Rod Blagojevich, Man of Our Times

Rod Blagojevich, the 40th Governor of Illinois, is currently serving a 14 year sentence at a federal penitentiary in Colorado. You probably knew this.

Before he went off to prison, but after he had been arrested and charged with a whole bunch of things, the Illinois House impeached him, and the Illinois Senate indicted him, and as a result of those actions, he was removed from office.

Now, keep in mind that Blagojevich was arrested in 2008 and removed from office in 2009, all for actions which primarily occurred in 2008. 2008. Got it? This will come up later.

See, I’ve wanted to write about good ol’ Rod for a while. It’s just always been hard to tell exactly how to frame it. I think there are things Blago can teach us about Donald Trump. I also happen to think Blago has served his time and should be out of prison now. Meanwhile I think other people who have committed many of the same technical crimes are still out there ruining government - and the main reason Rod Blagojevich remains in prison today is because he almost blew it all for them. We’ll get to all that.

First, though, I’d like to tell one of my favorite stories.

Tuesday Night at Millikin

Early in October 2006, Rod Blagojevich, the first Democrat elected Governor of Illinois in decades, was running for reelection. His opponents were the incumbent Republican State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka and the Green candidate Rich Whitney.

On this particular night, they and we were all in Decatur, on the campus of Millikin University, for a gubernatorial debate. Even though Whitney was averaging north of 10% in polls, he was not included in the debate. So the debate was between Blagojevich and Topinka, after which Whitney would be allowed to field some of the same questions separately, because that is what Americans call democracy.

A healthy Green contingent - myself included - was camped out in front of the hall, as was a Democratic contingent a little bit larger, and a Republican contingent notably smaller. See, it was a bizarre election. Nobody actually liked Rod Blagojevich. But it was 2006, it was going to be a huge Democratic year, and the Republicans were simply not showing up for Topinka.

Blagojevich’s main campaign strategy had been to convince people that whatever they might have thought of him, Topinka wasn’t any better. For all intents and purposes, his campaign slogan was “What’s she thinking?” Was it as bad as calling his opponent “Crooked Hillary”? Maybe not. But there we were in 2006, with an experienced, moderate, professional Republican woman, on the end of a blatantly misogynist campaign, one that the media was perfectly happy to go along with.

(And, so, Blagojevich’s strategy worked well enough. The election eventually went about 50-40-10. We crunched the numbers afterwards though and found that probably the majority of Whitney’s votes came from voters who otherwise would have leaned Republican.)

Anyway. It wasn’t just that nobody really liked Blagojevich. We all already knew that he was totally corrupt. It’s hard for me to tell you exactly how we knew, but we all knew. People had bumper stickers that year which read:

BLAGOJEVICH ‘06

QUINN ‘0?

The allusion there being that, sure, Blagojevich was going to get reelected, but he’d ultimately get removed from office. Yes. People were openly saying this in 2006.

And so when the debate itself was over, and Whitney was inside on stage, the remaining Green contingent removed itself to behind the building. There were 15-20 of us left. There was also a Democratic contingent there, another 15-20 people. I can’t tell you why we were behind the building, we just were.

Out walked Rod Blagojevich.

The Democrats started chanting: FOUR MORE YEARS!

We started chanting back: IN JAIL!

I should note here that our contingent included a guy dressed as a chicken, carrying KFC buckets around; and also included a beloved activist whom I will just call The Walking Man, who spent most of the time holding aloft Al Gore’s book.

Blagojevich? He didn’t miss a beat. He never broke stride. He went directly out the door, up the sidewalk, and made a beeline for…

… the four frat guys, doing some sort of weird fundraising stunt, consisting of standing on a tiny stepped platform.

Blago went straight up to them, stepped directly onto the top step, had pictures taken by his entourage (his people? press? who were they?), got down, asked the frat guys a question about who they were (so he could have money sent to them), and then got into his black SUV and pulled away, with our chicken clucking, and with The Walking Man pointing dramatically at Al Gore’s face.

A couple of minutes went by. Two of us walked over to the frat guys and asked them if they knew what had just occurred. They were completely baffled. We gave them Green Party t-shirts.

$31,000 Between New Friends

When I say that we knew Blagojevich was corrupt, but it’s hard to say how we knew… well, I can tell another little story. I’ll keep this one short.

There’s this guy named Jay Bergman. He owns an oil company, PETCO Petroleum Corp., based out of Hinsdale, Illinois. He was appointed to the Illinois State University Board of Trustees by Rod Blagojevich. Why? Well, best as we could tell, because he gave money to Blagojevich’s campaign.

