Woman of the year?

THANK GOD for the Year of the Woman. Otherwise, there'd be almost nothing to make a Year of the out of Here in Chicago, it certainly won't be the Year of the Cubs or the White Sox, who are waging their annual battle for second place. Nor, in much of Illinois, will it be the Year of the Tomato; as elsewhere in the Midwest, tomatoes hang huge but green on the vines, apparently unable to summon the shame to redden.

Some blame Al Gore's New Pantheism, which encourages permissiveness and immodesty throughout Gaia's creation. Others fear it's a collapse of the Year of Rio, when equatorial rain forests were to have begun the long march toward Winnipeg. A great sense of unease is stirring among the Global Warmers during this summer of record cold. Perhaps they are actually caught in an interglacial period, waiting to be ground into intellectual goo by rivers of dirty ice.

Nevertheless, although Chicago baseball, tomatoes, and global warming are out this summer, it is still the Year of the Woman. And in Illinois, the Woman of the Year is Carol Moseley Braun, catapulted by a flukeish three-man (whoops, three-person) primary from a Great Gildersleevish sort of job in Cook County government (Recorder of Deeds) to the threshold of the U.S. Senate. If she makes it through the door--and for the moment she's running ahead about 3 to 1 in the polls--she'll be the first black Democratic senator and the first black woman senator ever.

Whoever is in charge of central casting for The Year of productions--the Democratic National Committee, Norman Lear, Gaia herself-couldn't have invented a more correct central character. She's 44, a product of Chicago's "reform" movement, the daughter of a policeman and a medical technician who began life in a middle-class neighborhood, and in her teens, when her parents divorced, went to live with her grandmother in a black Chicago neighborhood called "Bucket of Blood." "I had a chance to be part of the black experience on a lot of different levels," she says, and it was this experience that she says led her to choose a career in government and politics. That career began in Chicago as an assistant U.S. attorney under Jim Thompson and his assistant, Sam Skinner. She won her first election as a state representative in 1978, and in 1983 became legislative floor leader in Springfield for Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor.

After personal problems which included family deaths and a divorce, Mrs. Braun was elected in 1988 as Cook County Recorder of Deeds. The job doesn't sound like much, and it isn't. But she made political history by becoming the first black of either sex to win executive office in Cook County government. And in the process, she also established the base from which to launch her campaign for the senatorial nomination--a campaign she undertook, she says, because she could not stomach Alan Dixon's support of Clarence Thomas and the Senate's treatment of Anita Hill.

Her victory, to put it mildly, was improbable. But so is celebrity, and she was the right person for the right part at precisely the right time.

Yesterday she was a charter member of an organization called Illinois Women for Government--or, as the group calls itself, "Babes in Government." Today Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn raise funds for her. At an outdoor concert at Ravinia, where music lovers go to sit on the grass and recycle white wine to the mosquitoes, Peter, Paul, and Mary interrupted their concert to introduce her to the crowd. She drew more applause than Puff, the Magic Dragon.

Her record as a legislator in Springfield was consistently liberal, soft on crime but bullish on taxing and spending. However, she did win the respect of the Illinois political establishment. It is perhaps indicative that her deputy campaign manager, Jill Zwick, is also a Republican nominee for a Kane County Board seat.

Personally, as a divorced mother who has raised a 14-year-old son in what appears to be exemplary fashion, and a woman whom the New York Times's Isabel Wilkerson describes as "a den mother with a cheerleader's smile," her appeal is strong and basic. Nor is it just cupcakes and spice. According to one visitor to her Chicago office, there is a sign hanging in her restroom that reads, "I'm 51 per cent sweetheart, 49 per cent bitch. Don't push it." We'll see.

Then there's her opponent, Rich Williamson, a corporate lawyer who held a number of staff jobs in Washington, among them heading President Reagan's office of intergovernmental relations and later serving as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. Williamson has also held office in the American Conservative Union, and in 1980 attempted to impose order on Phil Crane's presidential campaign.

Williamson wouldn't be central casting's first choice for heavy. For one thing, he's too comfortable. At 43, father of three handsome children and husband of a striking and intelligent woman who serves on the Illinois Board of Higher Education, Williamson is a former football player working on a milk-and-cookies suburban sort of portliness.