Chicago politics in need of ‘Change’

WASHINGTON — I’m from Illinois and proudly a Chicagoan. I have also spent most of my life overseas interviewing strange leaders.

We’re talking about guys like Saddam Hussein (oddly quiet and focused during the entire interview), the Ayatollah Khomeini (me, wearing an abaya; him constantly staring into some absent horizon), and Fidel Castro (who talks so incoherently and without cessation that he can easily put you to sleep).

Yet had I known what strange leaders we could throw up and vote into office in my home state, I might as well have stayed home. Rod Blagojevich, who has been masquerading as a serious, working governor for the last six years, puts the sheer strangeness of all of those foreign leaders to shame.

Hey, Democrat Blagojevich even puts Illinois politics to shame. He makes the last governor, Republican George Ryan, who is serving a sentence for federal fraud and racketeering charges, look normal.

The New York Times called this a “strange tale” and, even by Chicago standards, it is. Even after the Chicago Tribune had written that Blagojevich was being taped on his phone by the FBI, he continued to talk on and on about his own Chicago-type Camelot dreams.

Think about it his way. Barack Obama was effectively in Washington with plenty to do — why not sell Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat for cash? The governor was accused of the charges of conspiracy and soliciting bribes, and of threatening the Chicago Tribune, whose editorial board had been critical of him, to get rid of those pesky writers, or else. He was demanding payoffs — $50,000 here, $100,000 there — for city contracts and was even accused of holding up funding for a children’s hospital dependent upon campaign contributions.

“Pay to play,” they call it in Chicago. And why not? He deserved it: He was somebody.

Typical old Chicago

Now, some of these “activities” were typical old Chicago — the contract payoffs, for instance. But what was new was the unbelievable scope of the whole thing — that and the fact that, in the old Chicago ward system, loyalty and spreading perks were the most important principles, not personal enrichment.

Yet Blagojevich made little effort to hide his grandiose demands for money. In fact, he seemed to revel in it and to dare the coppers and the feds to catch him. And this is where this classic punk, out of the picaresque neighborhoods and the Chicago ward system, essentially veered off the old curve.

Had he had more talent and more guts, here is where he could have been a Fidel (or some other more nutso, but talented, foreign leader that I have known). Blagojevich was equally delusional (governor was too small; he wanted to be president of the United States), vengeful (Barack had gotten it, and now all Blagojevich could do was cash in on the possibilities all around him), and narcissistic (am I not beautiful; am I not really “the one” in place of him?). But in the end, he blew it.

His hairdo should have been the first clue. Blagojevich was the seemingly serious son of a Serbian steelworker — a typical Chicago background and one not given to quirky Rush Street displays of dress. But even after his arrest Tuesday, he came across looking about 12 years old with so much black hair cascading over his forehead that he could have sold it for cash.

He looked that way when the feds arrived at his home at 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday demanding he come out. Stunned, he was arrested and taken away in an undignified blue jumpsuit. Even then, he couldn’t believe it. It was like this man, who came to office as an Elvis-loving reformer, had lost his grip on reality.

Democratic machine

There is no evidence — at all — that the president-elect had any part in the governor’s schemes, although of course he knew the man. In fact, although both men on some level came out of the Democratic machine in Chicago, it is good to remember, as the Chicago Daily Observer columnist Don Rose wrote well before the election, that “Obama never fully plants himself in anyone’s garden.”

Universal Press Syndicate