Saturday, February 13, 2010

More politics as usual in Illinois

Recently, the primary elections were completed. Pat Quinn, the incumbent governor (he was Blagojevich's lieutenant governor) won the Democratic primary. His running mate in the general election was going to be Scott Lee Cohen, but he had to drop out once it was revealed that he had engaged in some less-than-savory action of his own.

Pat Quinn said that he didn't know anything about the incident with Cohen until after they had become running mates. Admittedly he did not choose Cohen to be his running mate; in Illinois there is a separate primary for governor and lieutenant governor, and the winners of each join forces in the general election. Perhaps Cohen was actually a Republican sleeper agent tasked with infiltrating the Democratic primary and winning so as to discredit the Democratic candidate. However, there were five other candidates in the Democratic race, so one would expect that they would have brought Cohen's incident to light in the primary, when they were competing against Cohen. So maybe they are the real sleeper agents. (As you can see, this is another instance of realism in board games. In the Battlestar Galactica board game, players are tasked with finding out which among their number is secretly a Cylon. In real-life politics, politicians have to find out who is really working for them and who is secretly plotting against them, and that is not always simple)

2 comments:

Dan Mont said...

Except in this instance, maybe 5 of the 6 were cylons and it is really up to the voting public to find the one honest politician -- but we aren't very good at it.

Nanette Goodman said...

It sounds to me like the press are the cylons...or just lazy.