said. “I thought we would be running an issue-based campaign. But I think it is going to come down to that.”
Foleygate has outraged many of the GOP’s cherished “values voters.” In a public statement released yesterday, a coalition of 70 conservative Christian groups called for the prosecution of any House member “who knew of this situation,” adding: “It is clear that someone knew.” Yet other conservative groups, perhaps with an eye to November elections turnout, have issued more tepid statements. The Pro-Bush group, Focus On The Family, urged leaders to leave Hastert alone and concentrate on strengthening indecency laws.
Winning over dogged conservatives in the coming weeks won’t be easy for Laesch, even with Hastert under fire. The Speaker has never been reelected with less than 64 percent of the vote in his Illinois district. And since 1860 only one sitting House Speaker has lost an election—Democrat Tom Foley in the “Republican Revolution” of 1994. Paul Green, director of Roosevelt University’s School of Public Policy Studies, believes Hastert won’t be vulnerable unless more dirt turns up. “There would have to a hell of a lot more going on,” he says. “And Laesch is going to need an awful sudden surge. I don’t know how much money he has. I would assume he had barely enough to take the metro into downtown Chicago.”
Still, if any candidate can woo voters to the progressive cause on the plank of moral integrity, it’s probably Laesch. The son of Christian missionaries, he grew up in Liberia, where political corruption and violence was a way of life. In 1986, he witnessed the coup against President Samuel K. Doe from his parents’ living room window, watching as soldiers shot up the nearby house of the vice president and dragged out his children. Liberia taught Laesch that democracy can overcome corruption; he’s heartened by the country’s recent election of president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who appears to be honest. “And if there’s hope for Liberia,” he says, “there’s hope for America.”
Laesch and his family moved back to the United States in the late-1980s and settled in Newark, Illinois, where his mother took up farming and his father translated bibles. After high school Laesch managed an Amoco gas station and was so successful that he was asked to give a presentation before the company’s marketing institute. He describes his political outlook at the time as “right wing. . .a cutthroat, go-get-‘em, survival of the fittest type.” After his presentation to the oil company, he says, several middle-aged gas station managers were fired because the company decided they weren’t working hard enough. The incident disillusioned him and he quit.
Looking for adventure and a challenge, Laesch joined the Navy in 1995 and rose to a post in Bahrain as an intelligence analyst. His job included monitoring video footage from Iran. At the time, a popular parade route in Iran had been painted with American and Israeli flags so that soldiers could trample them when they marched past. But after Iran’s moderate president Mohammad Khatami came to power, Laesch noticed the flags were removed. He saw the move as an opportunity for rapprochement which was later dashed when President Bush dubbed the country part of the Axis of Evil. “Our actions create an equal and opposite reaction on their side,” he says. “And this is why terrorism is growing.”
Honorably discharged in 1999, Laesch studied history and political science at Illinois State University and was drawn to politics. In 2004 he talked with men who worked at a Maytag factory that was shuttering in the town of Galesburg and moving to Mexico. “That bothered me,” he says. That year Laesch managed the congressional race of Democrat David Gill, a doctor running for the 15th district of Illinois on a health care platform. He felt under qualified for the job, but even so, Gill turned in a strong showing. The next year, when Laesch’s brother, Pete, was sent to Iraq a week after his wife gave birth to a child, the munitions sergeant urged his brother to run against Hastert. “It hadn’t even realistically crossed my mind,” Leasch says, “But when Pete got his orders to Iraq, I said, ‘I’m gonna do it.’”
Like many “fighting democrats,” Laesch believes the U.S. needs to set a timetable to withdraw from Iraq—arguing that a widespread belief among Iraqis that U.S. forces are on an imperialist mission is fueling the insurgency. He also wants to see a wider peacekeeping role for the United Nations and the Arab league, but doubts the Bush administration possesses the diplomatic resources to pull it off.
Anti-war, anti-pedophilia sentiment isn’t the only thing going for Laesch in Illinois District 14. Locally, he says, Republicans have been less outraged by the sex scandal than revelations that Hastert used a federal road project to pad his bank account. A former high school wrestling coach who entered politics a man of modest means, Hastert secured a $207 million earmark in the highway bill last year for the Prairie Parkway, a road that serves about as little purpose as its name implies, many locals say, but which will run within a few miles of land Hastert bought in 2002 near Plano, Illinois. Hastert and his business partners then sold the land to a developer, netting a cool $1.8 million.
If this week is any indication, Laesch will certainly find plenty more opportunities to bring Hastert’s record to light. He’s appeared on CNN, NBC, Fox News, Univision, National Public Radio, and most recently, Chris Matthews’ Hardball. He’s convinced he can win; his campaign’s most recent internal poll, taken before Foleygate, put support for Hastert at 55 percent. And at any rate, running has already been worth it—in May he got engaged to his campaign manager, a former ex-girlfriend and former Republican who he’d encountered on the campaign trail. “I got through the primary, and I got the girl,” he says, “so now I’ve just gotta to take down the speaker.”
Josh Harkinson is a Mother Jones investigative fellow.
