Plenty of blame to go around

Campaign Contribution Limits: Illinois is one of five states that have no limits at all. Give a grand, fifty grand, a million. Perfectly legal.

Various Limits (38 states + D.C.)
Ban on Corporate Contributions; No Other Limits (4 states)
Limit on Corporate Contributions; No Other Limits (3 states)
Ban on Monetary Contributions by Political Parties; No Other Limits (1 state)

WHITE STATES: No Limits from Any Source (5 states)

Let’s move past cringing in shame and embarrassment over the Blagojevich fiasco and look at how we got here. It’s not enough to blast the “culture of corruption” and wail with John Kass about the “combine.”

It’s structural. It’s also about people – the people who, because they everything to gain by the system as it is, hold hard and fast to the status quo. Who are they? The Dynasties.

Blago is the product of Dick Mell, though they have indeed since had a falling out. Todd Stroger, who has nearly his entire extended family on the county payroll, is the product of John Stroger. Daddy Stroger spawned an ocean of others who were indebted to him as well. Mr. Speaker For Life gave us Lisa. Emil has now provided us with his kid. Comptroller Hynes was created by 19th Ward Committeeman Tom Hynes. And Daley, famously known for saying “what’s the point of political power if you can’t help out your friends and family?” – well, enough said. Dynasties protect and promote their own.

And what have the dynasties created?

No limits on campaign contributions. Illinois is one of five states that allow the unbridled excess of unlimited campaign contributions – be they by political action committees (formed by parties, party leaders or interest groups), corporations, unions or individuals. Who in their right mind just loves some state pol so much that they would give them $25,000 – or hundreds of thousands. I can see it with Obama; there was a lot of love out there. But tell me Blago’s contributors were just loving him up. That’s not love. That’s paying for something in return. The dynasties and those who are indebted to them ensure these laws do not change. That's ****in' golden.

Opacity in government. Illinois does not have freedom of information; we have Guantanamo of information. It’s all locked up and locked down. It isn’t just Blagojevich. How about Todd Stroger’s gag edict on staff? Open meetings? Ha. Ever seen the state budget process? It’s all done (when it used to be done, that is) behind closed doors. Few object. The Dynasties love operating in the shade.

Over-reliance on the feds. Okay, Lisa Madigan deferred to Fitzgerald on the Blagojevich investigation, but there’s lots of corruption to go around. Do she and does the State’s Attorney really have to sit on their hands rather than investigate the stuff going on all around them? In other states, both the AG and state’s attorneys prosecute corruption. It’s not up to one guy – fortuitously nominated by an outsider who knew exactly what he was bequeathing Illinois.

And the people of the State of Illinois?

Is there pride in corruption? The people of Illinois almost giggle when they talk about corruption. The U.S. Attorney’s Office supplies some of the titillating jocularity as it names its investigations like they are B-movies: Operation Greylord, Operation Haunted Hall, Operation Silver Shovel, Operation Safe Roads, and now, Operation Board Games. We compete for the status of “most corrupt.”

Maybe, finally, it doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

Illinois in the news: A governor is arrested

Yeah, it’s our turn (again).

It’s been just a month since the flag waving in Grant Park -- with the whole world watching and maybe even a little jealous. It was followed by day-after-day of orderly transition and press conferences (some say too orderly – they want free for alls) from Chicago, highlighting again Obama’s smooth, confident and focused work of putting an administration together.

Then, like a gang banger grabbing some bling off a kid around the corner, our governor with the giant mound of hair has to chase after his own bling – whatever he could get for a Senate seat, for approval of a gaming bill, for releasing committed funds to a children’s hospital, and a host of other sales of his office – and our state -- to whomever he could get to bid and pay.

This has been going on for years. To some of us, it is not news, even as the arrest is. We can exhale. Finally. But the timing is aggravating.

Blagojevich is now grabbing international headlines, too. In an entirely disgusting way. Due to his vainglorious and greedy idiocy, we are no longer the city of that magnificent, uplifting and peaceful night at Grant Park, but the Tribune's John Kass’s nightmare-land of venality and corruption. And, predictably, Kass will tie it to Obama – even if the string is as thin as a net of spun sugar.

