Every election cycle, one candidate runs a campaign more brazenly misleading than all the rest. Two years ago, Todd Stroger loyalist Joseph Berrios, a Democrat, won a race for Cook County assessor by falsely implying that if elected he could help "freeze property taxes."
Sean Morrison, a failed candidate that year for Cook County Board of Review, must have been taking notes when Berrios was spouting fiction. Morrison is back this year, challenging incumbent Republican Dan Patlak, who beat him in the 2010 GOP primary and then reclaimed what had been a Democratic seat on the Board of Review. This three-member panel, which hears appeals to assure that assessments are uniformly calculated, doesn't set your tax rates; that's the job of school districts, municipalities and other local governments. Yet Morrison's literature trumpets the patently phony message that a vote for him will "Lower Our Property Taxes Now!"
This race is rooted in nothing more noble than a feud between competing factions of Cook County Republicans. In endorsing Patlak for re-election, we wrote that Morrison evidently knows there is no reason to unseat Patlak: Morrison has built his campaign not on Board of Review issues, about which his knowledge is demonstrably limited, but instead on serial mudslinging that speaks poorly of his judgment — one of this job's core necessities.
Successive Morrison ads and mailers spouting his nonstop smears of Patlak further convince us that voters should keep Morrison far away from this low-profile but crucial office.