Ed Rutledge for Lieutenant Governor

By Ed Rutledge and Rob Ross

09/03/10

Since late August, Bill Brady and the Republican Party have been telling us on TV that we've "Had Enough." Innovative, to-the-point, and easy to fit on signs and business cards, “Had Enough” is a great campaign slogan. It is so good, in fact, that I made it my campaign's slogan on Facebook nearly 6 months ago. In June, Lex Green and I began to use the slogan together, still a full two months before Mr. Brady and the Republicans decided to use it, too. But perhaps, given the resources that Mr. Brady and his cronies threw at us in challenging our petitions, the Republicans just thought that Lex and I would have been forced off of the ballot by now and that we would not mind their use of our campaign slogan.

They were half right; we don’t mind them exclaiming our campaign slogan because, indeed, we have had enough.  We’ve had enough of unethical career politicians who would steal rather than create, who remain silent when they should speak and who, when they do speak, only offer platitudes and empty promises. It saddens me that so many people are pinning their hopes on status quo politicians like Mr. Brady to clean up the financial and ethical problems plaguing our state. His, and his party’s, past and present actions certainly are not consistent with those that we should expect from a true reformer.

But if this were just about a pithy slogan, it wouldn’t really bother Lex or me very much. Unfortunately, “Had Enough” is just one of several instances where the Brady campaign has “borrowed” from Lex and me. He has taken comments made publically about him by Lex’s campaign manager, and spun them around in a radio attack against Quinn. He has incorporated concepts from my website into his speeches. His plans for the Department of Education and his proposed reduction in the motor fuel tax look as though they were taken directly from Lex Green’s website. This is beyond mere coincidence. In the future, if Mr. Brady decides to incorporate other elements of the Libertarian Campaign into his own, perhaps he at least would consider giving us a footnote.

It appears that, even as they were working to limit voter choice in Illinois by fighting to deny the Libertarians their hard-earned place on the ballot, the Republican Party of Illinois was desperately combing our campaign material for ideas to use for their own candidates. Don’t get us wrong; they are great ideas, we are happy just to see people taking our ideas seriously, and we have plenty of ideas to spare. We just wonder why voters looking for innovative solutions to our state’s problems would want to vote for a candidate who can’t even come up with his own campaign slogan.

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