For those not paying attention, Blagojevich just handed the Supreme Court their asses on a platter. The Supreme Court essentially escalated a fight over judicial raises into state Constitutional Showdown where they had the authority to rule on the ultimate outcome, but they would have lost in the court of public opinion. Playing directly into G-Rod’s hands they portrayed themselves as insider hacks who just wanted to get their raises despite the dire condition of state budget.
Miller does a good job of covering the issue and brings up C-Word–Clinton in that description. Miller is absolutely right about Blagojevich burning a lot of bridges, but just like Clinton, he knows whose buttons to push, and whose buttons aren’t to be pushed.
Last year during the campaign, Blagojevich tried to push Madigan’s button and instead of an outright rebuke that defended Speaker Madigan’s position on livestock show and put Blagojevich in the catbird seat, Madigan mentioned G-Rod might have some indiscretions. What indiscretions were those? Who knows, the Speaker just sort of shrugged leaving it to our and, and more importantly, G-Rod’s imagination. The Speaker says very little, but carries a big stick.
No one really knows what the hell Madigan meant, but G-Rod hasn’t publicly taken on the Speaker, or his daughter, since. Unfortunately for the unfortunate Gary MacDougal, the former Illinois Republican Party head tried to parlay the comment into a scandal. The thing he forgot was that no one knows what the indiscretions were or if there were any. So the head of the Illinois Republican Party was making the case that Blagojevich had a scandal based on the hated Democratic Speaker of the House’s integrity, of which MacDougal thought there wasn’t any integrity. Naturally, the press left the press conference wondering when they had entered Bizarro World and tried to write the story straight, but ended up writing stories that could have been in the Onion. I can’t make that kind of satire up.
The key to this is the Governor hasn’t taken on who matters in the general election or the primaries. He hasn’t taken on Mayor Daley, he hasn’t taken on Madigan, he hasn’t taken on interest groups except for a bungling of the Hispanic Caucus with whom he is reaching out to to heal the problem. He hasn’t directly taken on Dan Hynes who is dancing a strange dance with him over the Senate race and who and when the Governor will endorse a candidate.
This sort of game may work, but it doesn’t exactly bring confidence to government–indeed the entire strategy is based upon tearing down government credibility to increase G-Rod’s and that is unhealthy for the state. In many ways he is playing right into the Illinois Center-Right Coalition strategy of attacking the public sector. There is much wrong with Illinois politics and government, but it is unclear if the Governor is going to fix that at all, or just establish himself as a credible candidate in 2008 or 2012 to be President of the United States.