Like just about everyone else who pays any attention to Illinois politics, we had for years now made a parlor game of wondering just when and how it would happen. Smart money was on a complicated, multi-count indictment announced at a press conference in Chicago by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Then the governor’s lawyer would hold a competing press conference to announce that the charges were nonsense. We’d have an arraignment, lots of continuances and a protracted jury selection process. Many months later, an anticlimactic trial would lumber its way through federal court, long on legalese and circumstantial evidence and short on smoking guns. If there was a sentence, it would be appealed. More legalese. More delays. Yawn.

We knew the drill. After all, we had just been through this with our previous governor.

Then came Tuesday morning.

G-men awakening the sleeping governor to lead him off in handcuffs. Wiretaps. Bugs. A governor profanely auctioneering the president-elect’s old Senate seat. Threatening to take $8 million away from a hospital for sick children if the CEO didn’t cough up $50,000. The first lady — no slouch at profanity herself — getting in on the effort to get members of The Chicago Tribune editorial board fired. Fitzgerald proclaiming that he had to arrest Blagojevich because the governor could have done too much damage if the feds didn’t grab him immediately.

Maybe the Inuit language, with all those words for snow, has a word that might accurately describe our reaction to Fitzgerald’s criminal complaint. We know of no word in the English language that means “reading this makes us feel like the whole room is spinning very fast.”
We’ll settle for “shocked,” but that hardly begins to convey our feelings on Blagojevich at this point. To better express those feelings, we have to go back to October 2002, when candidate Blagojevich met for the first time with The State Journal-Register’s editorial board.

Reformer with boundless energy
Then-U.S. Rep. Blagojevich was a striking contrast to both his opponent, Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan, and the governors of the previous 12 years. Ryan had a serious, prosecutorial demeanor. The governor at the time, George Ryan, was grumpy and standoffish (and is now in prison). His predecessor, Jim Edgar, was conservative politically and personally, and earned the nickname “Governor No” for his tight-fisted fiscal approach.

Blagojevich, the surprise winner in a three-way Democratic primary, had a name few could pronounce and a personality that was a living example of the danger of over-caffeination. From the front door of the lobby to the third-floor editorial boardroom, he greeted and glad-handed everyone he encountered. This is a pattern that was repeated several times as Blagojevich became a fairly regular visitor to the SJ-R editorial board through 2006.

As a guest of the board, Blagojevich was an eager and engaging subject. The conversations were on the record, and Blagojevich obviously relished the chance to speak in an open-ended forum, even when his statements were challenged by board members and reporters. He didn’t earn our endorsement, but he did make an impression as an energetic candidate intent on cleaning up state government.

When he met with us after his election, he emphasized his desire to break from “business as usual” in state government, most notably in handing out state jobs as political rewards. This, he said, had caused a problem with “my daughter’s grandfather” (Richard Mell, a powerful Chicago alderman) who contacted Blagojevich immediately after the election with his requests for political spoils. Mell did not take kindly to being rebuffed by his son-in-law, Blagojevich said.

One of his first acts after being sworn in the following January was to fire dozens of state employees he said had been illegally shifted into protected positions after the election. Many of the employees later sued and won (after lengthy court proceedings), but Blagojevich’s move seemed to signal a change in state hiring philosophy.

In 2005, Blagojevich told the editorial board that he was not eager to grant a casino license to the city of Chicago despite the revenue it would generate for Illinois. Why? Because, he said, all that extra cash would make it impossible for him to trim state government the way he wanted to. The pressure to use the money on new or expanded programs would simply be too great.

“We’ll never get the cuts in some of the places we want to get cuts. We won’t be able to downsize where we want to downsize, won’t be able to make a lot of the hard decisions that I think are necessary to get the budgets in a better position,” Blagojevich said.
That statement would be unimaginable today.

Governing by press release
But almost from the start, Blagojevich’s actions were betraying his self-portrait as reformer.

For starters, he did not live in Springfield. That was fine by us — Jim Thompson didn’t live here full time either, though he was here during legislative sessions and generally spent a lot of time in Springfield. But Blagojevich usually wasn’t here even during General Assembly sessions. He did not work with legislators, preferring to dictate to them and then criticize them when they ignored his wishes. State government offices here became extremely Chicago-centric, with important agency posts being filled by Chicagoans who commuted here every Monday and left on Friday.

He became notorious for publicity stunts funded by Illinois taxpayers.
In 2004, with the nation facing a shortage of flu vaccine, Blagojevich announced he would get Illinois its own supply from England. He ordered $2.6 million in vaccine despite being told the federal government would not allow it into the country. When the federal government wouldn’t let it in, Illinois got stuck with the bill. The vaccine expired. Blagojevich then tried to send it to Pakistan to help in earthquake relief. But even a disaster-ravaged country won’t inject its citizens with expired medicine, and the vaccine was destroyed.

Blagojevich also embarked on a plan to import drugs from Canada in violation of federal law. Hardly anyone used the plan, called I-SaveRX, but it got Blagojevich face time in the national media. He used state employees to promote the plan, requiring some to attend, with pay, an after-hours meeting on its marketing strategy. Using state workers to advance his programs would become a common practice for Blagojevich.

He spearheaded a patently unconstitutional effort to ban some video games from sale to minors. It earned him lots of headlines. The law was later struck down.

And his acumen for fund-raising seemed to take precedence over actual governing.