The out-of-towners – the reporters hunkered in here for the duration of the transition -- will ruminate and speculate. Is there something about Chicago? Is it the Daleys? How is Obama implicated? How could he not be?

Well, for starters, while he didn’t “take on” the machine, he was hardly “of the machine,” let alone its creature. We have plenty of those – the dynasty families that give birth to and then get their spawn elected and elected again.

Obama’s deceased parents did not bequeath him seats in Illinois. And no matter how much that “godfather” label is given to statehouse senate prez Emil Jones in relation to Obama, he was more a church usher; Jones just opened the doors of the statehouse and directed the flock this way and that. He didn’t raise the guy.

So, the drama is still unfolding and will for a long time to come. Blago won’t resign. He’s too full of himself to even consider it. As we sit here gagging on his greed, he’s pouring over the headlines and rejoicing. Finally, he’s getting headlines like his hero Elvis.

"Aiding a Surrender to Terror"?

What the %#& did Romney say? The gloves are waaay off now.

Romney, the former favorite GOP robot since Gort ("Klaatu barada nikto!) just announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference that if he stayed in the race it would "forestall the launch of a national campaign and be making it easier for Sen. Clinton or Obama to win. Frankly, in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Can't get much more inflammatory than that. Perfect for his audience of paranoid conservatives fretting over fear of liberal fumigation. They will be hearing panels and speeches apparently designed to ratchet up that fear. "What Do Liberals Have Planned for Your Money?" featuring, among others, Grover Norquist, who famously instructed his partisans, “You look for an issue that unites your side . . . divides the other side and allows you to reach in . . . and take their hearts out," and denounced bipartisanship as "date rape." Will he be calling Barack a "date raper?"

The crowd's hearts will race as they cringe over other frights: How the Liberals Are Criminalizing Free Enterprise. Threats to Our National Sovereignty. Why Judges Are STILL the Problem and What to Do About It.

While all this fear is being spread and accompanying vitriol spewed, I reflect on its ubiquity.

Demonization in American politics is hardly new. While in the earliest contested presidential elections it was considered unseemly for the candidates themselves to sling the mud, or even directly campaign, their surrogates were unrestrained. John Adams’ supporters published attacks that make Romney's accusation today and GHWBush’s Willie Horton spectacle seem positively gentlemanly. Of their opponent Jefferson, they said, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes.”

Lest anyone think that the contemporary Christian right originated challenges to candidates’ proper Christian credentials, as they did with Romney, the Adams gang also called Jefferson an infidel who “writes aghast the truths of God's words; who makes not even a profession of Christianity; who is without Sabbaths; without the sanctuary, and without so much as a decent external respect for the faith and worship of Christians.”

The Andrew Jackson campaign was even dirtier. He was accused of murder, gambling, slave trading and treason. Adams’ son’s gang continued the traditions of his father’s. They said Jackson’s mother was a prostitute and that his father was a mulatto, and his wife first an adulteress and then a bigamist. Jackson’s troops hit back that Adams was the gambler, plus a pimp for the Russian czar, and thoroughly corrupt.

Against that, suggesting that Hillary and Barack would "surrender to terror" is almost tame. But let's see what's to come. "Date raper?"

I voted for Barack today -- 4 good reasons

It's been a hard year for this political junkie. I have been torn up over the primary trying to decide for whom to vote.

You see, I know Barack from my days in Springfield lobbying for poor people and the problem is that when you know someone up-close, you know their warts, faults, flubs and snubs.

Throughout my struggle to find my candidate, I kept saying to myself, if I knew Hillary (or Richardson or Biden an eon ago when they were still relevant), I'm sure I would have seen their warts as well.

So, I decided, screw the warts (which I shall not enumerate here). Everyone has warts.

Here are my turning points / bottom lines -- my reasons for voting for Barack today that coalesced just yesterday.

1. McCain and Independents. Independents will be critical voters in the general. McCain will get too many of their votes over Hillary and that is not a good thing.

