Just because he voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary doesn't mean John Garrido isn't a Republican.
It might mean, though, that he's an idiot.
Garrido, a candidate for Cook County board president, is defending himself on accusations within party circles that he's a stealth Democrat in the race to create mischief.
The accusation rests on the fact that Garrido voted in the Democratic presidential primary last time around.
Garrido explained himself in a post on Illinois Review:
"In 2008, I joined over 100,000 Republicans in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and 38,000 in Mississippi who voted for Hillary Clinton to put Republicans in the best position to win in the general election."
That may be so, but unlike Ohio and Texas, Clinton had absolutely no chance of winning the primary in Illinois. Perhaps Garrido thought he could damage Barack Obama by making the vote differential one less than it would have been had he not crossed over.
Politics
Beyond that, voting in the other party's primary is what they call in the business a "dirty trick." It may not be illegal, but it's certainly unethical.
And that's the larger point. While Republicans argue among themselves about who has true party bona fides, they're missing the real question: Who has the integrity?
Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.
