Republicans might as well bid former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s seat good-bye, and the nation finally will notice the utter dismal, if not dead, shape of the state GOP.

Even if the Republicans hold on to Hastert’s seat in a close call, it will be a clear sign that the state party is beyond resuscitation.

Hastert’s 14th congressional district, which runs from west suburban Chicago almost to the Iowa state line, long has been a GOP stronghold, but in a Saturday [March 8] special election it could go to the Democrats thanks to a series of dreadful Republican failures:

• An ugly primary battle that split the district’s GOP voters into bitter factions, certain to dampen party turnout.

• A comatose state Republican party, so inept that it has been unable to win a single statewide elective office—federal or state—for several years.

• The nomination of a candidate who has repeatedly run for office, only to be rejected in the general election, for good reason.

The candidate, Jim Oberweis, keeps showing up, like bad mushrooms in a dank forest, thanks to his ability to self-finance his campaigns from the millions he has made in the dairy business. But, his millions may not be enough to beat another wealthy businessman, Democrat Bill Foster.

Foster, a scientist who worked for two decades at Fermi National Laboratory, later made his fortune by manufacturing theater lighting. He has no prior political experience, but has successfully identified himself as the candidate of “change,” an image bolstered by the endorsement of the change candidate himself, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)

On the issues, he’s liberal—for example parroting the given progressive wisdom on the Iraq War—even though he has tried to position himself as a “Blue Dog Democrat.” But his position on the political/ideological continuum isn’t as an important as who he’s not—Jim Oberweis.

Oberweis is a candidate who lost bids for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004 and for governor in 2006. When he declared he was running for Hastert’s seat, long-time and respected GOP commentator Thomas Roeser said it was time for him to give someone else a chance, that someone being the impressively credentialed conservative state senator Chris Lauzen. The primary race was marked by deep personal animosities and with Hastert’s endorsement, Oberweis won.

Even the nominally Republican Chicago Tribune has been put off by Oberweis. Taking the unusual step of endorsing a Democrat in a Republican district, the Tribune noted: “In 2006, he ran TV ads that used headlines from the Tribune and other newspapers to attack an opponent. But the headlines were fake. They hadn’t appeared in the newspapers.”

The Tribune summed it up: “[Oberweis’s] campaign style has consistently been nasty, smug, condescending… and dishonest. In 2004, he ran an ad in which he hovered over Soldier Field in a helicopter and said 10,000 illegal aliens come to the U.S. each day, ‘enough to fill Soldier Field every single week.’ The number was grossly inflated and the ad smacked of fear-mongering.”

However, endorsing Oberweis were the Herald, suburban Chicago’s largest daily newspaper, and surprisingly enough the Chicago Sun-Times.

Not surprisingly, both parties have taken a strong interest in the race. In the last week, the National Republican Congressional Committee poured more than $1.1 million into the race, while the Democratic Congressional Committee spent $600,000. It’s a repeat performance for the committee’s head, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) who came close to in the last election to engineering an upset for his handpicked candidate in the neighboring and heavily Republican 6th congressional district, a seat formerly occupied by the late and honorable Henry Hyde.

A Foster victory is sure to claim nation-wide attention, with Democrats citing it as bellwether evidence of the changing national mood for “real change,” even if the truth is that Republican incompetence gave the district away. Such a victory isn’t as far-fetched as it would have been in the years that its voters consistently gave Hastert large margins of victory. Just how quickly fortunes have changed there is demonstrated by the non-partisan Cook Political Report’s rankings: When Hastert announced his early retirement last year, the report called the district likely Republican. Last week, it said the district was leaning Republican and this week it called the race a toss-up.

Whatever happens in Saturday’s special election, Oberweis and Foster will face off again the November general election, both having won separate party primaries for that race. If Oberweis loses Saturday, or even if Foster comes close to beating the Dairy King, it might be the shock that the moribund Illinois Republican Party needs. To realize that its political fortunes can’t get any lower. To stop embarrassing itself by running third-tier candidates. Or to officially fold its tent and give up its charter to the someone who takes it all seriously.

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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer Editorial Board.