Scoring points

Gov. Rod Blagojevich shoots his message into Illinois living rooms. At the end of the first quarter heÿs still got game. Howÿs he governing?

by Dave McKinney

When Gov. Rod Blagojevich summoned reporters to his Statehouse office during the November veto session, he ridiculed lawmakers as a bunch of “drunken sailors” for threatening to restore more than $148 million of the spending cuts he had made over the summer.

That confrontational and now infamous phrase captivated headline writers. But lost amid the blustery rhetoric was another, equally descriptive metaphor: Blagojevich compared the legislature to the hometown favorites and himself to the road team doing battle on someone else’s turf. “They’re just running amok here at home,” the Democrat said, peering squarely into the TV cameras with a message aimed at Illinois’ living rooms. “We do the best we can to persuade them. But they’ll do what they want to do.”

That perspective is the one that captures the essence of this young governor as he finishes his first year in Illinois’ most powerful office. He’s brash, combative and media savvy.

He has opted to govern from Chicago rather than live in the Executive Mansion and work out of Room 207 in the Capitol. And he wants voters to see him as a political road warrior, ready to defy long odds in the home arena of the entrenched interests running state government.

So far he has managed to pull this off, burnishing his image as the outsider while getting most everything he wants. “Given the fact that virtually all the things that mattered to us legislatively have passed so far,” Blagojevich told Illinois Issues in a December interview, “I have no regrets on how we’ve approached the first year.”

As he enters his second year, though, the governor must map out a new legislative agenda that is likely to be dominated, yet again, by the state’s gloomy financial condition. To take the sports analogy a step further: While the first quarter is coming to a close, there are three more quarters to play. And, increasingly, his administration is scoring critics, particularly from within his own party. They say he hasn’t mastered the art of consensus, he doesn’t communicate with legis-lators and he opts to lead by press conference. They say he and his staff are undisciplined and lack focus. And that’s just the Democrats.

Meanwhile, Republicans, relegated to the tiniest patch of real estate in the Capitol, see potential for political salvation in the turmoil the glib- speaking Blagojevich has helped generate in Springfield.

“He’s buoyant. He has these wonderful one-liners. He’s always attempting to be warm and fuzzy.

You can’t dislike him,” says state Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, head of the Illinois Republican Party and a potential gubernatorial rival in 2006. “But from a professional standpoint he’s a mess. There’s no leadership. The state is adrift.”

So far, the criticism hasn’t stuck.

He’s at his best when mixing with the public, and voters appear disposed to support him.

But the game isn’t over, and Blagojevich will need the legislature to win. This spring, for instance, the state faces an estimated $2 billion shortfall for the next fiscal year that begins in July. Should this fiscal year’s budget come unhinged — something the governor insists won’t happen — a good working relationship with lawmakers will be doubly important.

Blagojevich’s formula for winning points with voters could strain that relationship. It revolves around “changing the old way of doing business” at the Statehouse — something at which he feels he has succeeded. As good as anything Madison Avenue might have cooked up, the strategy is part of his effort to be viewed as the antithesis of George Ryan, his Republican predecessor — the guy voters disapproved of but pols loved. Blagojevich aims to show Illinois that it no longer has a chief executive willing to wine and dine lawmakers at the Executive Mansion, winning their votes by dishing out pork.

“That system has to change. I know it, I presume you know it and I know the people know it. We are going to keep fighting to change this system, a system that has way too much cynicism, a system that has too many misplaced priorities and a system that spends the people’s money with reckless disregard,” Blagojevich says.

“There will be hundreds of battles along the way. We’re going to lose some. We’re going to win some. But in this process, I think what you’re getting from the executive branch this time, unlike the previous administration, is going to be an executive that will keep an eye on the taxpayers’ dollars.”

Blagojevich has accomplished much in his first year. In fact, it could be argued that he was as effective in his first year as Ryan, who knew few equals in his ability to work the General Assembly.

Perhaps Blagojevich’s most enduring achievement was the new ethics law he and legislators negotiated this fall. Inspired by the licenses-for-bribes scandal that toppled Ryan after one term, the final package includes new commissions and several inspector general positions to better police government misconduct. It prohibits lobbyists and their spouses from serving on most state boards and commissions. It requires unpaid political advisers of statewide officeholders to disclose their financial interests.

