Perhaps it is the moment of comparison. But, geez, Illinois could use Phil Rock right about now.
A state without a budget for most of a year. Unpaid bills pushing toward new highs. A pension system in tatters. A single social service agency that lays off 750 people and shutters 30 programs because the state owes it $6 million. And political leaders in both parties who make us ashamed.
So we mourn Phil Rock, the Oak Parker and longtime Democratic state senate president, who died last week at 78. He died at home on Oak Park Avenue after a long, tough illness, a brain disorder known as Lewy Bodies dementia.
We don’t own rose-colored glasses, and it is certain, for instance, that at various points during his leadership Phil Rock signed on to deals that we’d now uniformly regret. The pension mess is an amalgam of decades of political malfeasance for certain.
That said, Phil Rock brought a common-sense savvy to political leadership. You weren’t about to slip something by him, but he also had no need to run the table. Smart. Decent. Rooted.
Over decades in Oak Park — he moved here from the Austin neighborhood in 1977 — Phil Rock came to be seen as a quintessential Oak Parker. It is worth remembering that his arrival here was met with deep suspicion among independent Democrats that old man Daley was exporting his Machine ways to Oak Park. But as the Machine faded and Rock’s meld of political acumen and essential problem-solving skills became ever more clear, his stature in Oak Park grew, as did the affection in which he was held.