First, let me stipulate that as bad as I think the budget is, no one pays attention to that who isn’t already voting one way or another. Budgets are far too detailed for the average swing voter and just don’t affect their vote much.
The print press has pretty much given the budget as a win to Blagojevich and in the sense that it gets him out of the press and takes the primary attack against him out of play, that’s certainly true. Rich Miller’s column is pretty much the conventional wisdom, and it’s pretty much correct in terms of the budget helping the Governor out in a tough time.
I think that success is fleeting though. Next year, as pointed out in an interview with The Speaker, the budget probably won’t be much different and so going into the election one might be tempted to think Blagojevich has avoided his biggest problem.
But I don’t think he has, I think Rich points it out here:
Just about every reporter I know who is employed by a major media outlet is working on at least one big story about alleged corruption or shady practices within the Blagojevich administration. Not all of these investigations will bear fruit, of course, but we can expect plenty of negative reports in the days and weeks ahead. His “window” could close soon as reporters dig into the shenanigans at the Department of Central Management Services, the state lottery and allegedly hinky hiring practices all over the place.
The thing about the Administration is that by repeating endlessly the mantra that Blagojevich was changing the way the state does business, he’s legitimately set himself up to be held to a higher standard. Now, with the dam broken after the CMS audit and Tony Rezko appearing on every corner, every reporter who had a tip on something shady can go after it because the editors believe there is something worth going after. There’s smoke and so probably there is fire. As those pop up, some may be minor, some may be major, some may be devastating, but such stories never produce good results. One doesn’t go in looking for corruption and come out finding a well run agency. The stories have three possible results with varying degrees in each category:
1) Corruption
2) Incompetence
3) Story is killed
None produce good publicity and every story can start with the hook that while he ran in 2002 promising to change the way business was done in Springfield……
The advantage of keeping your nose clean as a politician is that generally reporters are well fed by campaigns and state government. They can go and get the differing sides to a policy dispute or cover an interesting angle to a press release and when it’s busy they can’t justify spending resources just combing through potential tips that’ll take a lot of time to track down. Under the game when there isn’t a big issue of corruption out there, it means that incumbents do okay and can build up name recognition and get credit for specific bills or programs. However, when a story breaks and it looks like there is blood in the water, everyone wants to break the hot story and to do that they have to start following up on rumblings in Springfield or Chicago and investigate–competition works for the public good.
Making it worse–the timing for the CMS audit and other issues comes as the Lege adjourns and the Springfield press now has a lot of free time on its hands to track down stories. Those efforts are likely to produce a drip, drip, drip effect with new negative stories on a consistent basis.
Add to that a grand jury investigation and a potential challenger in Devine and it gets very hard to get back on message for the administration. What he needs is a strong challenge from the right wing so he can define himself against conservative Republicans. But with a Republican primary most of the fire is going to be within the Republican circular firing squad and that won’t let himself define his positions in relation to them–and worse, a moderate like Topinka could emerge posing a real threat to him in a general election.
So the Governor did avoid a platform for the Republicans to attack him everyday, but he also freed up the press to investigate every orifice that Tony Rezko has.
ArchPundit