Tength Congressional District Democrats

By Laurence D. Schiller

The last Congress Watch column reviewed the GOP budget passed on a party-line vote a month ago and pointed out how 10^th District Congressman Bob Dold and Illinois Senator Mark Kirk have conveniently passed over the draconian cuts made to social programs while telling their constituents that they did no such thing. (“Congress Watch:  Dold and Kirk Vote To Gut Medicare and Other Health and Social Programs, Increase Defense Spending, and Lower Taxes on the Wealthiest Americans,” Tenth News, May 2015.)

In a May 18^th newsletter to constituents, Kirk defended his vote by stressing the cold black-and-white numbers of the budget rather than the pain it was going to cause. Apparently to Mark Kirk, balancing the budget on the backs of the middle class and working poor is just fine, as long as military spending isn’t cut. Paul Ryan couldn’t have stated it better.

Kirk also wrote of the budget: “It stands as a referendum against President Obama’s budget by laying out a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.”

Kirk’s glossary is as wrong as his facts.  A referendum is a direct vote by the electorate on a single political question.  That’s pretty much the opposite of a party-line budget vote in Congress.  The closest thing we’ve had to a referendum on Obamacare was the 2012 presidential election, which Obama won by millions of votes.  And polls show that if there were a national referendum on Obamacare today, approval of the Affordable Care Act would be overwhelming.

And note how Kirk repeats the tired line that the GOP has a plan to replace the ACA.  Yet no one, not Kirk, nor any one of the now nearly dozen declared Republican presidential candidates, has presented any alternative plan.  Certainly there’s nothing of the sort in the Republican budget Kirk supports.  Nor is any proposal to replace Obamacare on the agenda of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Like Kirk, Congressman Bob Dold, who already has voted to repeal the ACA some 30 times, refuses to quit his assault on this law. Most recently, Dold voted for HR 30, perversely called the “Save American Workers Act.”  It’s an anti-worker piece of legislation that increases the number of hours that employees must work to be covered by employer group health plans from 30 to 40 per week.

Like most in the Republican Party, Mark Kirk and Bob Dold do not believe that Americans have a right to affordable health insurance or affordable healthcare. And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 25 decision rejecting the most recent challenge to the ACA, neither Mark Kirk nor Bob Dold has even suggested that he intends to abandon efforts to repeal or gut the law. Don’t we in the 10^th District have a right to better representation in Congress?

By Eleonora di Liscia

Charles Troy is paying for his sins—by volunteering at Tenth Dems!  Since 2013, Charles has served as a graphic designer for the newsletter.

In 1992, Charles had his own graphic design/copywriting business.  An Evanston client asked Charles if he would mind doing work for a political candidate: a Republican running against Congressman Sid Yates, who was then 88 years old.

“I read this guy’s positions, and I thought, ‘That sounds all right.’  I could make a case for a younger guy against a guy who is past his prime.  I believe in a two-party system. The guy then lost to Yates 60-40.  Yates got the message to step down in 1994, and Jan Schakowsky ran and that was that,” Charles explained.

“Then I forgot about it until 2010 when we were living in Mundelein and represented by Melissa Bean, who I liked a lot.  There was a Republican primary, and I was horrified to see one of them was the guy I had done work for in 1992. It was Joe Walsh.  I saw what his positions were now, and I thought, ‘How sad. Eighteen years ago I did work for this guy, and now I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.’  And he won.  I was in agony for two years being represented by this jerk.”

In 2012, Mundelein was redistricted into the 10^th.  “Then Brad Schneider won in my new district, and I was so appreciative and grateful that as expiation for my doing work for this awful Joe Walsh 20 years ago, I offered my services to Tenth Dems to do the newsletter,” Charles said.

But volunteering for Tenth Dems isn’t all penance.  Charles appreciates the chance to give back “by using the skills I have developed, in support of the local outpost of the national political party that I strongly support.”

Born in Chicago, Charles was raised in Skokie, graduating from Evanston High. “My parents were Stevenson Democrats, and I remember being very excited about the election of 1952 when I was 6 years old.  That conditioned me to Democrats losing,” he said.

Charles attended the University of Michigan, earning a B.A. in English. He had hoped to become a musical theater lyricist but, because of Vietnam, Charles went on to obtain a Master’s in English from New York University.

Returning to Chicago in 1969, Charles eventually worked for Foote, Cone and Belding, one of the largest advertising agencies. But the job was nothing like Mad Men.  “I was on the least glorious account. I was on International Harvester.  I wrote about farm implements. It was talking about manure spreaders and combines,” he said.

In 1972, Charles joined the family textile distribution business, but he was never happy.  After his mother died in 1990, he decided “there was no one left to please except myself,” so he hung his own shingle as a graphic designer and copywriter in desktop publishing.  “I was basically a creative fish out of water, badly cast as a businessman,” he said.

Charles worked out of his Highland Park home from 1990 until 2003, when he got an account laying out the catalog for OASIS, a senior learning center in Northbrook.

“I saw they had a number of classes in musical theater, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is something I should be doing,’” he said.

Charles let his accounts “wither away by attrition. What I’m doing now is something different and very exciting.”  He creates and shows multimedia presentations on musical theater topics.

“I do the stories behind the show or the stories behind the songwriters who wrote the great musicals.  I do the research, I do the graphic design, and I put them together in a program called Keynote with audio tracks and film clips.  That’s what I do mostly these days,” he said.

Charles presents monthly at the Skokie Theater.  His most recent production is “The Creation of  A Little Night Music,” the show by Steven Sondheim. He also appears at an annual Cole Porter festival and has done presentations on Christmas songs from the Great American Songbook and a recent collaboration with the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band on the history of Yiddish theater, which included a live band.

Essentially a lifelong Democrat, Charles remembers “when you could legitimately think of voting for the man but not the party.  And I don’t think that has been possible for 20 years.  I think anyone who calls themselves an independent now is fooling themselves,” he said.  “I never had a time where I was flirting with the basic precepts of Republicanism, although there are certain things like welfare in the extreme, people not relying on themselves, that’s where it gets sticky for me.”

Charles sees government as having a role in balancing “off the baser impulses of human nature. That to me is the core of what the Democratic Party stands for.  We simply cannot tell government to stay out of everything.  It doesn’t work.”