By Steve Rhodes
How did this man get elected twice to the governorship of America’s fifth-largest state?
That’s a media meme that took hold as the trial of Rod Blagojevich began to wind down last week.
The media analysts largely ignored their own role in Rod’s rise; instead it was, um, Rod’s charm that was to blame. And the political establishment. And voters. Everyone but themselves.
But the media was complicit in the rise of a man who had no business running a state. Let’s take a look.
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To the Sun-Times’s credit, sort of, it acknowledged in an editorial – parenthetically – that “OK, yeah, we endorsed Gov. Rod twice” while basically chastising the public for not paying more attention.
To this day the Sun-Times still hasn’t come clean on what really happened in 2002 when publisher David Radler ignored the editorial board’s support of Paul Vallas in the Democratic primary and ordered the paper to endorse Blagojevich.
Editor Michael Cooke lied to me – and I’m sure others – about it while future publisher John Cruickshank and the board sat silent. Are they more to blame than the citizens of Illinois who listened to them?
Radler was also known to dip his beak into the paper’s news coverage; in retrospect we can only wonder if Vallas got a fair shake there.
But the truth is that the media bought Blagojevich’s newly drawn image as a reformer despite a record as a mediocre backbencher who owed his career to Machine hack Dick Mell. In fact, Blagojevich’s whole life had been an exercise in mediocrity – from law school to Cook County prosecutor to U.S. Congress without making a meaningful mark. What in the world qualified him to be governor?
Vallas had his faults, but he was expert in finance and education. Blagojevich was expert in nothing except campaigning. Will we ever learn the difference between talk and action? Between past performance versus vague promises of an amazing future?
Journalists like to complain about voters choosing style over substance, but nobody does so more than journalists.
“But he’s such a great campaigner!” Rich Miller told me back then, as I’ve written before.
So.
Look at his record.
People are who they are. They do what they do.
(Miller at the time in Capitol Fax: “And whatever you may think of why the Sun-Times endorsed Blago . . . their reasoning, that he has the best shot of winning in the fall, was probably right on the money.”
Because he talk pretty; the best bet for fooling voters. Not the best person for the job.
Because they guy was backed by Mell, the Daleys and the big money. He was a front man for the usual entrenched interests. Somehow the media missed that.
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“How could we have elected this turkey, not once, but twice?” Greg Hinz wrote earlier this month in Crain’s
“The sad truth is, for those who cared to look and listen, the broad outlines of Mr. Blagojevich’s leadership style and character were apparent by the time of the 2006 gubernatorial election.
“We knew Mr. Blagojevich didn’t spend much time in the office, that he was incredibly vain – remember all those hairbrush tales? – that he’d taken the art of raising campaign cash from those who needed something from government to a new level.”
We?
“But the political establishment – from Barack Obama to Mike Madigan on down – didn’t want to make waves.”
A primary challenge by Edwin Eisendrath didn’t get the support of, say, Obama; Judy Baar Topinka ran a terrible campaign in the general. But nobody thought Topinka was a crook.
“[A]s Better Government Assn. chief Andy Shaw puts it,” Hinz wrote, “Mr. Blagojevich had the money ‘to buy a persona,’ and to define Ms. Topinka – a capable if flawed official – as ‘Lucy (Ricardo) without a sense of humor, a crazy lady.'”
Topinka was a terrible candidate, but the persona Blagojevich bought was purchased four years earlier and never properly vetted. It’s a movie we’ve seen before and since. Lessons are never learned.
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In a story republished in newspapers the world over, AP also asked the question: How Did Blago Get Elected?
Again, in answering the question, the media’s role is left out of the equation.
“The answer is an only-in-Illinois mix of luck, skill, blind partisanship, scandal fatigue and the power of money,” AP decides.
And again, voters are blamed.
“As the 2006 election approached, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald publicly confirmed Blagojevich was under investigation. Blagojevich fundraiser and political adviser Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko was indicted less than a month before the election.
“Voters couldn’t claim ignorance this time, yet Blagojevich won a second term, with nearly as many votes as he had gotten four years earlier.”
Maybe voters shouldn’t have listened to Barack Obama, who claimed Rezko as his “political godfather.” Obama assured voters in a re-election endorsement that “We’ve got a governor in Rod Blagojevich who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.”
Party leaders knew that wasn’t true.
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And when the media did begin reporting on the allegations swirling around the governor’s office, even alleged party reformers were there to defend Blagojevich.
“I don’t like government being used as a tool to reward political favors and I never have. I don’t like to see limited state funds wasted on unnecessary employees. And I don’t like seeing public officials accused of wrongdoing when there is nothing to substantiate the accusations,” Abner Mikva wrote in an Op-Ed that appeared in the Sun-Times on June 13, 2006.
“I worked on Gov. Blagojevich’s transition team to advise the incoming administration on how to set up systems for running state government efficiently and transparently. From the beginning, the administration indicated that it wanted to clean up and improve the state’s massive bureaucracy so as to better serve the public.
“When Blagojevich took office in January 2003, there was massive turnover in personnel. No one knew how many employees were really functioning, and how many were supernumeraries. Many employees had been given promotions and locked into their positions. On top of that, Illinois was in the midst of a widespread investigation into corruption under the former governor, George Ryan. Public trust was at an all-time low.