The most comprehensive rewrite of this state’s ethics laws since the 1970s, the reforms are the result of Blagojevich’s decision to veto a weaker package approved by lawmakers last spring. That legislation lacked ethics commissions or inspectors general for statewide officeholders and the legislature, provisions the governor wanted.

Blagojevich has succeeded on other fronts as well. He convinced lawmakers to go along with a risky budget plan aimed at erasing a $5 billion budget deficit he inherited from Ryan. It called for no hikes in state income or sales taxes, allowing Blagojevich to remain faithful to a campaign pledge. Yet he managed to increase funding for elementary and secondary education by $400 million.

To make his spending plan work, the governor orchestrated steep cuts in other programs, raised more than 100 fees, proposed the sale of the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago and other state property and moved to auction the state’s disputed 10th casino license. Together, the moves would have raised $550 million, but they are non-starters midway through this fiscal year. The sale of the Thompson Center remains a possibility in coming months, but the administration has given up on the sale of the Emerald Casino license, at least for this year, because of its tangled legal status.

Blagojevich bought himself some budgetary wiggle room, however, by pushing a $10 billion borrowing plan billed as a way to shore up the state’s pension systems. He likened the idea to refinancing the state’s debt to future retirees. But, in the short term, it enabled the administration to cover required pension payments out of the state’s main checking account while freeing up $2 billion for day-to-day operating expenses.

Blagojevich also enacted sweeping death penalty reforms that ban executions of the mentally retarded, give defendants more access to evidence and grant the Illinois Supreme Court more authority to throw out improper verdicts in death penalty cases. That package was agreed to this fall, too. The governor had, in a bow to police unions that supported his campaign, struck a provision on police perjury. Ultimately, he and police organizations compromised with lawmakers on the matter and a process will be in place to strip cops of their badges if they lie in capital cases.

In a series of gestures to organized labor, Blagojevich also helped win passage of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s plan to expand O’Hare Airport, which is expected to generate 195,000 jobs, and another measure to hike the minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.50 an hour over two years. That increase in base pay for Illinois workers will give the state the highest minimum wage in the Midwest.

And Blagojevich signed legislation designed to cap the high cost of prescription drugs. The measure would set up a new program for seniors and the disabled, allowing the state to negotiate for medicines in bulk and pass along savings of up to 30 percent for enrollees. Further, the governor wants to import cheaper Canadian drugs for state workers and has pressed President George W. Bush’s administration to relax federal restrictions on the sale of over-the-border drugs for all consumers.

During the fall session, Blagojevich was able to block all but 26 legislative override attempts out of 115 total vetoes. At the same time, he was forced to defend $220 million in spending cuts. Lawmakers voted to restore only about $20 million of that amount.

But in his first year, Blagojevich did take one very public misstep: He rushed to sign a complex telecommunications package pushed in the spring by SBC Communications. Headed by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s brother William, the phone and Internet com-pany launched an aggressive lobbying effort for legislation allowing SBC to charge rivals higher wholesale rates for using the company’s phone lines that are wired to homes and businesses. The Citizens Utility Board, and even Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, opposed the measure, but the governor signed the bill only hours after it hit his desk. In a blow to Blagojevich, a federal judge disagreed with his decision by issuing an injunction to block the law, finding that it was anti-competitive and in conflict with federal law.

Ignoring that bump in the road, Blagojevich’s supporters praise the rookie governor. “I think he’s doing a fine job as governor,” says lobbyist and former Republican Gov. James Thompson, who co-chaired Blagojevich’s transition team. “I’ve said that publicly from the day he took office. I still say it today. His relationship with the legislature will always ebb and flow, as every governor’s has, including mine. But I think he’s a bright, eager, smart politician who’s got his pulse on the feelings of the people of Illinois.”

Still, not everyone is a fan. Blagojevich has made a surprising number of enemies. This is noteworthy because, when Democrats won the governor’s office in 2002, along with both chambers of the legislature, there was giddiness at the state Capitol. It represented the first period of Democratic dominance since the mid-1970s, and offered that party the first chance in a quarter century to dictate an agenda.

