Illinois Unconvinced Corruption Culture Will Fade

Illinois Unconvinced Corruption Culture Will Fade
By MONICA DAVEY and EMMA GRAVES FITZSIMMONS
Copyright by tHe New York Times
Published: August 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/us/19blago.html?_r=1&hpw


CHICAGO — This state’s long, troubled, expensive episode with Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor, appears far from over.

But as prosecutors prepare to retry Mr. Blagojevich on the most serious corruption charges against him — charges that a federal jury found itself deadlocked over on Tuesday — one thing does seem to have come and gone: the impetus to cleanse Illinois’s political system, long derided as corrupt.

That system molded the career of Mr. Blagojevich, as well as that of his predecessor, George Ryan, currently serving a prison sentence for corruption, and, literally, hundreds of others convicted of public corruption crimes in recent decades.

Though prosecutors are expected to retry Mr. Blagojevich — convicted of a single count of giving false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — the jury deadlock added a puzzling ingredient to the public conversation about what amounts to corruption and what does not. Many here seemed surprised by the trial’s outcome, concerned that a costly retrial might bring a similar result, and leery of the thought that politics will ever change much around here.

“What’s really at the core of our problem isn’t one politician, but this notion of a culture of corruption,” said Patrick Collins, a former federal prosecutor appointed by Mr. Blagojevich’s successor, Gov. Pat Quinn, to lead a commission to find ways to end the pattern of corruption. He added later, “We’ve been disappointed so many times.”

After Mr. Blagojevich was arrested on charges that he had turned state business into money-making enterprises for himself and his friends, reform groups sprung up all over the state, from within the capital to citizen brigades. But two years later, the results, many here say, have been disappointing.

“We had a perfect storm of events which sort of cried out for fundamental reform,” Mr. Collins said. In the end, Mr. Collins said the changes accepted by state lawmakers amounted not to a “half a loaf,” but to “some breadcrumbs.”

With the passing months, ethics reform has largely faded from the collective mind-set in Illinois, thanks, in part, to the votes on elements of an overhaul by state lawmakers, mounting alarm about the increasingly dire economic picture in the state and, especially, a growing sense of Mr. Blagojevich as a singular, unusual character.

It was hard to imagine a situation more shocking than the one people here woke up to on Dec. 9, 2008: Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat in his second term as governor, had been arrested and accused of, among other things, trying to sell an appointment to the United States Senate seat vacated by the newly elected president, Barack Obama.

So began the jokes on late-night television. The essential theme: What was wrong with Illinois? With Mr. Blagojevich’s conviction for false statements, he becomes the fourth Illinois governor in recent memory to be convicted of a crime, and the fifth of the last eight elected governors to be charged with wrongdoing.

By some estimates a thousand public officials and business people in Illinois have been convicted of public corruption in the last 40 years alone — a fact driven in part by decades without limits on political contributions to state candidates. The price of corruption to taxpayers in the state? More than $300 million a year, according to a 2009 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The immediate reaction to the accusations against Mr. Blagojevich in Springfield, the Democratic-dominated state capital, was outrage. Mr. Blagojevich was vastly unpopular even among fellow Democrats, having clashed with leaders in Springfield about nearly everything. He was quickly impeached (the State House voted 114 to 1) and removed (the State Senate was unanimous, 59 to 0).

Changing the way politics is done was more complicated.

In 2009, lawmakers purged the state’s pension boards, which had struggled with scandal, and made it easier to obtain public records and to see the results of government inspectors’ investigations, and Illinois became one of the nation’s last states to restrict how much an individual or corporation can give a candidate in a state race.

But other efforts failed, including an initiative to remove partisan politics from the state’s decennial redistricting. (The current method still involves breaking certain tie votes by pulling a name from a stovepipe-style hat.)

The state’s campaign finance restrictions do not go into effect until next year, and some of those deeply involved in reform, like Mr. Collins, said they are too lax, still allowing state party leaders to give large amounts to races.

Some politicians and analysts argue that the new laws should not be underestimated.

“For this state, it is a massive change,” Cindi Canary, director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said of the passage of campaign finance restrictions. “It’s almost an earth-shattering change.” Still, she said, the culture here has shifted less.

Not surprisingly, Republicans, who are in the minority in both chambers of the legislature, were particularly dismissive of the notion of any true change. “It’s kind of business as usual,” said Representative Tom Cross, the Republican leader. And Senator Christine Radogno, who leads Republicans there, said she was still seeing “some very Blagojevich-esque behavior going on.”

Part of the difficulty with using Mr. Blagojevich’s actions to push reform was the developing portrait of Mr. Blagojevich himself.

Through his trial Mr. Blagojevich came to be viewed ever more as a lone, odd, off-the-rails politician — isolated, it seemed, from just about everything else, including any broader, systematic problem in the state. (One state lawmaker refers to him not as a Democrat but as the sole member of the Blagojevich Party.)

In recent months, too, the dreadful economy came to eclipse the once statewide conversation about ethics reform. For many, worries about Illinois’s $12 billion deficit, unpaid bills and unfunded pension obligations seemed to drown out the Blagojevich soap opera.

None of which is to say there were no lessons learned from Mr. Blagojevich’s journey so far. As Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor, said, the politics here may have changed little, but “people may be more careful talking on the phone.”

On Wednesday, Scott Dantuma, a financial consultant who was having lunch at a McDonald’s and said he did not support a retrial because the case was weak, said the practice of corruption would look slightly different now. “It will just be more underground,” he said