Voted for Chad Koppie. Thanks BillyBoy, for making me wise toward the Sauerberg campaign's caginess. While I wouldn't breach this during the campaign, it's time to air out the dirty laundry.
What really ticked me off, I agreed to conduct veterans outreach on behalf of the campaign. After all, I'm a life member of Veterans organizations. and held many positions of responsibility in veterans organizations.
After coordinating with the appointment book keeper at the Lombard office in early July, we booked Dr. Sauerberg as a VIP speaker for the American Legion Department of Illinois Convention.
Surprisingly, Neal Sauerberg calls me back, not to thank me, but yells at me for booking Dr. Sauerberg without Neal's permission. Then abruptly cancels Dr. Sauerberg’s speaking engagement.
Cancels the most important speaking engagement of the campaign season! Reaching thousands of Illinois Veterans, who might influence many more in their community, in both writing and casual conversations and in one shot?
From that point on, I believed the Sauerberg for Senate campaign was simply a reelect Durbin sideshow.
Cheers,
OLA
I know you switched sides during the campaign, and I'm glad you saw the light. I believe Dr. Sauerberg was token "opposition" and was slated to give Durbin an opportunity to coast to re-election without breaking a sweat. It's no secret in Illinois that the state Republican Party chairman, Andy McKenna, is a longtime friend of Senator Durbin and his family has had a personal history of donating to Durbin. For Andy McKenna to personally endorsed a completely unknown candidate (who has never held office) before the primary, and use all the party resources to ensure Sauerberg won the GOP primary, was simply unprecedented. Sauerberg lost my vote back in Feb. when he refused to meet with any conservative groups to answer questions about where he stood on the issues and arrogantly referred to himself as "The Republican Candidate for U.S. Senate" (before he had won the nomination) as if the other Republicans who filed didn't exist.
I'll also go one step further and mention that I do believe some paid Sauerberg staffers (not you obviously) were specifically working to con conservatives and divert their money and resources towards Sauerberg's campaign (knowing it was not viable) to take attention AWAY from staunch conservatives in COMPETATIVE racs who needed help. As I noted, Ray Wardingley ran neck-and-neck with Illinois Senate President Emil Jones (D) in the suburbs, after Jones announced he was retiring and was going to install his unqualified son to his seat for life. Ray was the first challenger Jones had in about 20 years, and got around 48% (running in heavily DEM suburbs) with a shoestring campaign and no volunteers. That was a race where we could have gotten the upper-hand, if Ray got as much attention as Sauerberg got.
Durbin had a decent opponent 6 years ago, State Rep. Jim Durkin, who had no money and got 38% of the vote statewide, winnning 26 counties. No one would give him the time of day in trying to promote his candidacy online. Compare that to Sauerberg who had "volunteers" working day and night to post endless vanities about how he was "within striking distance of Durbin" (even though every poll showed the opposite, that he was 30 points behind), and then begged conservatives to send him money with no questions asked about who he is or where he stands on the issues. Chad had a look at Sauerberg's campaign and concluded Sauerberg was a disaster who would lose every county in Illinois (close prediction: Sauerberg won 3 out of 102, which is 7 less than Keyes got in his 2004 campaign for U.S. Senate in Illinois that had been cobbled together a month before the election). It also speaks volumes that Maelstorm is nowhere to be seen on this forum to answer these allegations, after hyping Sauerberg for monthes.
Also, now that the election is over, I will point out how it's unfortunate that Chad only got 23,000 votes statewide after he got nearly 20% against George Ryan a decade ago. I was a volunteer for Chad and sadly, only about 4 of us on the campaign did our job. Chad's webmaster let his website sit for months without an update, after Chad and everyone else on the campaign called endlessly about what material needed to go on the webpage. Chad's vote total of 0.5% will just embolden the combine to run more RINOs. The 1.4 million Republicans who voted for Sauerberg may have thought their vote would help "beat Durbin", but all it did was tell the IL GOP that it's fine to run liberals and the party base will rubber stamp them.