When Illinois' new Republican Governor,Richard Ogilvie, went to Wrigley Field last week for the Chicago Cubs' opening game, some brisk applause greeted him. "If I'd showed up there a week earlier," he observed, "they'd probably have thrown beer cans at me."
Ogilvie's quick action in dealing with racial demonstrations had for the moment offset the unpopularity of his tax proposal. But the ephemeral drift of public opinion and other obstacles seem to matter little to the Governor. In three months in office he has marched without hesitation into every political minefield in sight. He has promised to "dismantle" Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's Democratic machine. He has set out to overhaul the state's fiscal program, and in his spare time to reorganize the state Republican party.
The fight with Daley falls somewhat short of total war. When Daley asked for National Guard troops this month to contain disturbances on the eve of the anniversary of Martin Luther King's death, Ogilvie began moving some 5,000 soldiers within 14 minutes. But that concordat between the old rivals was a rare thing. The Governor is pushing through a stiff anti-fraud voting law aimed at the kind of ballot-box finagling for which Cook County is famous. Another Ogilvie-backed bill would make Chicago's mayoralty election nonpartisan; when candidates must run without official party labels, organizational control over them is weakened. The cruelest thrust against Daley is a proposal to reform Chicago's civil service system and thus wreck the giant patronage network that has maintained the Daley combine as one of the last of the oldtime machines. Ogilvie associates added to the mayor's woes last week by backing an insurgent Democrat who squeezed out a slender victory over a Daley regular in a Chicago aldermanic election.
Ogilvie has also been brash in his approach to taxpayers. Illinois ranks third among states in per capita personal income, but 49th in the percentage of personal income going to state and local taxation. Ogilvie believes that the "bedrock needs of this state" demand radical change. Even the Republican legislative leaders were stunned by the size of his proposal: a budget increase of 45% and the biggest tax jump in Illinois history, including its first income tax. The money would be used to hike welfare spending by more than 20%, nearly double aid to elementary and secondary public education and, for the first time, provide state support for private and parochial schools.
Coming from a Presbyterian who has been regarded as conservative and at a time when taxpayers generally are restive, the fiscal package obviously required a good deal of courage. Its future is uncertain, and mail to Springfield is running 4 to 1 against the income tax, but Ogilvie remains unmoved. "I did not run for office," he says, "to evade responsibility."
Ultimate Control. Ogilvie feels the same way toward his party. Since January, he has consolidated the G.O.P.'s hitherto chaotic fund-raising and spending procedures, which often worked at cross-purposes, and has begun combining branches of the state organization with local party units. In each case, the man in ultimate control: Richard Ogilvie.