In one particularly embarrassing episode in 2004, Chicago’s WLS-TV videotaped Blagojevich’s state police security detail stopping traffic at an intersection in California, where Blagojevich was holding a fundraiser.

Embarrassment aside, Blagojevich entered the 2006 campaign with an astounding $17 million war chest.

Into the bunker
Blagojevich’s relations with this page cooled abruptly in 2006. His visit on October 24, 2006, when he stopped by after the newspaper’s annual First Citizen breakfast, was his last. A few weeks earlier, Blagojevich was identified as the “Public Official A” in the first of many federal indictments that would come from kickback schemes involving state boards and the Teachers’ Retirement System.

Blagojevich told the editorial board the scandal, which involved his confidant and fund-raiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko, “will never touch me” because he was never involved in any discussion about such a “ridiculous and blatantly illegal” scheme.

Around this time, Blagojevich’s staff began carefully choreographing his every public appearance, often scoping out back exits to avoid any contact with the press.

The one-time populist candidate who marched in the Illinois State Fair Twilight Parade and greeted every available bystander would now retreat from public view except in controlled settings.

Blagojevich had earlier refused to meet with the SJ-R editorial board for an endorsement interview for the 2006 election. Editorials critical of his governing style led his staff to decide in advance that he would not get our endorsement. They were correct.

“The governor’s increasing reluctance to engage the public via the media also bothers us. It is troubling, to say the least, that Blagojevich literally sneaks out of the state Capitol on the rare occasions he is here to avoid questions from reporters,” read part of our Oct. 29, 2006, endorsement of his opponent Judy Baar Topinka.
Despite an easy re-election, Blagojevich’s aversion to public appearances became even more pronounced.

In November 2007, WBBM-TV Channel 2 in Chicago reported that Blagojevich had made an average of one public appearance every five days in the previous four months. The station staked out the governor’s home (where he was arrested on Tuesday) in an effort to track his work habits.

“With the knowledge of his state police bodyguard detail, CBS2 news watched for several days over three weeks, repeatedly finding the governor at home during normal business hours with no one other than his family coming and going,” reporter Mike Flannery said in his report.

Government breakdown
By early 2008, Operation Board Games had become the defining element of the Blagojevich governorship. Yet you would not have known that listening to his budget address in February. Nor would you have known that Illinois was in serious money trouble, as Blagojevich spoke of new programs, child tax credits for families and a $25 billion capital construction program.

Idealistic to the point of delusion, Blagojevich spoke of leasing the state lottery (an idea already rejected twice by lawmakers) and a variety of other novel schemes to pay for his many ideas.

Blagojevich’s big plans hit walls on two fronts. First, lawmakers predictably rejected all his money-making plans (which included leasing the lottery, moving hundreds of millions of dollars out of dedicated funds in the budget and “securitizing” state assets for quick cash). Second, despite provisions intended to largely remove the governor from the money-handling process of the capital plan, lawmakers still didn’t trust Blagojevich being anywhere near such a huge pot of money.

The session ended on May 31 with the General Assembly sending the governor a budget he claimed was $2 billion out of balance. That began a standoff that endures today.

On Nov. 30, Springfield’s historic Dana-Thomas House, along with dozens of historic sites across the state, shut its doors because of cuts Blagojevich made to the budget.

Throughout all of this, Blagojevich refused to entertain any talk of a sales or income tax increase.

Before Tuesday, lawmakers were hoping that a new session in January with a new Senate president might break the stalemate.

It all changed Dec. 9
For many people in Illinois, the morning of Dec. 9 provided a 9/11 moment. We remember exactly where we were when we heard of Blagojevich’s arrest. Though we expected an indictment of Blagojevich in Operation Board Games at some point, we weren’t prepared for the suddenness or the tawdry details that emerged that day.

Nor did we ever anticipate the utter stupidity of a governor who knows he is in the sights of arguably the nation’s top federal prosecutor yet openly flaunts his desire to sell the most famous vacant seat in Washington.

We all knew Blagojevich was transparently vindictive. In May, he decided abruptly to close Pontiac Correctional Center — a move that will destroy the economy of an entire county — to punish a senator who voted for a bill that would have allowed voters to recall public officials from office. Yet we had no idea he would take $8 million from a children’s hospital because its CEO failed to make a $50,000 campaign donation.

We knew he was vain (tales of his Illinois State Police hairbrush detail are legendary), but we had no idea his image-consciousness would lead to scheming for the firing of editorial writers who criticized him. (Despite our best efforts over the years, we didn’t make the governor’s hit list.)

The national media have fixated on Blagojevich’s non-existent ties to Obama and on the amazing details contained in Tuesday’s criminal complaint as they pertain to selling Obama’s Senate seat. They miss the real story in doing so.

First, Blagojevich had been poison to Obama for years. Tuesday’s complaint, in which he fantasized about a Cabinet position with Obama, only confirms the delusional nature so many Illinoisans had long suspected of Blagojevich.

Second, those terrifically salacious details may be fascinating, but they’re only a small part of the Blagojevich story. That is a story of five-plus years of ego-driven, inept government that has left Illinois in its worst financial shape in decades — perhaps ever.

It’s the story of a vibrant, young candidate who in 2002 had the world in front of him. All he had to do was not make the mistakes of his prison-bound predecessor and, presumably, the sky would be the limit.

For this page, the contrast between the enthusiastic candidate we met in 2002 and the sullen figure sneaking into an SUV in an alleyway on Wednesday is jarring. But in the big picture, it’s not surprising.

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