Back in 2006 when I reported on this (for the Indy, Bloomington-Normal’s short-lived independent newspaper) the donations added up to $31,000. If you go back and look at campaign disclosure filings from that era, Bergman was hardly alone. A whole bunch of people made one-off $25,000 donations to Blagojevich’s campaign. And several of them got some kind of appointment or another.

It’s often called Pay To Play. Another term for it is, one you may have heard recently, is quid pro quo.

Why did we zero in on Bergman? Because his company was a serial polluter, repeatedly fined by the State of Illinois. Oh, but this is all another whole story, involving Jane Fonda. I’ll tell it some other time.

It’s the quid pro quo I want to talk about.

Quid pro quo. Tit for tat. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

Quid pro quo. Now, where have I heard that term recently?

As it so happened, around this time, I threw my own hat into the ring, running for State Representative in a district that was almost exactly Bloomington and Normal. In so doing I started looking at things like campaign finance disclosure statements for incumbents. This is when I learned about the raw mechanics of politics in Illinois.

Illinois of course has a poor reputation when it comes to things like ethics in government. Having had several governors shipped off to prison will do that to a state.

But much of what goes down in Illinois doesn’t get anyone thrown in jail. It’s simply playing the game. Here’s how it might work.

Let’s say there’s a Republican state legislator named Bob. Bob represents a traditionally Republican district. It’s so Republican, Bob hasn’t had an opponent in the general election for years.

Bob is sort of moderate. He’s a go along to get along kind of guy. Maybe if he’d been born elsewhere, if he lived elsewhere, he’d be a Democrat instead. Maybe.

He has no particular reason to take any kind of controversial stances. Plus, this being Illinois, he doesn’t have to. Most legislation isn’t even allowed to come up for a vote, and what legislation does come up is already groomed and guaranteed for passage. So Bob votes with Democrats most of the time, and votes against them sometimes, much like most other Republicans. After all, he’s a moderate, and he works well with others.

So unions give him tens of thousands of dollars in contributions every cycle.

Now, he has no actual use for this money. Remember, he has no actual opponents. He even reuses yard signs! What’s he going to do with all of this union money anyway?

Well, he just turns around and gives it to other political committees. Maybe he gives it to the Republican Victory Fund, which in turn puts up money to support Republican in tight races. Maybe he gives it directly to those candidates who are in tight races.

Tight races? Against whom? Oh, that’s right: Democrats running against Republicans elsewhere. Democrats who are relying on union dollars to fund their campaigns.

When a tight race comes up, well, someone is going to lose. But everyone else is going to win. A candidate wins, obviously. The unions sort of win, even if they lose. Similarly, the corporations sort of win, even if they lose. The political consultants definitely win, because they got paid the big bucks to go in and run those tight campaigns.

This way that the money cycles all around has the overall effect of keeping incumbents in office. If someone finally does get up the gumption to run against Bob, well gosh, Bob is not only sitting on a wad of cash, he’s also a Republican who’s getting union support. Who else is he getting money from? Well, all sorts of people. People like Jay Bergman, who not only give to the governor to ensure appointment, but also might give to the local state legislators, as something akin to a form of tribute.

All of this is perfectly legal, because there’s no quid pro quo. Or, more precisely, there’s no explicit and provable quid pro quo.

See, if Jay Bergman had handed Rod Blagojevich $25,000 in cash, and said, I am giving you this money, in exchange for which you will appoint me to the Board of Trustees… well, that’d be a crime, right? It’d be bribery. The quid pro quo would be obvious. Even if he gave just $500 to a legislator in exchange for the legislator putting in a good word for him, that’d be a crime too. But if it’s not in exchange… if the transaction and the good word aren’t agreed to… well, now it’s gray. And the feds don’t go after gray. And, anyway, everyone and everything is a little gray, isn’t it? A little gray never hurt anyone, right?

But what if it’s a whole lot of gray? What if it’s a whole lot of those $25,000 contributions? Any single one might raise an eyebrow, but if there are dozens of them, well, that’s kind of problematic, isn’t it?

Well, why? If one isn’t problematic, then any individual one must not be either… right?

We might call this phenomenon “body of work” corruption. If it’s just a little gray, it’s hard to see, easy to ignore. But when the gray adds up, when it gets darker, when it gets nearer to black… it’s not any individual action, it’s the body of work that defines the corruption, and we all know it. And yet in so knowing, we also have to acknowledge that the only way this can truly be corruption is if each individual $25,000 contribution was itself corruption… and, for that matter, each little $500 contribution, just to make sure a good word is put in, well that must be at least a tiny bit gray too.