“Blagojevich began turning things around, from reducing administrative waste and redundancy to providing more funds for critical services. The governor sought the input of government watchdogs and respected public servants in developing landmark ethics legislation that he later signed into law. For the first time, an independent inspector general – not some political lapdog – was appointed to investigate wrongdoing in state government. There is a functioning Board of Ethics to review the complaints of wrongdoing. Because of the reforms, state officials can’t leave government on a swinging door to work for businesses they once regulated. We have a gift ban that prohibits lobbyists from using trips and expensive presents to influence lawmakers. No, we didn’t get all that we suggested enacted into law. But most of the proposals that were made by the advisory group are now the law. And yes, that means we now see and hear about more investigations. That is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
“The governor was able to control headcount of employees by holding agencies accountable for hiring only for positions necessary to the mission of the agency. That reform helped reduce the size of government by 13,000 positions. While that is not popular in all quarters of a state nurtured on political plums for favored people, it has made government more efficient and saved hundreds of millions of dollars. He changed the personnel tracking system so that candidates for Rutan-covered jobs – those that by law are required to be free of political influence – are reviewed on the merits without disclosing the names of applicants.
“Those are the facts. But you wouldn’t know it by reading or listening to the media. The emphasis there is on vague allegations that ‘some’ employees have been hired improperly. There are ‘lists’ of open positions that have gone through various persons in the governor’s office. But there are no specifics as to whether such positions are ‘exempt’ or Rutan-covered, or evidence that people whose names may be on lists were actually treated differently than anyone else. Every administration has the right to fill certain positions with people they think will best help them implement their agenda. And for those positions where politics cannot be a factor in the selection of a candidate, there is no prohibition against anyone making recommendations for the jobs. There is, however, a very clear testing and interview process that must be used to select the best candidate. The newspaper stories over the past few weeks do not offer any evidence that those processes were violated.
“In fact, most of the recent allegations seem to come from disgruntled ex-employees. No one has even checked as to whether the disgruntlement is about loss of the job or something fishy on the job. If there are credible charges of improper hiring, they should go to the inspector general, state law enforcement and the U.S. attorney’s office.
“Vague allegations of improper employment practices tar and feather the whole state work force. We need state government workers who take pride in their reputations, in their work efforts, who get ‘psychic’ income from their jobs, to make up for the gap between their pay scales and those of the private sector. We aren’t going to encourage those kinds of applicants if we don’t acknowledge reforms that are working and instead beat up on everybody who goes to work for the state of Illinois.”
One might wonder why a newspaper would feel compelled to give space to a piece of campaign propaganda; shouldn’t it know better?
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More Blago punditry from the vaults, some embarrasing and some prescient.
Steve Neal, 2002: “No doubt he’s the real thing.”
Sun-Times editorial, 2002: “Blagojevich . . . offers youth, a fresh face and a clear break with the past. He seems to have a knack for sizing up a situation and offering innovative solutions . . .Rod Blagojevich will usher in a new era in state government, and after all the scandal and acrimony of recent years, we are eager to see it.”
Lynn Sweet, 2002: Greg Goldner (who comes out of Mayor Daley’s City Hall) – was not embraced by Madigan. Goldner – who ran Rahm Emanuel’s primary House campaign – eventually signed on to run Blagojevich’ss field campaign for the November election.”
Sun-Times editorial, 2006: “There’s no denying the cloud of scandal over his administration. One of his chief fund-raisers, Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, was indicted last week for alleged shakedowns for campaign contributions. More revelations likely will come right before the election when power broker Stuart Levine is expected to plead guilty. The governor said the charges against Rezko, if true, represent a personal betrayal by Rezko, and that he himself has never been involved in any unethical or illegal fund-raising. Our experience with Blagojevich prompts us to take him at his word. We’ve chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt and endorse him for a number of reasons.”
Neil Steinberg, 2006: “So when do we start viewing the gubernatorial race as being not so much between Judy Baar Topinka and Gov. Blagojevich as between Topinka and Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, who would take over the job should his boss find it necessary to, ah, spend time elsewhere?”
Mark Brown, 2006: “[Topinka] called Blagojevich the ‘new George Ryan’ and strongly implied that she expects him to follow the former governor to the defense table in federal court.
“‘It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when,’ Topinka declared.
“That struck me as a tad reckless, even by the standards of a newspaper columnist, Topinka having moonlighted as one before the start of this campaign. I’d say it’s still a matter of if.”
To be fair, Brown wrote in 2002 that “Neither Jim Ryan nor Rod Blagojevich is the right man to clean up Illinois government.
“Either through acts of omission or commission, both are products of the same cynical political culture that has driven this state for at least half a century.”
John Kass, 2006: “Blagojevich’s future seems federally inevitable.”
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Joan Rivers, 2010: “He’s an idiot. When you talk to him for 10 minutes, you go, How did this man get elected? Come on, Chicago, didn’t anyone talk to him?”
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Finally, a word about Patti. She had a record too.
“In 1983, Patti left home for the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to major in economics on a legislative scholarship,” Illinois Issues reported earlier this year.
So she was used to financial rewards she hadn’t earned.
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Comments welcome.
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1. From Lew Manilow:
You dismiss Edwin Eisendrath’s second term primary campaign too quickly (one sentence). No Chicago newspaper or “notable” person or organization supported him. One major woman”s group actually gave him an award. Had one, there might have been a groundswell or, at least, a principled stand. Moreover I couldn’t raise much money. Full disclosure, I am his stepfather but also was experienced as President Clinton and Carter’s fund-raising chair in Ill. It wasn’t that he was unknown; as a two-term maverick alderman and Regional Director of HUD (who started the teardown of public housing when it was bankrupt and under HUD’s jurisdiction). I have thought about our failures for a long time and wondered why someone of note didn’t stand up for Edwin. Perhaps you can provide an answer.
Posted on July 27, 2010