Obama’s Oold seat up for grabs…

NAPERVILLE, Ill. — From a tiny booth at a festival here, a radio station host gave Representative Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican candidate for Senate, a moment to make his pitch between plugs for free massages and the corn dogs being sold a few booths away.

“I’m the candidate who wants to spend less, borrow less, tax less” was all Mr. Kirk had time to blurt out.

Then again, judging from a sampling of those who encountered Mr. Kirk here, at this Chicago suburb’s Last Fling celebration on Sunday, it might have been enough. In fact, there might have been something to lose with even a word more.

Voters along these streets, which smelled of fried dough and clanged with carnival rides, seemed to share a mood about the coming elections: a low-grade grumpiness toward anyone who has anything to do with politics, an exasperation with the string of corruption claims that have dogged leaders from Illinois and, most of all, an obsession with finding a cure for the nation’s economic tumult.

“I’m getting sick and tired of the politics — just get the job done,” Cliff Olszewski, 50, a civil engineer, said after Mr. Kirk had shaken his hand and walked on.

In this close fight for the Senate seat once held by President Obama, Mr. Olszewski and his wife, Mary, described themselves as reliable Republicans who cast their first votes for a Democrat in 2004 (and again in 2008), for Mr. Obama. Mr. Olszewski is part of a crucial — and, polls show, remarkably large — group in the race between Mr. Kirk and his Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias: the undecided.

The landscape is complicated. Republicans hold no statewide offices in Illinois, and Mr. Obama remains, even in Mr. Kirk’s estimation, “personally popular” in his home state.

And yet, the previous governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat, was impeached over accusations that he tried to sell the Senate seat at issue in this campaign, and the current governor, Pat Quinn, another Democrat, finds himself locked in a tight race.

“What surprises me is, it used to be when voters asked what party you were from, if you said Republican, they were done,” Mr. Kirk said as he wandered the festival with A. George Pradel, the longtime mayor of Naperville, who was once a police officer here and who was instantly recognized by many who gazed blankly at Mr. Kirk. “Now, if you say Republican, it’s almost like, ‘Hey, O.K., I’m voting!’ ”

In this traditionally Republican part of the state, the ferocity of anger at the Democratic Party felt particularly pronounced.

In Frankfort, another suburb where Mr. Kirk appeared in a parade earlier Sunday, Keith Blais called for an end “to the same old Chicago crap” in politics and yelled to Mr. Kirk, “Take Congress back — take it all the way back!”

Sharon Wasko said everyone in Washington should be fired, adding, “they’re too old — they don’t belong there anymore.”

None of which is to say that Mr. Kirk, a moderate Republican (who, Ms. Wasko may wish to know, is in his fifth term in the House), has a simple task. Along with calls of encouragement, Mr. Kirk was greeted with other tones as well: “RINO!” one man yelled (a pejorative acronym for Republican In Name Only), while another called out, “The lesser of two evils!”

Written by Monica Davey, and riginally published August 6, 2010, in the New York Times

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