The NA710N

More than a year removed from a scandal that got him booted from the highest office of his state and obliterated his moral reputation, Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois has navigated a career odyssey in an attempt to find a home, with all roads leading to jail. He has been a tell-all author, a talk show staple, a reality TV personality, and an Elvis impersonator, paying for each public appearance with another shred of dignity in the hope that some media bottom feeder will take pity on him. Throughout his year of implosion, however—one that would give Britney Spears a run for her money— something truly un-American happened. No one challenged the verdict against him in the court of public opinion, condemning him for attempting to sell President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat. The diversity of opinions only our great country can provide has spawned support for some of the world’s most despicable characters: OJ Simpson, the Gosselins, even Osama bin Laden. But Rod Blagojevich was met with crickets when asking for help.

As a nation, we didn’t throw Blagojevich under a bus; we threw him on an airplane tarmac during holiday season and, just to make sure he got it good, drove one of those luggage-filled golf carts over him a couple of times before the planes got there. Not since the Watergate scandal had the nation experienced such organized and devastating character assassination. It’s enough to make any suspicious mind curious, and it takes a bit of a conspiracy-oriented mindset to even contemplate that this man should be innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps it is the hair, or maybe the outlandish press conferences, or the fact that he unleashed the fury of Roland Burris onto the Senate, but Americans have a passion for disparaging this man. Yet the seventy or so pages accusing him in the federal complaint of attempting to sell the Senate seat generate many more questions than they answer. There is something thoroughly unsatisfying about the way it quotes the main characters and the integrity of the witnesses. It is simply filled with too many pseudonyms, too many brackets, too many ellipses to be telling the full story. The impression that someone is being protected in these pages is impossible to ignore.

Before getting to the extremely questionable evidence, it bears pointing out that the more obscure of two major claims, alleging that Blagojevich attempted to get a Chicago Tribune reporter fired for being critical of his administration, rings truer than the Senate seat accusation. The quotes from the governor (and his wife) clearly indicate his intentions and the sources seem to be, if not believable, at least consistent. He was leveraging the purchase of the Chicago Cubs to force the head of the Tribune to fire an enemy. Patti Blagojevich says it herself, in cruder words than that. The governor does not even attempt to defend himself from those accusations in his autobiography The Governor, a 200-page manifesto against racism and taxes that goes into his arrest in detail. It is the second accusation— that Blagojevich intended to sell Barack Obama’s former senate seat— which reads a bit like a retelling of Rashomon, with no one testimony aligning with another and no witness more credible than the next. In particular, there are two gaping holes in the federal argument against Blagojevich. The first is one that the governor made a hearty talking point out of; the quotes from taped conversations read suspiciously out of context. The second is the quality of the people willing to step forward and condemn him is subject to further inquiry.

Blagojevich’s foul language does little for his public image, but throwing around a few f-words shouldn’t put anyone in jail. And besides that, there is not all that much meat on the bones of this accusation. Yes, it is quite clear that he considered taking the Senate seat himself, with classic quotes like “I can parachute me there” and “I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying?” Contemplating this does not break any laws and, considering he was thinking about appointing Oprah Winfrey and eventually appointed Roland Burris, maybe he wasn’t his own worst choice after all.

Outside of being clear about considering himself a possible Senate candidate, one is hard-pressed to find direct quotes that sound like Blagojevich is trading personal monetary benefits for the seat. With the help of way too many editor-inserted words in quotes that are too short to hold so many, it may be possible to stretch them out into a smoking gun. In fact, many of the suspicious sentences—for example, the suggestion of a “three-way deal” between Blagojevich, the President, and the unions “so there is no obvious quid pro quo”—are not even attributed to the governor. Most of the time, though, the complaint accuses Blagojevich without evidence of things like stating “that he is willing to ‘trade’ the Senate seat to Senate Candidate 1 in exchange for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services.” The accusations are there, but the tapes aren’t quoted, and the witnesses questionable (more on that later).

Of the direct quotes, the most incriminating is also the most famous: “I’ve got this thing and it’s f****** golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f****** nothing.” Blagojevich has repeatedly stated that he meant nothing illegal by this claim, and that he merely wanted to put someone in office that would work to bring benefits back from Washington to the people of Illinois. He was, he claims, fighting for health care benefits for Illinois residents, for more money for the state government, to appoint someone who was first and foremost concerned with Illinois. This made him wary of candidates the White House handpicked, who would be more concerned with sponsoring legislation that would improve the Obama administration’s image. Moreover, he argues in his book that he had made what he describes as a “routine” political deal with Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and his daughter Lisa. The elder Madigan would pass a bundle of laws benefitting Illinois residents and stop blocking Blagojevich’s initiatives in the legislature in exchange for Blagojevich appointing his daughter to the Senate seat. Lisa Madigan was serving as Illinois Attorney General at the time and was not a laughable suggestion for the seat, although bad blood between Blagojevich and the Madigans made the choice “personally repulsive” to him.

The more mundane part of the complaint seems to back up Blagojevich’s good intentions. He states openly that he would appoint a White House approved senator “in good faith . . . but it is not coming for free. . . .It’s got to be good stuff for the people of Illinois…” The complaint later explains that Blagojevich had a concrete plan for distributing this “good stuff,” further corroborating that he had bigger interests than himself. He is quoted as suggesting to the White House that he would appoint current White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett (“Senate Candidate 1”) if he could receive help in starting up an issue advocacy group, “so I can advocate health care and other issues I care about and help them.” In fact, Blagojevich emphasizes in the complaint that the nonprofit is the “one thing I’d be interested in.” The nonprofit sounds very much like a way to go around the Illinois legislature to enact the same reforms he would have wanted out of the Madigan deal. Looking for a senator who has an interest in allocating funds to an issue one has an interest in is not, to paraphrase the governor himself, an impeachable offense, and the consistency in the demands makes his claims more concrete. In fact, it would be a crime to appoint someone to office based on anything other than political interest in the same issues. It would only lead to stalemates. The press kept the idea of a 501(c)(4) organization under wraps, sticking to the shock-value quotes and laughing off the idea that The Hair, and the human under its control, would be interested in anything but itself. The direct quotes from the complaint seem to paint another story, and Blagojevich’s persistent claims to have all the tapes heard seem to indicate that there is more exonerating evidence under wraps.

Reading into the quotes from the governor alone, however, will lead nowhere. As the saying goes, the author is dead, and anyone can interpret anything from his words. Yet these possible out-of-context quotes are not the only suspicious items in the complaint. The list of people responsible for catching him in flagrante begins to cast some doubt on what was almost certain guilt this time last year, even those involved in the Tribune case. We already knew that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had had conversations with Blagojevich that incriminated the latter and not the former. As Blagojevich succeeded Emanuel in his Congressional seat prior to assuming the governorship, their relationship should come as no surprise. Nor should the presence of Obama himself make any jaws drop. It is way past them that big sharks swim.

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