More than anything else, disgraced ex-Governor Rod Blogojevich (forever Blogo in the public’s memory) was more reminiscent of a tiresome bad-haired actor who simply would not leave his stage. At least with actors we can ignore their plays, movies and TV.
The Illinois Senate by a unanimous 59-0 vote rid themselves of their embarrassment after pelting him with the political equivalent of rotten tomatoes: words. Yet, in so doing, the politicians managed to bring into play by way of pundit reaction and observations by Forever Blago a nasty little secret: Pay for play is common currency in lots of places including Illinois. Heavens to Betsy and the cats are now out of the bag!
Blago, in defeat, surely must have impressed those Senators with his marathon verbal abilities in blathering the daylights out of the English language.
Like a like a member of the Jets in West Side Story and possessed of a lexicon heavy on Kipling and cowboy stories, Blago provided pundits with the kind of stuff suggesting street corner analysis. For them and editorial page cartoonists, Blago was the best thing to come down the pike since Sarah Palin. Dare we hope that greater fools will come along to take our minds momentarily off the economy?
Blogo, as we learned through a seemingly unending series of exclusive TV interviews, is a relatively artful dodger of questions. Were he a running back, memories of Chicago Bears Walter Payton would have been invoked somewhere along the way. Blogo’s next problem involves likely prosecution by U.S. Prosecuting Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. It was Fitzgerald who offered up for public consumption what Blago feels are cherry-picked segments of the ex-governor’s highly F-worded salesmanship of the President’s former U.S. Senate seat. Blago’s suggestion that the damning evidence was lifted out of context and that only by hearing the tapes in their entirety can justice prevail failed to win the hearts and minds of the Illinois lawmakers. Blago appears to have an uphill struggle since the evidence is on tape.
Politicians caught on tape is not a new thing. The Nixon White House tapes have added greater understanding of Watergate and the former President’s rants suggesting mounting paranoia. The passage of time has given us perspective of Nixon’s enemies list that included actor Paul Newman. Newman had the last laugh when he observed that his proudest moment came with the news that he was on the list.
One of the most frightening aspects of this dear but fragile democracy concerns the quality of people we elect to public office. This is borne out by approval ratings indicating we don’t know what we are doing when electing people to represent us. The public, often admittedly fickle, public granted an office-leaving George Bush an approval rating of 38 percent, double that of four months earlier. It takes not a Mensa mind to understand that the public bought into a massive White House PR campaign that peddled a he-saved-us-from-another-terrorist-attack legacy; that and a gigantic sigh of relief that the President and his silly syntax was finally leaving office.
While Bush’s eight years of ineptitude, end runs around the Constitution and soaring arrogance were a ratings bomb, the public’s approval of the job being done by Congress is even worse The most recent Rasmussen Reports indicates 11 per cent approval shortly after the current Congress went into session. That was three points higher than 11 months prior, the all-time poor performance record.
Then we have the remarkably unpopular vice-president Dick Cheney whose performance, had he been a contestant on “American Idol,” would have earned deserved scorn from the judges. Cheney, whose dark Machiavellian presence will provide tantalizing fodder for historians, left office with 13 per cent approval. Keep in mind there are a great many people in this country who vote zealously on the basis of one subject, an indictment of great import.
The damnable thing about the long-running lack of political leadership in this country is that we keep encouraging hacks to run for even higher office. We had our chances with Nixon a number of times and failed the challenge. In view of the shambles left behind by George Bush, there was forewarning of his talent in a highly mediocre governorship of Texas.
And, of course, elections aren’t the only way for inappropriate candidates to attain office. There’s always office by appointment and it goes far beyond Gov. Blago’s naming of Roland Burris to the Obama seat. Currently, there are five U.S. Senators in office by appointment. In spite of the ratification of the 17th amendment in 1913, 184 Senators have been “elected” to office by governors. This is in direct violation of the Constitution which dictates governors “shall issue writs of elections to fill such vacancies.” Only Oregon, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts currently play by the rules.
As Shakespeare’s Cassius once observed: “The problem, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves.”
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