A Portrait of a Politician: Vengeful and Profane

By SUSAN SAULNY

CHICAGO — Little in Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that dropped like a bombshell here on Tuesday. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Mr. Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors.

“I almost fell over,” said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and a frequent critic of the governor. “I was speechless and sickened. In all of the millions of indictments I’ve read over the last years, I can’t remember anything as vile as this.”

Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend of the governor, suggested that Mr. Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality.

“I’m not sure he’s playing with a full deck anymore,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I think he brought a lot of this on himself. He’s so gifted, but so flawed in a number of fundamental areas. It’s like he dared the feds to come get him.”

Drama and suspicion have long surrounded Mr. Blagojevich, a 51-year-old Democrat known locally for his quirky love of Elvis and a big black signature hairstyle of his own. Though he ran for office as a reformer, he has been embroiled for years in a federal investigation into hiring fraud that included multiple departments under his purview.

More recently, his reputation was left badly damaged after the corruption trial of the political fund-raiser Antoin Rezko, who was convicted in June of fraud and bribery among other charges. Mr. Blagojevich’s name and administration surfaced again and again during Mr. Rezko’s highly publicized trial in Chicago. The governor’s approval rating, according to The Chicago Tribune, had sunk to 13 percent.

Yet, despite what looked like his lead role over many years in a political theater of the absurdly corrupt, Mr. Blagojevich, the seemingly earnest son of a Serbian steelworker, was not charged with any wrongdoing. Rumors swirled, and denials were issued.

Tuesday changed all that. It was not simply the extortion and venality with which he was charged that left mouths gaping, but the ruthlessness and grandiosity revealed in the federal wiretap transcripts, even as he knew he was being investigated.

“You might have thought in that environment that pay to play would slow down,” the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said at a news conference announcing the charges. “The opposite happened: it sped up. Governor Blagojevich and others were working furiously to get as much money from contractors, shaking them down, pay to play, before the end of the year.”

In the words of Dick W. Simpson, head of the political science department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a former city alderman: “It’s over the top, even for the governor.”

Ms. Canary, the reform advocate, said she was trying to figure out the pathology that might explain such actions because they are not part of the classic style of Chicago corruption.

“He was raised in the old Chicago ward system where the most important principle is loyalty,” she said. “It’s about protecting one another, spreading perks, and earning personal power. It’s not about huge personal enrichment.”

But that, according to the 76-page criminal complaint, seems to be exactly what Mr. Blagojevich, who cast himself as a man of the people, was after.

Whatever his current motivation, he came into office with a very different persona. As a young congressman representing the North Side of Chicago, Mr. Blagojevich was pegged as a rising star with a populist touch. Undistinguished as a lawmaker but with proven likability in and out of Chicago, he seemed hellbent on pushing reform and cleaning house in a state with an embarrassingly overt culture of political corruption.

Running on a do-good theme as a candidate of change, he swept into the governor’s office earlier this decade mainly on promises that he would be different, that he would restore integrity to the governor’s office after the previous chief executive, George Ryan, was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison for racketeering and fraud.

“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Illinois has voted for change,” he told a crowd at his victory party on election night in 2002.

Back then, it was not a secret that Mr. Blagojevich had big dreams for himself that included the White House. The federal complaint suggested that he was disenchanted with being “stuck” as governor, and had his eyes still trained on the presidency — in 2016, since 2008 was a lost cause.

Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said Mr. Blagojevich had clearly come into office believing he was destined for bigger things, and may have been tripped up by that ambition.

“The combination of arrogance and stupidity that would prompt him to continue in these types of behaviors is just stunning,” Dr. Redfield said. “There’s no feedback loop or reality check.”

Mr. Blagojevich had grown increasingly isolated in recent years, particularly from his own state’s Legislature and even from his father-in-law, Dick Mell, a powerful longtime Chicago alderman who showed him the political ropes as a younger man.

The governor was rarely seen around his offices in Chicago and Springfield, preferring instead to spend time at home on the North Side.

“I believe he became a prisoner of his own home,” Mr. Jacobs said.

Dr. Redfield said he had little sympathy for a man who regarded “the state of Illinois like it’s a big Chicago ward, where a U.S. Senate seat is like granting a zoning variance or liquor license.”

He added: “The damage to the state, it’s going to take a long time to dig out.”

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave."

PATRICK FITZGERALD, the United States attorney in Chicago, commenting on charges against Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois.

Editorial

The Strange Tale of Gov. Blagojevich

We have seen a lot of political hubris, scratch-my-back politics and sheer stupidity over the years. But nothing could prepare us for the charges brought Tuesday against Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois.

The governor’s administration was already under a well-publicized investigation into whether it has been selling appointments to state boards and commissions and awarding contracts and jobs in exchange for financial benefits and campaign contributions.

So what does the F.B.I. claim Mr. Blagojevich was up to while the feds were watching him? According to an F.B.I. affidavit, in recent weeks the governor plotted to sell off the United States Senate seat just vacated by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.

