The Krait Plumbs The Illinois Electorate: Forget Dumb, Blago Has A Reformer's Hair

In today's NY Fishwrap, The Krait (Gail Collins is just as poisonous as her Op-Ed nest-mate — Maureen Dowd, aka The Cobra.) sinks her fangs into the Illinois wackiness that is the disintegration of Governor Milorad "Rod" R. Blagojevich. The Krait is LOL funny throughout today's piece. If this is (fair & balanced) diversion from bad times, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Good News From Illinois
By Gsil Collins

These are troubled times when people yearn for diversion. We like stories about a simple crisis in which somebody does something incredibly stupid that will not cost 100,000 people their jobs. Yet Hollywood starlets and pop singers have been unhelpfully quiet. Then, suddenly, there was Rod Blagojevich seeking bids for Barack Obama’s Senate seat with all the subtlety of a tobacco auctioneer.

That’s the ticket! Now, if only we could indict the economy ...

Feel free to indulge in a little schadenfreude at the expense of the governor of Illinois. Sure, the last couple of months have been tough. But at least you didn’t have to spend your birthday listening to the nation debate whether you were the most corrupt elected official in living memory or simply out of your mind.

Some people might wonder why Blagojevich chose to say potentially incriminating things like “I want to make money” over the telephone at a time when he knew he was the subject of multiple federal investigations. Perhaps his legal problems sent him off into his own little world. There he was, sitting around the house in his blue jogging suit, dipping into delusions of grandeur in which the empty Senate seat becomes a magic key to a Cabinet post, a big-money job for the missus, the presidency in 2016.

Lord knows we’ve all been tempted to retreat into fantasyland when things get rough. Really, the only thing saving us from succumbing was the lack of a Senate seat to sell.

Those of us who do not live in Illinois had generally not given much thought to Rod Blagojevich until this week. We had never wondered how a person with a 13 percent approval rating ever managed to get elected in the first place, though now I am personally leaning toward the theory that it was the hair. Blagojevich tossed his thick brown mane and the voters told each other: “Yes, he sounds a little dumb. But truly, this is the hair of a reformer.”

Illinois is not the only place going through empty-Senate-seat turmoil. In New York, the departure of Hillary Clinton for the Cabinet has set off an unseemly scramble, the like of which you usually see only when someone drops a pound of hamburger in the middle of a pit bull convention.

Still, as far as we know, nobody has actually tried to trade anything other than political advantage, the hope of future campaign contributions and the gratitude of one or more special interest groups. You know, the normal stuff. On behalf of my state, I would like to thank the governor of Illinois for making us feel as if this is a good record.

The Senate seat sellathon is actually not the most damaging thing Blagojevich is accused of trying to do. There are, after all, 100 senators, and we know from several centuries of experience that the nation can survive quite nicely even if a sizable minority are brain-dead bank robbers.

Worse, he’s upped the already hearty level of cynicism in Illinois voters. He ran for governor as an antidote to the culture that had sent an average of one Illinois chief executive to the clink every 10 years. (“Our state has been adrift. Corruption has replaced leadership,” Rod and his hair said in early campaign commercials.) Now look at him. It’s the sort of experience that sets the public wondering if there’s a way to get reform while avoiding reformers.

In New York, of course, we elected a reform governor two years ago, and he was driven from office by some unpleasantness involving the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. escort service. Now, post-Rod, all that seems kind of petty — especially since, as far as we know, Eliot Spitzer even used his own money.

That’s something else we have to hold against Blagojevich. He’s definitely driven the bar of acceptable political behavior below sea level.

Look at Delaware, where the election left yet another Senate seat vacant and Gov. Ruth Ann Minner quickly announced that she’d be appointing Joe Biden’s longtime aide, Edward Kaufman, to the job. Given the fact that Biden wants his seat to eventually go to his son, Beau, who is currently serving in Iraq with the Army National Guard, some observers found it a tad convenient that Minner happened to choose a person no one has ever heard of who is intensely loyal to the Biden family and has already promised not to run in the next election.

But now Delaware is looking like the gold standard. It was only political expediency! The State Legislature isn’t going to have to set up an emergency election so the governor won’t have time to barter the seat away. And everybody in Washington knows the aides do all the real work anyway so nobody will even notice Biden is gone. Good work, Governor Minner!

One thing is clear. We cannot have any more vacant Senate seats hanging around, creating temptation. Next time we have a presidential election, let’s try to limit the candidates to governors, retired generals and failed movie stars. Much safer.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007. Besides America's Women, which was published in 2003, Ms. Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book, which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins. Her new book is about American women since 1960. Collins has a degree in journalism from Marquette University and an M.A. in government from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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