ArchPundit

This follows up on the comments below though I hadn’t read the article yet. The Pantagraph blasts the Senate Democrats for confirming Tim Martin for the second half as head of IDOT. They are right–perhaps confirming him might be reasonable, but grilling him harder and getting firm committments to improve performance is what an independent Legislative Branch is supposed to do.

The hyperpartisanship of the last few years can probably be argued back to Isaac and Ishmail, but the problem is that few are willing to point out problems on their own side. The series of Holland Audits have put this to the test for many Democrats. Holland has issued a series of blistering reports on the Blagojevich administration, some of which have been referred for criminal prosecution.

The problem is a basic accounting problem that is simply unacceptable:

All the auditor said was that Martin’s office had not documented $700,000 in spending and didn’t dispute his findings when given the opportunity. Holland thought it serious enough to turn the matter over to state and federal investigators.

In a meeting with some senators before his confirmation, Martin said the questionable expenses were closer to $100,000.

Whether its $100,000 or $700,000, there are still questionable expenses. And senators didn’t bother clearing up the matter before taking an ill-advised vote.

Senate President Emil Jones, D-Chicago, called for the vote. He said it was inappropriate to raise the audit issue during a confirmation vote. How ridiculous. What was inappropriate was for senators to confirm Martin before they know what is going on.

If the $700,000 in undocumented spending wasn’t enough, senators also had to be aware of the March audit from Holland’s office criticizing management within IDOT’s Division of Traffic Safety.

You can also take a look at Rich’s post on standardized tests not being delivered on time.

These are issues of basic competence and the breadth of them tell me more that it’s about incompetence and less about corruption–though I’m open to clear evidence. For those of us who want to support a Democratic Governor and more importantly, All Kids and universal access to quality early childhood education, we need to see some adult supervision. The Governor is good at the politics in general, but his inability to manage effectively is a huge problem. If it isn’t corrected, why should someone believe he can institute an effective statewide early childhood education plan?

Madigan insisted on Memorandums of Understanding. That’s unheard of from the same party. While Jones and the Governor has had a generally better relationship, everyone understands the Governor’s attention span isn’t so good when it comes to managing. That’s not always a horrible thing–if one hires a staff that can compensate for his particular strengths and weaknesses. Early on, that clearly wasn’t the case, whether the administration is taking the problems to heart or not and making improvements is a something it has to sell to the voters and the best way to do that would be to demonstrate some seriousness to actual management.

For an incumbent, his numbers are bad, but not unsurvivable. I expect much of the election to turn on wedge issues and it’ll probably be incredibly negative. There are some interesting stats from recent poll Rich posted that I’ll go into.