And this, friends, was Rod Blagojevich’s great crime. It was not his attempt to sell the Senate seat. It was not lying to the FBI. No, his great crime is that he took a political environment where everything was gray, and pushed all available limits. And up until the point where they actually had him on something that was much too big and much too dark, he was getting away with all of it. Except, everyone seemed to know that he was going to fall. And the political elites feared that they would fall with him. They feared that the way they kept power would be so thoroughly exposed for what it was that their games would be up.

Rod Blagojevich didn’t think he could get away with things because he was Governor. He thought he could get away with things because, in his mind, the only difference between what he was doing and what everyone else was doing was a matter of scale.

When he finally went to trial, and the main charge was over selling the Senate seat, the federal statute that the prosecution used to nail him involved something called “denial of honest services”. The idea was that he was using the power of his office to enrich himself, and in so doing, denying “honest services”, i.e. being a good public servant.

The whole time Blagojevich was Governor, of course, the Speaker of the House in Illinois was Michael Madigan. Matter of fact, he still is. And guess who is the absolute master of Pay to Play? Guess who is the ultimate weaver, winding together strands of all shades of gray, producing a canvas of totally unaccountable and disastrous government, but one which to this day has never actually led to his downfall? Madigan’s secret? He never got too greedy over any single transaction. And yet “denial of honest services” doesn’t have a dollar limit associated with it. It’s just that… you’ve got to prove the quid pro quo. And if it’s not so simple; if the web of transactions is complicated and money is flowing all over the place; and the one person in a position to actually stand up and do something about it all just so happens to be the unbelievably hapless and spineless Pat Quinn; well, you might just be able to ride it out until you, like your mentor Hizzoner himself, simply die in office.

And when someone truly gets in your way? Well, if they can be sent off to a federal penitentiary in Colorado for a long time, then by all means, send them off.

Now, again, I’m not saying Rod Blagojevich is an innocent man. But if you add up the totality of his offenses and the damage he did to the people, and you put that up against any number of other Illinois politicos, he’s going to pale in comparison.

This doesn’t mean the feds aren’t picking off plenty of others along the way. While writing the above paragraph, I mean, literally, I read how State Representative Luis Arroyo got bused by the feds just today. And it was only a few weeks ago the feds came through and raided the offices of my current Cook County Commissioner Jeffrey Tobolski in addition to those of a few other politicians.

Still, only Blago is serving for as long as he is. And I am convinced it is in large part because the power structure needed him to be a scapegoat.

Sadly, there is one person who may have actually learned the wrong lesson from all of this…

Finally, Let’s Talk About Trump

If Rod Blagojevich’s grand crime was ultimately a matter of scale, then a reasonable conclusion might be that it’s safest to play the game on the game’s terms, because there’s still plenty of opportunities out there.

A less reasonable conclusion would be that Blagojevich’s true failure was in not aiming high enough. Selling a Senate seat? That’s a one-time proposition. The real money is all around you, if you’re only smart enough to be sitting on a lot of real estate, or willing to dispatch former mayors of New York off to Ukraine. And if being Governor won’t protect you? Well, surely being President will.

I know other people who agree with me that it’s time for Blagojevich to be out of prison. Reality is, the only way he’s getting out early is if Trump commutes his sentence. Weirdly, Trump has suggested he might do that very thing… and yet hasn’t done it.

Here’s my belief. Trump has said that he thinks Blagojevich was treated unfairly. I think he actually believes that. I even think, on some level, Trump sympathizes with Blagojevich, and wishes he could commute his sentence. But on this subject, every single adviser, from Ivanka on down, has made it crystal clear that he can’t do this. He is allowed, even encouraged, to do every single other possible ludicrous and dangerous and reprehensible thing that comes to his mind, but not this. Anything but this.

Trump accepts all of this, but it grates at him, whenever he bothers to remember it, because he believes that here is a man who has been treated unfairly, and he has the sole power to do something about it, and the system will not allow him. But of course, in the end, whatever twisted sense of decency he may have loses out, even though he might otherwise be willing to blow off all advice he gets, for one very simple reason: There is nothing in it for Trump for Trump to release Blagojevich. It will only, ultimately, come to pass that Trump commutes Blagojevich’s sentence if Trump himself is so near to being chased from office that he takes such action as a matter of spite. And this is all very sad. Think of it:

Rod Blagojevich is the last sitting American Governor to be impeached and removed from office, and his last best chance to go home any time soon is if Donald Trump is himself impeached and on the precipice of being removed from office.

As disgraced as he is, for this to be the manner by which a couple years might be shaved off his sentence would only amplify the disgrace.

Meanwhile, the gray tapestry persists in the state he left behind. Yes, there are hopeful signs that it is finally becoming unwoven. But this is Illinois. And Rod Blagojevich didn’t make it the way that it is; really, it’s quite the reverse. He just happens to be doing time for a lot of others too. May justice finally come to them as well.