But at times the tension between Blagojevich and his erstwhile allies has been thick, rooted in poor communication between the executive and legislative branches. The governor is increasingly comfortable at using his bully pulpit but hasn’t yet mastered the art of picking up the phone.

Asked to assess the governor’s communication skills with the legislature, Democratic Senate President Emil Jones says, “Well, he does a pretty good job of communicating — if I read the papers in time.”

Blagojevich engaged in a public fight with Jones over the surprise amendatory veto of the death penalty provision on cops who commit perjury. He dueled, too, with Democratic Secretary of State Jesse White over $49 million in cuts the governor imposed last spring on White’s budget. That conflict flared again in the fall session when Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan allowed a vote to restore nearly $5 million more than White and Blagojevich agreed to in October.

The governor’s relationship with Madigan has been described as icy, due perhaps to the age-old distrust in Chicago between North and South Side political organizations. Blagojevich, of course, is the son-in-law of North Side Chicago Alderman Richard Mell, while Madigan controls one of the city’s most powerful ward organizations near Midway Airport on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

Likewise, Blagojevich’s ties to the Black and Latino caucuses have been strained. As an example, the governor refused to sign several Latino-supported measures last summer after Sen. Miguel del Valle, a Chicago Democrat, likened him to a “used car dealer” for cutting millions of dollars targeted for social programs, though he had made a commitment to fund them. The measures, aimed at discouraging Latina teen pregnancies, enabling Puerto Rican-trained nurses to get Illinois licenses more easily and requiring women and minorities to be included in more clinical trials, became law anyway under a constitutional provision. Under that provision, a bill automatically becomes law if the governor takes no action within 60 days. This represented the first time an Illinois governor has used such a tactic since the 1930s, and it was interpreted as an effort by Blagojevich to muzzle his critics.

“To send a message this way is clumsy and it’s short-sighted,” del Valle said at the time. “From a political standpoint, it makes no sense, and it puts into question the reform credentials of this administration.”

Blagojevich’s most vocal critics do seem to be clustered in the Senate Democratic caucus, where some members believe he can’t be trusted. Yet relations worsened when the governor used his divisive “drunken sailor” line. “He doesn’t like it when we chastise him, and we don’t like it when he chastises us,” says Democratic Sen. Denny Jacobs of East Moline. “I mean, if he wants to get into a war of words, it’s like I tell people: I was born in the gutter. If you want to go there, c’mon, it’s that simple. But to me, that’s not the issue. The issue is the old adage: Politics is a matter of addition, not subtraction, and he does not add very well.”

But Blagojevich and his allies argue that any tensions are a natural outgrowth of the checks-and-balances system of the executive and legislative branches, that any quarrels lawmakers have with the governor will evaporate the moment one of them needs a favor.

“There’s no question he could improve his relations with members of the General Assembly, but I think he’s got time to do that,” says House Minority Leader Tom Cross, an Oswego Republican and one of Blagojevich’s closest legislative allies. “Members of the General Assembly always want something from the governor’s office. Those days will come if he wants to do that. He has picked a way to govern, and I probably wouldn’t do it the way he’s done it. But it’s just style, and I’m not going to be critical of it.”

Blagojevich’s management style is built on a brain trust of youthful advisers with experience from outside Illinois, a strategy driven partly by his recurrent desire to be positioned as the outsider with a fresh perspective. Blagojevich’s chief of staff Lon Monk is his law school roommate and a former sports agent from California. His deputy governor Bradley Tusk is a former congressional aide and assistant to Republican New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. While both top aides have performed ably during Blagojevich’s first year, some critics question why more homegrown political talent isn’t in the mix — individuals who might be more adept at soothing raw feelings in the legislature.

“Are there not qualified people who have been waiting, who know the score and who have all the capabilities, who are Illinois born and bred?” Topinka asks. “He has to go and pick a roommate from California and some guy from Bloomberg’s administration in New York who have no concept of how the state of Illinois works.”

