The Governor’s Team deserves ridicule for serving up this stinker:
The administration this week asked eight top state employees who have nothing to do with education to enlist friends and relatives in a letter-writing campaign to newspapers. Now the administration is being criticized for possibly coercing some of its employees into working for the governor’s aggressive public relations machine.
“This is more of the all-self-promotion-all-the-time that this administration seems to go for,” complained Charles N. Wheeler III, a state government expert at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “To have this kind of stealth grass-roots propaganda campaign … strikes me as something over the top.”
With some minor alterations, Meneghetti’s newspaper piece sticks closely to the form letter Blagojevich deputy chief of staff Brian Daly circulated Monday to the eight high-level employees at the Department of Central Management Services, an agency that manages state property and supplies.
The memo encourages the employees to have “friends and relatives” send letters to newspaper editorial pages across the state as part of the administration’s “outreach efforts” and to make sure to show copies of those letters to their boss at Central Management.
And I think we all know, CMS employees probably should be focusing on other priorities as the Register Star pointed out.
What’s most disturbing about this is that CMS seems to be one of the most politicized state offices when it should be the model of good management practices. That puts nearly all of the Governor’s efforts to reform state operations in question. Just as the auditor’s reports pointed out.