Warren: Blago’s Disgrace, Our Shame

As Rod Blagojevich stands disgraced, many of us should be ashamed.

The penchant for rationalization and revisionism—displayed daily in divorce courts and press offices of dictators—ran rampant during the gaper’s block that was his lengthy fall. We can now avert our eyes, and he presumably heads to prison and likely plots a rebirth fit for an age where notoriety enhances a miscreant’s magazine-cover and reality-show prospects.

But as we wag our fingers, justifiably exhausted, we forget how “the people” spoke on six occasions when asked if they wanted him as a state legislator, United States congressman and governor. And the press, which can serve a salutary policing function, was often entranced, too.

“In times of uncertainty, a leader must be able to communicate a message of hope that is decisive and aggressive,” opened the Chicago Sun-Times 2002 endorsement of his first gubernatorial run. “An energetic and dynamic campaigner, Blagojevich has demonstrated the self-confidence and political skills needed to guide Illinois through a thicket of woes.”

The late political columnist Steve Neal was more enthused a few months into that first term.

“He’s a breath of fresh air. Blagojevich is living up to his promise,” he wrote.

Neal wasn’t alone. Many were lured by Blagojevich’s charm, retail political skills and the nerve of someone whose life accomplishments were scant—as his premeditatedly self-deprecating testimony reminded the jury as subtly as a Times Square Jumbotron.

And why not? He’d long exploited a self-portrayal of Imperfect Everyman, eschewing aides who told him to cut the talk of flunking the bar exam and other failures. He thought it humanized him and it explains his reflexive turns to the jury nearly every time he’d cite another life’s comeuppance, with his humor, vanity, pettiness, lassitude and occasional stupidity all on view.

For sure, when his 2006 re-election campaign rolled around, there was an unsavory aroma and ample criticism, including from the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune. But naysayers cried out with Don Quixote futility due to his prodigious fundraising and a feeble Republican Party’s hack of an opponent.

“Pay-to-play” was the moniker for the culture he seemed to embody, with one key fundraiser indicted for alleged shakedowns and another soon to plead guilty. But Blagojevich assured all that he was a victim and the Sun-Times, for one, chose “to give him the benefit of the doubt” and endorse him.

When impeached by the legislature, he inadvertently foreshadowed his future appearance on “Celebrity Apprentice” as he resembled a TV character from HBO’s “The Wire.” In the TV show, it’s a corrupt state senator who testifies in his own defense with patently false, rhetorical pyrotechnics of the “You have some nerve to accuse me!” genre.

Blagojevich assembled a populist chorus of disenfranchised souls, including a man in a wheelchair, all of whom he’d supposedly assisted. He threw in a poem, “Ulysses,” by Lord Alfred Tennyson, concluding “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Blagojevich prides himself on his literary and American history bents. And he did have a curious fascination with President Richard Nixon, according to a former aide who testified for the government and asked that I not identify him.

The two politicians did share a few traits, notably obsessing about real and imagined enemies–the imagined torments conjured from the darkest recesses of fertile imaginations. For Nixon, it was often Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. For Blagojevich, there was state House Speaker Michael Madigan and, sometimes, his own father-in-law, Ald. Richard Mell (33rd).

As Blago testified for seven days, and rebutted the incriminating thrust of FBI wiretaps, I did wonder whether he actually believed what he was saying. Some psychologist friends even speculated on possible mental illnesses. I sought more fruitful counsel.

“Nixon claimed he was unaware of the Watergate cover-up until I told him some eight months after the arrests,” said John Dean, the former White House counsel. That was a lie, told to the public and privately to individual members of Congress.

Having lost the 1960 presidential election, Nixon lost his bid for California governor two years later and famously, and self-pitying, told the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” This would surely be his last race.

It wasn’t. As for Blago, assume the collective memory will get shorter in our iPad and YouTube universe. He will find a way back to the public stage. We are, after all, such dupes.