It sells milk, butter and very good (albeit rather expensive) ice cream. The Chairman of the Board is Jim Oberweis, grandson of the founder. Jim Oberweis leads the extreme conservative wing of the Illinois Republican Party.
In 2004, Oberweis wanted the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, but was defeated in the primary by Jim Ryan. During the primary race, Oberweis appeared in television ads for the dairy, and wound up being fined by the Federal Election Commission for "improper corporate contributions". Admittedly, the fine was a whopping $21,000.
For those one or two of you unfamiliar with that senatorial race, it is interesting. As I said, Jack Ryan was the Republican nominee, the Democratic nominee was a relatively obscure state senator named Barack Obama. Ryan, then Illinois Attorney General, had a problem with his name. The Governor was George Ryan -- no relation to Jack -- who was tied up in a nasty corruption scandal at that time (and spent some years in the Federal Pen at Terre Haute). Still, there were undoubtedly people who confused the two Ryans.
However, Ryan's real problem stemmed from his messy divorce from actress Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager). The couple asked to have the divorce records sealed, but during the Senate campaign, the Chicago Tribune and the ABC television affiliate in Chicago petitioned the court to have the records unsealed. While this was going on, the heads of the Illinois Republican Party asked Ryan if there was anything damaging in the records. Ryan said that there wasn't.
Well, the records were unsealed, and there were allegations from Jeri accusing her ex-husband of taking her to sex clubs and trying to pressure her into having sex in front of others. Ryan's lie about the records infuriated the Republican leadership, especially Judy Barr Topinka (the head of the party in Illinois) and then-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert. If they had known what was in the records, they could have easily spun it as the wild accusations of an aggrieved ex-wife; but Ryan's lie was unforgivable.
Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from the party, and then the party scrambled to find a replacement. They had a number of problems:
• The Illinois Republican Party is split fairly evenly into two factions. There are the extreme conservatives, led (more-or-less) by Oberweis; and the moderately conservative, led at that time by Topinka. Oberweis, who had finished second in the Republican primary to Ryan, wanted the job, but Topinka, who loathes Oberweis, vetoed it. The party leadership agreed that Oberweis had not a prayer of winning. (Topinka had some interest in running herself, but Oberweis, who loves Topinka as much as she loves him, killed that.)
• Two men who would be obvious candidates, former Governors Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar, each of whom was reasonably popular (especially Thompson), both said they would not run. Various others were approached, including former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka, but either they turned it down or they were not seen as viable candidates. One leading possibility, Orion Samuelson, turned it down because (1) he was recovering from recent major surgery, (2) his wife was not keen on the idea and (3) he had no money.
Ryan quit the race at the end of June 2004, and the Republicans went all through July without a candidate, leaving Obama to campaign unopposed for over a month.
Finally, at the beginning of August, Alan Keyes became the candidate for reasons that are unclear.
Keyes lives in Maryland, and had no actual connections to Illinois. It did not help that in 2000, Keyes attacked Hillary Clinton for running for U.S. Senator from New York even though she had never lived there, calling her a carpetbagger. So, of course, he was asked how his running for the Senate in Illinois differed from Clinton's running for the Senate. He did not have an answer.
Keyes did not run a good race. He egregiously misstated Obama's stand on abortion, saying that Obama's support of abortion extended to support of infanticide. Almost no one believed it, and the Democrats legitimately said that he was lying about it, which people did believe.
In a debate with Obama that covered gay marriage and gay adoption, Keyes said that because of sperm donor anonymity, a hypothetical lesbian couple could adopt a child who would be unable to determine who his or her father is and therefore would be put at risk of marrying a sister or brother. Of course, this argument could be made about all pregnancies with anonymous sperm donors.
Keyes came off as a homophobe, defining homosexuality as centered in "selfish hedonism". When asked if Mary Cheney, Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, fit the description and was therefore a "selfish hedonist", Keyes replied, "Of course she is. That goes by definition." He said "granting homosexuals the right to marry is like granting plantation owners the right to own slaves".
Keyes also got little support for his remark that "Jesus Christ would not vote for Obama", especially since it gave Obama to make an excellent speech about the place of freedom of religion in American politics.
The bottom line was that Obama got 70% of the vote and Keyes went home to Maryland.
= new reply since forum marked as read
