The personalilty conflicts will always lead the stories.
The two Chicago-area candidates for governor took turns Wednesday wooing farmers’ votes in a sea of central Illinois corn, touting competing energy plans that would replace oil with ethanol and chiding each other for ignoring rural communities. […]
The governor’s new, $1.2 billion energy plan, featured this week in campaign commercials throughout the southern half of the state, would put ethanol-based fuel in all Illinois gas stations in 10 years.
“I have nothing against oil . . . , (but) if we want a lasting solution, it has to come from the heartland of America,” he said.
Minutes after Blagojevich left the event, Topinka took the stage to accuse him of being a late convert. She noted she came out with an ethanol-based energy plan several weeks ago, “and 10 days later, the governor presented almost the same idea and immediately began running television advertisements.”
But there is a legitimate policy difference here, too, that mostly gets pushed down to the bottom, as it was in this piece.
“I believe that if we’re successful in November, that we’ll get some sort of bonding program to do this sort of thing as well as build the schools and the road projects that are critical to our state and our infrastructure,†said Blagojevich, who also toured construction sites at Illinois State University during his visit Wednesday to Central Illinois.
Topinka, however, scoffed at any idea of borrowing more money. She said Illinois has special-use funds generated by agriculture-related business to build ethanol plants but the governor raided those funds.
“I’m going to use renewable energy dollars to build new renewable energy projects. I’m not going to raid those funds,†she said.