Besides Monk and Tusk, the governor has relied on a cadre of other less visible advisers, including former Democratic National Chairman David Wilhelm, top fundraiser and roofing contractor Chris Kelly and former congressional chief of staff John Wyma, now a lobbyist. Kelly served as a liaison for Blagojevich in sensitive negotiations before the Illinois Gaming Board over the Emerald Casino. Wilhelm was instrumental in convincing former Federal Emergency Management Agency Director James Lee Witt to head a $2 million state review of a downtown Chicago high rise fire that killed six government workers in October. And Wyma helped orchestrate Tusk’s elevation to deputy governor.

None of these men is on the state payroll, drawing criticism from Senate Republicans who have dubbed them Blagojevich’s “shadow government.” Senate Minority Leader Frank Watson, a Greenville Republican, insisted the ethics legislation Blagojevich wanted contain language requiring these three and other unpaid advisers in the executive branch to file financial disclosure forms with the state.

“Those people who sit down and negotiate for the administration, if they have a stake in what’s being done, that should be shown by an economic interest statement,” Watson said.

Certainly, previous governors have relied on an assortment of behind-the-scenes advisers who weren’t on the state payroll, and little was made of it. But this time the issue had legs, driven by Kelly’s efforts to broker an Emerald casino deal on the governor’s behalf and by the federal government’s Operation Safe Road investigation. While Kelly hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, the feds indicted Larry Warner, an unpaid adviser to George Ryan when he was secretary of state, on racketeering and influence-peddling charges stemming in part from his say in doling out state contracts.

To Blagojevich’s credit, he agreed to include the disclosure requirement in the ethics package.

Other characteristics define Blagojevich’s style. He is chronically tardy to events and meetings. He can be self-deprecating, as when he recalled his days as a Pepperdine University law student who got a “C” in constitutional law. “I barely knew where the law library was,” he said. And he sometimes has said things that have been thoroughly questionable. Trying for an Everyman connection, he called the actions of a Cubs fan who interfered with a crucial playoff foul ball “stupid,” and jokingly offered to help place the fan in a witness protection program. While Blagojevich — a lifelong Cubs supporter himself — deplored threats against the fan for helping blow a World Series appearance for the team, the governor’s words did not help settle the situation.

But those amounted to momentary blips, portals into Blagojevich’s way of thinking. Neither those statements nor his squabbles with lawmakers seem to have tainted the public’s perception to any great extent, though voters do appear to be watching his performance with some degree of skepticism. The most recent public poll, published by the Chicago Tribune in late October, showed that 49 percent approve of the job Blagojevich is doing, while 22 percent disapprove. That standing is just below the 50-percent approval rating most politicians consider a minimum margin of safety.

Watson, the Senate Republican leader, says those numbers could trend further in the GOP’s direction, particularly if Democrats continue to bicker among themselves. As for Blagojevich’s performance, Watson dislikes his frequent attacks on the General Assembly, which remind him of the last Democratic governor, Dan Walker. Mercurial and combative, Walker served but one term in the mid-1970s, a political era marked by strained relations between the executive and legislative branches.

Of Blagojevich, Watson says, “He’s taken us on. He’s taken the constitutional officers on. Maybe in his eyes that builds him up. But it tears the process down. And, as an institution, we in state government should be working together. There’s been former governors who have used this same tactic that didn’t survive this process for very long. If that’s the direction he wants to go, we’ll wait and see.”

Blagojevich is quick to shoot down the comparison, insisting he bears no grudges, even against his harshest Democratic critics. His highest priority, the governor says, isn’t winning a popularity contest in Springfield; it’s putting the public’s interests first.

“When it comes to whether I’m the next Dan Walker, and all the rest, the question presumes the most important priority to me is to just get elected and damn the people. For me, I want to be the best possible governor I can be and worry about getting re-elected later.”

Unlike the Senate Republican leader, the more politically moderate Cross says the road-team status Blagojevich has prescribed for himself seems a natural fit. The House leader says his polling shows the governor hasn’t hurt himself any by taking on the legislature on its home turf. That may be because, as in any sporting match, the longshot often draws the public’s sympathies.

“If you’re the away team, you’re the underdog,” Cross says. “And perhaps he wants to be seen as the underdog.”

Dave McKinney is Statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Illinois Issues, January 2004

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