The Last Emperor of Illinois

It could only be now, this week of all weeks, when the story will inevitably be buried by all of the other madness going on:

Michael Madigan. Guilty. Ten counts.

And yet Madigan isn’t even the most notoriously corrupt Illinois politician in the news this week. That honor goes to the governor Madigan couldn’t stand, Rod Blagojevich, officially pardoned this week for his various crimes.

Five years ago, I wrote at length about the Blagojevich saga, and at the time, I wrote about Madigan and what made the two men different… and not so different. I’ll quote myself at length because it’s fascinating how the story has now flipped:

So, we’re here now, and Blagojevich is a free man, and Madigan did go down, his fatal mistake apparently being to trust Danny Solis. I suspect though that if you look very closely at the ten counts that stuck to Madigan in the end, you might be vaguely unsatisfied. That’s how these things tend to go in the end, after all. Not everyone gets busted for such spectacular things as trying to sell a Senate seat.

My point then, and now, is that Blagojevich went down the way that he did because of style and spectacle, not because his crimes were extraordinarily worse, where by worse, what I mean is that his crimes weren’t especially damaging. After all, he didn’t sell the Senate seat in the end. What made all of the politicos in Illinois so angry about Blago was that he took it all too far, attracted too much attention. Run of the mill corruption doesn’t tend to turn crimimal because you’re too corrupt; rather, you get busted for being too sloppy. (I also think that a whole lot of political types around Illinois were supremely pissed off that that guy managed to become governor and they didn’t.)

Madigan was famously old school. He learned directly from Old Man Daley. Daley’s Machine was built largely on a latticework of favors, where maybe the majority of favors arguably didn’t rise to the level of corruption on their own, but the sum total was a deeply flawed and unfair system. But unless you could demonstrate that the latticework somehow qualified as racketeering, you were just left scrutinizing the individual favors. And if the individual favors were explicitly legal… well, then, the whole damn thing is legal, isn’t it?

What distinguished Madigan from Daley, I think, is that during Daley’s reign over Chicago, people more or less thought the whole thing was working… on some level, they actually thought it was fair. And I think that’s because the perceived barriers of entry were quite low. You just had to be willing to scratch someone’s back. Now, it’s true that at some level they didn’t want nobody nobody sent, but you didn’t need to go to college to figure out how to get sent. And after all, didn’t Daley learn the right lessons from Cermak, didn’t he make sure to include all the ethnic groups, all the business groups? Didn’t Daley have the best interests of the city at heart? Wasn’t there a purpose to the power?

Mike Madigan, I’d argue, was an even purer distillation than Richard J. Daley, because the power was the whole point. Getting developers routed to his law office? Getting dipshits cushy no-work jobs for ComEd? That stuff was secondary, a side hustle. Honest graft.

The people may be willing to forgive the honest graft if they think the system is working for them, like they did was Daley. But for whom was the State of Illinois truly working well in the Madigan years? Illinois was a high tax, low services state. The state legislature was a hotspot of nepotism, filled with fools who barely attempted to do their jobs. Madigan’s control wasn’t quite absolute, but within his caucus, it was close enough. Good luck trying to be a reformer or progressive through most of the Madigan years.

This is ultimately why the latticework of corruption was so awful, so reprehensible. It’s not about a bribe here or an appointment there. It’s about how Madigan was far more concerned with maintaining power than he was with the health of the state. It was under Madigan that cut after cut after cut to higher education took place, for example. And it was under Madigan that a mostly unexceptional north sider (but with exceptional hair) who happened to marry into a powerful family managed to in effect be given a seat in the state legislature, and then in Congress, and then, well, what if I told you that in 2002, a year when the Democrats were pretty much guaranteed to finally win the governor’s mansion back, that the very best they could find to field in the primary were Roland Burris, Paul Vallas, and Rod Blagojevich? And even then some spectacular things had to happen to open the door for Blagojevich? And of course Madigan was fine with all this at first, because he didn’t want a strong governor to contest his tight grip on the state.

At some point time catches up with us all, and what’s telling to me is that Madigan, like Daley, didn’t really have a successor lined up, that was never part of the calculus. What Madigan ultimately couldn’t control was the emergence of JB Pritzker in 2018. Pritzker the billionaire didn’t need Madigan at all, and once he was elected, it turned out that suddenly a lot of other Democrats didn’t much need Madigan either. Astonishingly, over the past several years, Illinois has gone from having one of the most thoroughly incompetent legislatures to having one of the most competent. It took Madigan being sidelined for that to happen.

It’s true that over the last five decades, the American people have grown more and more cynical toward government, and for a lot of good reasons. I just don’t think most people expect their governments to do a very good job, and I think that sentiment lives all across the political spectrum. Having lived in Illinois for, well, my entire adult life, the person I associate most with holding government back is Michael Madigan. This is not the same thing as what’s happening in Washington right now, where government is actively being ransacked, but I do think that what’s happening now has resulted from a broad weakening of government, and Madigan was one of the people who frankly led the way nationally. I know a lot of you reading this are angry about the ways Republicans have gerrymandered their states, but who do you think they learned that from? I know a lot of you reading this are angry about how pervasive money is in politics, but who do you think was the master of moving money around to control legislators and votes? Even if it feels like a stretch to suggest that Madigan could be blamed for what’s ailing America today, let me tell you, it’s not. It wasn’t just him, of course, but his contributions to the decay of American government were real.

I admit, I’ve despised the man for a long time, for a lot of reasons. My animus is well established. Take my mother’s word for it:

Alas, I don’t take much solace from the conviction of an 82 year old man who was already mostly a political pariah. I think he deserves to fade away into ignominy in his twilight years, but I don’t find it cause for much celebration. I do, however, think it’s funny that his conviction comes on the heels of Blagojevich’s pardon. One of the things which I think Madigan has largely avoided in his long life is outright mockery, and on some level I think Blago’s very existence is about as insulting to Madigan’s political life as anything could possibly be.

There will never be another Madigan, or at least not around here. Guys like that - and of course they’re only men - will always be around, but the traditional levers of power have shifted too much to be grasped in the same ways. The closest comp in Washington is probably Mitch McConnell, and his days in the Senate are surely numbered now, though he’ll manage to avoid ending his career as a convicted felon, so I guess that’s one for Mitch. But nah, their kind is a dying breed, and in large part because of their very actions to weaken the positive potential of government. Much of what’s emerged in the wake of their destruction is worse, but Illinois at least stands as an example that things can get better, that better people can actually make real attempts to govern. Maybe this can happen in Washington one day as well.

Here in the Land of Lincoln, though, we have seen the full fall of the last emperor.