Foxx is taking a big risk ducking TV debates with challenger O’Brien
It’s not uncommon for incumbents to decline to debate their challengers. Debates have a way of leveling a playing field that’s often tilted strongly toward incumbents. They grant free exposure and additional legitimacy to otherwise hopeless underdogs, and they needlessly open the door for ruinous gaffes, admissions and gotcha moments.
It’s far less common for candidates of any sort to pull out of debates that are on the calendar — particularly when they’ve already participated in several forums, and particularly when the race is considered close.
So it’s curious and noteworthy that Democratic Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is now declining to participate in a televised debate with Republican challenger Pat O’Brien on WLSCh. 7 planned for either Oct. 14 or 15, and in a similar clash on WTTW-Ch. 11 set for Oct. 26, a little more than a week before Election Day. She previously tangled with O’Brien in livestreamed videoconference debates in front of the Chicago Sun Times Editorial Board on Sept. 10 and the Daily Herald Editorial Board Sept. 17.
Foxx’s campaign notes that she isn’t technically pulling out of the televised debates because she never formally agreed to participate in them. But the WLS and WTTW clashes are considered stations of the local campaigning cross — Foxx appeared in both ahead of the March 2016 Democratic primary in which she trounced incumbent Anita Alvarez.
In a statement released Wednesday, Foxx’s campaign said the reason for not participating was that O’Brien engages in “Trump-like name calling and fearmongering.” The statement said, “During this nationwide crisis, (Foxx) will not sit across the stage from a Republican that exploits tragedy to win a campaign. We had plenty of that (during Tuesday night’s nationally televised presidential debate).”
A spokeswoman complained particularly about O’Brien’s line of attack during the Daily Herald debate and at a Sept. 13 news conference in which he blamed Foxx for the recent fatal stabbing of a Walgreens clerk in Wicker Park because the suspect in the case had recently been released from home monitoring.
I rewatched the Sun-Times and Daily Herald debates to put these and other complaints in context (the candidates conducted separate endorsement interviews with the Tribune Editorial Board). They were contentious, sure. Scrappy. A bit heated at times, particularly the Daily Herald meeting, but without the constant interruptions and tangential broadsides that turned Tuesday’s debate between President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden into such a mortifying spectacle.
The roughest exchange between Foxx and O’Brien occurred about halfway through the Daily Herald debate. Foxx noted more than two dozen wrongful conviction cases that occurred when O’Brien was a supervisor of felony review under former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and she accused him of diminishing “the lives of those men and women who sat in prison because (O’Brien) did not do his due diligence or was complicit with the police officers who handled those cases.”
O’Brien fired back, accusing Foxx of “not wanting to defend what is essentially a failed state’s attorney’s office (run by) a state’s attorney who thinks she’s a social worker. You have not prosecuted crime,” he said. “You have not made us safer. Crime from the city is spilling into the suburbs and the suburbs are fed up with it. And you don’t have the confidence of the police department in the city or the suburbs, and you don’t have the confidence of your own assistants.”
A Foxx spokeswoman later referred to the suburban allusion as Trump-like “racist fearmongering.”
O’Brien went on later to say to Foxx, “You don’t have a right to be the state’s attorney for another term. You didn’t keep us safe.” He said Cook County residents deserve a chief prosecutor who “has the experience and judgment, and hasn’t lost their integrity by how they handled the (Jussie) Smollett case,” a reference to, oh, you know.
Gloves off. Tough stuff. Harsh. Personal. Not exactly fair on either side. And familiar in warmth and tone to what we’ve heard from many candidates many times.
In testy exchanges four years ago, challenger Foxx accused incumbent Alvarez of turning the Cook County justice system into “the laughingstock of the country” and failing “to realize there’s a crisis of confidence in her office.” Alvarez called Foxx “a proven liar” and political puppet who lacked integrity and exhibited an “extreme lack of judgment” and “ignorance of the law.”
If disgust with O’Brien’s sharp rhetoric during the Daily Herald debate was really the motivation behind Foxx’s decision not to publicly engage with him any further, we would have expected that announcement two weeks ago right after that debate was held.
The fact that it came so much later, on a day when nearly everyone in the country was nauseated by the very thought of debates, suggests a purely political calculation: The most recent public poll, taken in early September and commissioned by the Cook County Republican Party showed Foxx leading O’Brien 48% to 34%, and with Foxx falling below the 50% threshold it would be risky to give the 18% of undecided voters any more exposure to O’Brien’s message than necessary.
As a Democratic incumbent in Cook County, Foxx starts with a strong electoral advantage, particularly in a year when Democrats will be flocking to the polls to register their disgust with Trump. Televised debates would give extra runway to O’Brien — far more than the less flashy oneon-one interviews that WLS will have with both candidates and WTTW will have with O’Brien.
Of course the downside risk is that voters will consider Foxx a coward and see through her flimsy “O’Brien’s like Trump!” excuse for pulling the plug on their best opportunity to see how the candidates respond to the toughest challenges of their opponents.
It’s a downside risk she shouldn’t take. She should shake off the insults, damn the polls, get back into the arena and keep those dates with the TV folks. She’s an effective messenger for her agenda and defender of her record. But if she’s not tough enough to parry O’Brien’s accusations and insults, voters are going to wonder if she’s tough enough to continue in the job.
Re: Tweets
The winner of this week’s reader poll to select the funniest tweet was, “When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison,” by @Lisaley
The poll appears at chicago tribune.com/zorn, where you can read all the finalists, second-guess the voters and speculate about rampant fraud. For an early alert when each new poll is posted, sign up for the Change of Subject email newsletter at chicago tribune.com/newsletters.