Word: quinns
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...part, Quinn said on Meet the Press, "I tried to talk to the governor, but the last time I spoke to him was in August of 2007. I think one of the problems is, the governor did sort of seal himself off from all the statewide officials, [from] attorney general Madigan and myself [to] many others, and that's no way to govern. You have to be able to reach out and touch people and listen...
...Quinn is far from the only Illinois pol who carefully kept his distance from the governor as it became clear that the feds were investigating his administration. But for Quinn, who turns 60 on Tuesday, it may not have been simply a political calculation...
...from the mold of a 1970s post-Watergate maverick politician, Quinn has long been viewed as a serious-minded, if eccentric, reformer. In his 30s, after graduating from Georgetown and Northwestern, he tried to amend the state constitution to allow residents to enact laws through referendums. He once urged people to inundate former governor James Thompson's office with 40,000 tea bags to beat back postelection pay hikes. These days, he draws attention to the cause of veterans by hosting a website called Operation Homefront. (Meanwhile, he slips into the funerals of soldiers almost unnoticed...
...Still, as much as he battles the establishment, Quinn is not exactly an outsider. In addition to serving as lieut. governor, he has been state treasurer, he has served as a commissioner of the Cook County Board of (Property) Tax Appeals and he did a brief stint as revenue director under the late Chicago mayor Harold Washington. In office, he has pushed environmental causes, veterans' affairs issues, consumer and taxpayer rights, and health-care matters. But the whiff of scandal has hit him too. While a state treasurer from 1991-95, he accepted nearly $20,000 from a company tied...
...surprisingly, in a state where bare-knuckle politics is the norm, Quinn's crusading nature hasn't always endeared him to his peers. He has been called everything from a demagogue to a fool. As far back as 1980, in a profile of Quinn for Illinois Issues, a political publication run by the University of Illinois, the writer questioned whether Quinn, then heading an organization advocating for increased grass-roots political power, was a "gadfly or hypocrite." The piece was titled "Pat Quinn - A Man Politicians Love to Hate," and it quoted him as saying, "I'm like a rolling...