SPRINGFIELD – A few things have happened, politically, in the past 20 years. I’ve been lucky to be able to watch from a very special perch – that of political columnist in a particularly political town.

My plan – if my employer and the public are willing – is to stay in this job for quite some time. But given that my first twice-weekly column in The State Journal-Register ran in the summer of 1992 makes me think it might be fun to recount some of the things that have happened over a couple of decades.

My first 2 years at the SJ-R, starting in 1990, were spent covering city government without doing a column. So when I got the new assignment in 1992, it only made sense that names like Mayor Ossie Langfelder and Gov. Jim Edgar, Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch and U.S. House Republican Leader Bob Michel of Peoria were in my first column, on July 19 of that year. The Democratic National Convention had just ended in New York City, and Bill Clinton was the new nominee.