In exchange for his pick, authorities said Mr. Blagojevich was looking for a substantial salary for himself at a foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions, a highly paid position for his wife on corporate boards, a cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself or promises of future campaign funds.

The affidavit also claims that the governor weighed the option of appointing himself should no financially lucrative offer materialize. All this was recorded on court-authorized wiretaps that any target of an investigation would have to assume were in place.

The United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, was clear that the complaint makes no allegations against Mr. Obama. Indeed, it quotes Mr. Blagojevich cursing the president-elect and his team “because they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.”

Mr. Blagojevich also appears to be uncommonly sensitive to criticism for someone so apparently comfortable with bare-knuckle, and worse, politics. He was recorded telling aides to inform the Tribune Company, which filed for bankruptcy protection this week, that it would get no state assistance in selling off Wrigley Field unless it fired members of The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board who had called for his impeachment.

Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat, was elected in 2002 after pledging to restore honor to the Illinois governor’s office. His predecessor, Republican George Ryan, was convicted on federal fraud and racketeering charges and is now in prison. Mr. Blagojevich has urged President Bush to reduce Mr. Ryan’s sentence to time served as an act of compassion. It makes one wonder if the governor sensed that, somewhere down the line, he might need some of that compassion himself.

Mr. Blagojevich must be deemed innocent until proved guilty. But surely the recorded conversations, full of expletive-laced schemes, render him unfit to appoint anyone, least of all himself, to the vacant Senate seat.

If he refuses to step aside, the Illinois Legislature should move to bypass him by removing his appointment power, impeaching him or scheduling a special election. Certainly no self-respecting candidate should accept an appointment by Mr. Blagojevich.

Op-Ed Guest Columnist

Roll Over, Abe Lincoln

By TIMOTHY EGAN

For some time now, the most unpopular governor in the United States, Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, has been treated like a flu virus at a nursing home.

“He’s kryptonite,” one state representative called him in a Chicago Magazine profile last February. “Nobody wants to get near him.”

But it wasn’t until Tuesday, and the filing of a 76-page criminal complaint centered around the auctioning of a Senate seat, that we got a full X-ray of politics at its sickest.

Putting aside the peculiar dialect of desperation that made the governor sound like a John Malkovich character in a David Mamet play, the complaint showed a man trolling the depths of darkness.

The beloved Cubs, the sainted Warren Buffett, editorial writers from the Chicago Tribune, even financing for a children’s hospital — all were targets or leverage points for a shakedown.

The surprise is that he didn’t offer to sell out exclusive rights to deep-dish pizza.

If the world was roused by the sight from Chicago barely one month ago, hundreds of thousands of people streaming into Grant Park to celebrate the triumph of possibility over tainted history, the arrest of Governor Blagojevich on a dark and drizzly Chicago dawn was quite the opposite image.

Abe Lincoln may have rolled over once in pleasant surprise at the election of Barack Obama, and another time in revulsion at Blagojevich’s arrest, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said. More likely, Abe did a triple lutz in his grave on Tuesday.

If nothing else, Blagojevich did Obama the favor of a nonendorsement quote for the ages. According to the federal transcript, the governor showed disgust, barely a week after Obama’s election, that he could not get anything in return for offering the Senate seat to an ally of the president-elect.

“They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation,” the governor says, as outlined in the criminal complaint.

It would be somewhat comforting if there were a larger lesson here, or a map out of the banality of evil. But there is no trend or modern twist, no evidence of a greater criminal web, no overarching moral. Like a kid who beats up old ladies just because he knows no other way, the allegations against Blagojevich amount to what Fitzgerald called a crime spree, of the political variety.

The prosecutor’s narrative of plotting bad intentions and narcissism — Blago actually thought he was a viable candidate for president in 2016 — is a particularly graphic example of why some men see things as they are and ask: what’s in it for me?

Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Scooter Libby under the pressure of a White House not used to getting questioned by anyone, is the son of a Manhattan doorman and the product of Catholic schools at their finest. It’s unlikely that his dad ever heard anything to match the conversations captured by federal wiretaps in Illinois.

Like all damaged politicians, the Blagojevich in the complaint knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

What’s a Senate seat worth? “Golden,” and the governor vowed that he would not give it up for nothing.

How about help for the Tribune Company’s attempt to sell Wrigley Field and the Cubs? That would require getting rid of editorial writers who had called for his resignation. Fire them all, Blagojevich is quoted as having said, adding, “And get us some editorial support.”

Aid for a children’s hospital? That would require a contribution of at least $50,000.

On and on it goes, trash talk of the want-to-be-rich-and-infamous. Even by Illinois standards, where the path from the Statehouse to the jailhouse holds the footprints of numerous governors, Tuesday’s arrest and complaint was breathtaking.

“If it isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States,” said Robert Grant, a F.B.I. special agent, “it’s one hell of a competitor.”

On Monday, the eve of his arrest, Blagojevich showed that he could include hubris among his many flirtations with disaster. At a rally of out-of-work factory hands soiled by his presence, he all but asked to be followed and recorded.

“I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead,” he said. “I can tell you whatever I say is always lawful.”

