Lt. Gov Sheila Simon has released the first video from her, “I Wanted To Be Attorney General, But I’m Running For Comptroller” campaign. It’s a 90-second condensation of her statewide announcement tour, during which she drove from Chicago to Springfield to Carbondale.
The production values are pretty high, for a statewide campaign. This was necessary, because Simon’s documentarians had to employ creative camera angles to conceal the fact that she didn’t fill all ten chairs at her Chicago announcement in Cinema Room 1 of the Hotel Allegro. Most of the attendees were journalists. To be fair, it was 10 a.m., and there’s a lot to do in Chicago at that hour. Simon drew a much larger crowd in her hometown of Carbondale, where she held a rally at 8 p.m., when there’s nothing else to do there.
“I served on the Illinois Reform Commission, and because of that commission and others, we now have the first limit on contributions on political campaigns in the state’s history," Simon told her Carbondale fans. "But as lieutenant governor, I’ve held myself to an even higher standard. I don’t accept contributions from state contractors, state employees, their spouses, and I don’t take contributions from my own staff. It was my first order of business as lieutenant governor. It will be my first order of business as comptroller.”
Politics
We see a lot of windmills and hay bales along the way. We also see that Simon’s husband, Perry Knop, a professor at John A. Logan College in Carterville, is carrying on his father-in-law tradition of wearing bow ties.
Nonetheless, a Sheila Simon could never be as entertaining as a video of Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka sitting on a couch with her dogs, smoking a cigarette and hitting on the young man operating the camera, as she once did to the Chicago Reader’s Mick Dumke. When you’re running for a colorless office, it’s hard to compete with a colorful character.
