Jeff Trigg and Bill Dennis already hit on Blagojevich outflanking Jesse White and Judy Baar Topinka on office budget cuts.
Topinka, the best hope the Republicans have of defeating Blagojevich in 2006, is now in the awkward position of complaining about budget cuts. And she can’t even claim the governor’s motives were political because Democrat White’s budget will be slashed as much as hers.
Between this and the federal subpeonas Topinka just put herself in a big hole for the 2006 Gubernatorial Election. All Rod has to do is pull out her complaints and put ’em on the air. Of course, that assumes that is her and not the ever fire breathing Patrick O’Malley in the general election. Rod may be a bit sleazy, but he is damn talented, and on top of it he just triangulated the SoS getting him essentially good press with no real cost.
I only mildly disagree with Jeff Trigg that this turns the Illinois Democratic Party into a circular firing squad. Ultimately the Illinois GOP is a party split on ideology and so they tend to turn on each other. The fight between moderates and conservatives isn’t just a fight over turf or patronage or pork, it is a fight over control of the party. The Illinois Democrats are relatively on the same ideological page and so the intraparty warfare is kept down to typical turf wars–like this.
That being said, while I disagree with the level of spending that Jeff or Bill would have for the State of Illinois, I agree that Illinois doesn’t have a budget crisis–it has a structural spending problem that focuses too much on pork and too little on essential services.