2. Our relationship with the world. A number of months ago, someone, maybe it was David Brooks, said that the day Barack is elected, his name and face alone will alter and improve US relations in the world that Bush has done so much to tear asunder. I think Hillary would be an improvement, but not nearly as powerful and evocative a change of America's imagery of swagger and imperial power. Plus, I think Barack's desire (even if not actual capacity -- yet) to be a healer and "uniter" is desperately needed.

3. Rush and the other Screedmeisters. For me, the worst part of the Clinton years was the nightmare of rage the Clintons (innocently, in my view) provoked. I can't bear another four years of their screeching. While I know they will be hard on Barack, they will not be reduced to psycho attacks that I can only compare to the wild boys turned-cannibals in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. As Liz Taylor's Catherine Holly said, “They had devoured parts of him....or cut parts of him away with their hands or knives or maybe those jagged tin cans they made music with, they had torn bits of him away and stuffed them into those gobbling fierce little empty black mouths of theirs.” Rush's ditto-heads want no less as they seek to butcher Hillary.

Nothing unified the right in its quest for power during the Clinton years more than hating Bill and Hillary. Hate creates passion. Hate energizes. Hate creates focus. Hatred solidified and grew the right wing movement that had been delicately juggling Libertarians and Christian fundamentalists. Hatred brought them all together. As Stanley Fish and Jason Horowitz have pointed out, the Hillary haters are still living in their world of inexplicable psycho hatred.

I just don't want us to have to suffer that again -- even though it's not the Clintons' fault.

4. The Kumbaya Factor. It thrills me to think that finally a black man can elected President. It's about damn time. If it happens, I will be proud of my country and may once and for all stop seeing napalmed babies when the flag waves. (Update: I have since learne this is wrong, wrong, wrong to feel, as the kerfuffle over Michelle's comments have proven. So I should amend by saying, I would be over MORE proud of my country. . . Is that what you want?)

Down by the Riverside.

1/30/08, Afternoon.

I am in a huge convention center in Atlanta with 10,000 black Baptists singing “Down by the Riverside. . . I ain’t gonna study war no more; I ain’t gonna study war no more. . .”

We’re killing time waiting for Hillary to show-up. All the presidential candidates were invited. None of the GOP’s white guys in suits agreed to attend – just like their front runners’ failure to show-up for the Congressional Black Caucus debate last year. I guess the GOP thinks they have the Baptists sewn up -- or they have already written-off the hope of getting any black votes.

Barack was here a little while ago, but he came via a videocast -- about five minutes of nothing. He looked incredibly exhausted and stuttered and stumbled a lot. The video connection followed suit and cut in and out. The crowd was disappointed. Getting up and cheering the dispirited video just wasn’t going to happen.

The convention leader is oblique about Hillary coming – whether in person or via another lame video, but I see some stone-faced white guys along the wall with their tell-tale earpieces with the squiggly wires whom anyone who has been to a presidential campaign event knows to be Secret Service. Hillary will be here in person.

The crowd does not seem impatient at all. The music is rollicking, everyone is standing, clapping, dancing around, calling out, and having a great down-home gospel-singing time. Now they’re doing Amazing Grace, led by four incredible young men with voices from heaven.

Everyone around me in this older middle-aged and just plain old crowd is decked out in Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes -- the women in astonishing glittery hats with feathers, fur and brilliant colors made more vivid by the extravagant arrays of sequins and rhinestones; the men wearing suits with long jackets reminiscent of the Zoot Suits in the forties, many in colors, others in sharp pinstripes. I’m seeing quite a number of fur coats, too.

And shoes! The women have matching fancy high heels and purses. The men compete with alligator shoes in colors not found in nature. When the offering is announced, the preacher at the helm encourages the men to put at least as much as their shoes cost in the bucket, and the women at least as much as their hats.

Hillary arrives. Now she is the only other white woman in the room other than me, The Termite. And one of about six white people in all – the others being those Secret Service guys and some lost-looking hippie who has wandered in. She gives a long, powerful and meaty speech, most of which is not the stump routine, but specific to the audience, honoring the historic significance of this convention and talking about her own Methodist faith.

The audience doesn’t quite know what to do with this. They applaud and many rise from their seats but I can tell that many wanted to go nuts over Barack instead. Half jump up for Hillary; half stay seated and clap politely. Pollsters take note.