Then, like Huey Long at his most egregious, he cast himself as the person who has nothing to sell but an honest day’s labor. If you were to tape him, he added, you would hear a governor “who tirelessly and endlessly figures out ways to help average, ordinary working people.”

Substitute one word — himself — for working people, and you have the essence of Governor Blagojevich.

Timothy Egan writes Outposts, a column at nytimes.com.

Op-Ed Contributor

State of Shame

By SCOTT TUROW
Chicago

HERE in Chicago, where we are accustomed to news that challenges the thresholds of belief, we awoke Tuesday to find that our governor, Rod Blagojevich, had become the second Illinois chief executive in a row to be subjected to criminal charges.

The 76-page criminal complaint implies that Mr. Blagojevich was such an inveterate schemer that despite being the obvious target of a three-year federal grand jury investigation into trading state jobs and contracts for campaign contributions, he had to be taken out of his house in handcuffs to prevent him from selling off the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

Even by Chicago’s picaresque standards, Tuesday’s developments are mind-boggling, even more so to a former federal prosecutor like me with an understanding of some of the nuances of the federal criminal justice system. The most worrisome element is that Mr. Blagojevich’s shameless behavior seems to have put Chicago’s United States attorney, the estimable Patrick Fitzgerald, into the unenviable position of having to bring a case before he was ready.

Mr. Fitzgerald has lived by the Machiavellian motto that if you shoot at the king, you had better kill the king. Mr. Fitzgerald’s highest-profile prosecutions — like those of I. Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and of Mr. Blagojevich’s predecessor as governor, George Ryan — have been assembled methodically, with an almost obsessive desire to tie down evidentiary details before charges are returned.

Furthermore, Mr. Fitzgerald has a history of trying not to use the justice system to pre-empt the operation of other democratic institutions. Thus, despite a more than five-year investigation, the Ryan indictment was withheld until after the governor left office in 2003, and Mr. Fitzgerald did not oppose a defense request to schedule Mr. Libby’s perjury and obstruction justice trial after the 2006 midterm elections.

Undoubtedly one of the events Patrick Fitzgerald has no desire to influence is his own possible reappointment as United States attorney for four more years (all United States attorneys can be replaced by the incoming administration). Mr. Fitzgerald’s effectiveness as a prosecutor is unquestioned, and the state’s senior senator, the Democrat Dick Durbin, has said Mr. Fitzgerald can stay in the job if he wants to.

But the Justice Department may have other thoughts. Mr. Fitzgerald has held the job since October 2001, some may argue that a position with such extraordinary discretionary powers should not lay in the same hands for 12 years.

Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald’s bare-knuckle methods have rankled many in the Chicago bar. For example, he got George Ryan’s chief of staff, Scott Fawell, to testify against his former boss by threatening to imprison Mr. Fawell’s girlfriend for perjury.

In his news conference Tuesday, Mr. Fitzgerald indicated that he hadn’t planned to indict Governor Blagojevich until next spring, meaning that the prosecutor was going to wait until his own fate was decided. Instead, with wiretap evidence piling up that showed that Mr. Blagojevich was intent on selling the Obama seat in exchange for a substantial personal benefit, like a high-paying job for himself or his wife, Mr. Fitzgerald was forced to make the arrest. He decided that he could not even wait for the grand jury investigating Mr. Blagojevich to meet on Thursday and indict him.

Bypassing the grand jury and proceeding through a criminal complaint instead effectively puts the case against Mr. Blagojevich on the express route. Mr. Fitzgerald will now have only 20 days to either give the governor a preliminary hearing — which would amount to free discovery for his defense lawyer — or return an indictment. Given Mr. Fitzgerald’s frank appeal for information from the public at his news conference, it’s obvious that his case is not fully buttoned up, and that Mr. Blagojevich forced the prosecutor’s hand.

All of this news comes with personal chagrin for me because I was Governor Blagojevich’s first appointment to the Illinois Executive Ethics Commission, a body created his first year in office. (For the record, I have never made a campaign donation to him.) The commission judges ethics complaints against state officials, supervises ethics instruction, and tries to carry out an overall mandate to improve the ethical climate in Illinois.

Ethics reform in Illinois is often regarded as an oxymoron, and I admit that the commission’s arduous efforts to strengthen our ethics laws have met with little success. Speaking solely for myself, I hope the governor’s arrest galvanizes public outrage and at last speeds reform.

One change that is obviously indispensable is overhauling the campaign contribution laws in Illinois, where there are literally no limits on political donations — neither how big they can be or who can give them. The lone exception is a law, passed over a Blagojevich veto, that takes effect Jan. 1, prohibiting large state contractors from donating to the executive officer who gave them the business. Otherwise, anybody — union officials, regulated industries, corporations, lobbyists — can throw as much money as they like at Illinois politicians.

This astonishing state of affairs persists 32 years after the Supreme Court, in Buckley v. Valeo, recognized “the actuality and appearance of corruption resulting from large individual financial contributions” in approving limits on such donations to candidates for federal office. One can only hope that even in Illinois we are too ashamed now to tolerate business as usual.