Rod Blagojevich’s post-verdict press junket may demonstrate, among other things, his recognition that interest in him might not sustain itself in a second trial quite like it did in the first.
“Blago is playing the only card available to him,” said Roosevelt University political scientist Paul Green. “By becoming a media star he will prevent ‘Blago boredom.’”
The ink had barely dried on the verdict form before the former governor was off to New York talking to Meredith Vieira on NBC’s “The Today Show.” Then it was back to Chicago where he signed autographs (at $50 a pop) at the Chicago Comic Con festival, followed by an interview via satellite with “Fox News Sunday” before traveling again to Manhattan for a Monday appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
Judge James Zagel has set a hearing for Thursday to determine if and when a retrial will take place. In addition to Blagojevich finding out how to prepare his defense team for a second time, he’ll find out how much time he will have to grab headlines – and possibly make money.
Blagojevich’s publicist Glenn Selig said that the former governor’s media tour will take a brief breather following his “Daily Show” sit-down.
“You always want exposure but not overexposure,” Selig said. “Some people may look at it that any time you see him it’s overexposure. But you do the best you can and try to balance it the best you can. That is the way we looked at it back (before the trial) when we had a much larger window. I don’t know what we’ll have here.”
Selig continues: “If you go to a dinner party and all you do is keep talking yourself over and over and over again, you want to make sure people remember but you don’t want people to get sick of it.”
Already, some see a desperate need for Blagojevich to get new material.
“He’s like that annoying disruptive neighbor everyone has,” said Chicago-based Democratic political consultant Eric Adelstein. “At first he’s a menace and seemingly disruptive but after a while, when he doesn’t understand that he’s not welcome, people just go back to their lives and ignore him.”
If the next step is to be a political turncoat, Blagojevich has so far refused to bite.
On Sunday, Blagojevich resisted Chris Wallace’s effort at the end of his “Fox News Sunday” segment to comment on what the continued trial means politically for national Democrats – which likely would have manifested a headline-grabbing quote.
“This has never been about trying to take other people down and making other people look bad,” said Selig. “He said he did nothing wrong and these other people didn’t do anything wrong either.”
The ex-governor might hang like a dark cloud for Democrats with the election just more than two months away, but that doesn’t mean the cloud will rain cash for him.
Some things, of course, are out of Blagojevich’s control. He, like all ignominious mortals, is held to the inalterable laws of the media universe: diminishing returns, conservation of mass, etc.
But there is still a place for strategy.
“Since the trial was so high profile, the public will keep interest in Blagojevich if he lets people digest and absorb what happened,” says Republican political strategist Ron Bonjean.
“In a few weeks, he can then begin to raise the intensity again and peak people’s interest with another round of drama. This will be successful if he repeats this process throughout the year.”
Blagojevich found staying power throughout the 18 months between his arrest and the start of his trial.
Immediately following his impeachment from office, Blagojevich took to “The Late Show with David Letterman.”
Then came Patti Blagojevich’s reality TV insect-eating adventures; Rod Blagojevich’s appearance in a Second City musical; the announcement, and then release, of his autobiography, “The Governor”; his stint on “The Celebrity Apprentice”; his interview with Esquire magazine in which he claimed to be “blacker than Barack Obama”; and his lecture on ethics at Northwestern University, his alma mater.
Each episode was fairly evenly spaced out over the course of a year and a half, enough so that they generated a steady stream of headlines while obscuring the fact that Blagojevich wasn’t actually making news.
Selig said the spacing was by design. But the second round presents an even greater challenge.
“The Today Show,” was a logical first destination for Blagojevich following the verdict, considering past appearances on the NBC reality shows “Celebrity Apprentice” and “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Here!” (Selig said there have been new reality TV offers, but he would not release details.)
“We could have done all the morning shows.” Selig said. “I think then you have your message going everywhere. It was a very carefully thought out plan to not do everyone and the variety of shows we did gave us different audiences to reach and really gave him an opportunity to point his message and get one message out.”
Selig said that it is important that Blagojevich also does “tough interviews” to keep people tuned in.
“We’re being inundated right now for requests for interviews with projects they want to attach him to,” Selig added. “There is no shortage of things.”
Blagojevich would like to resume his former radio show with WLS-AM, Selig said. The show is currently on hiatus: “We do not have anything to announce at this time,” said Brad Wallace, WLS’s director of marketing and promotions.
Selig promises more.
And why not, some political consultants say.
“I think there’s a method to Blago’s madness, and I would pour it on,” said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala, a former adviser to Bill Clinton. “’Iron Chef,’ ‘Deadliest Catch,’ ‘Antiques Roadshow,’ you name it.”