Golden (10 page)

The next day, Mell went to work at city hall, and the gravity of what he was getting into hit him. Other aldermen, including Terry Gabinski, whose Thirty-Second Ward held most of the precincts in the legislative district, made it clear Mell was on his own. Others sent the same signal.

That evening, Mell called Blagojevich, who had spent the whole day calling friends and lining up their support. A few had even said they'd donate money. Mell told him he was having second thoughts. “Maybe I should talk to Ronan and see if I can get him back,” he told Blagojevich. “They're all against us.”

Blagojevich said he'd do whatever Mell decided but that he was up for the challenge.

“I'm a big boy,” Blagojevich said. “If it's bad for you politically, I understand. I'll support whatever you do.”

“That's all I wanted to hear,” Mell said.

As always, Mell had a plan. He called Nancy Kaszak, a community activist along the lakefront on the North Side who had made a name for herself in the 1980s in an unsuccessful effort to fight the Chicago Cubs' plans to install lights atop Wrigley Field. Now a lawyer for the Chicago Park District, Kaszak would be great against Ronan, who had earned a reputation as a wheeler and dealer in Springfield, the state capital. The “reformer” versus the “insider.” In the yuppie neighborhoods along the lakefront, where residents frowned on stereotypical machine politics, Mell felt she had a chance.

Mell knew Kaszak was already thinking of running anyhow. He invited her to come over to his house, and when she got there, Rod and Patti were sitting on a piano bench. The couple said almost nothing as Mell held court. Ronan, he explained, still had a strong political army and if he had to fight on two fronts—for both his seat and the seat between Kulas and Blagojevich—that would give both of them a better chance to win.

Mell also promised to stake $30,000 for Kaszak's campaign.

In Chicago, the Democratic primary—being held in March—was the only election that mattered. Working-class residents, many of whom got their city jobs from their alderman or ward committeeman like Mell, owed their livelihoods to those elected officials, all of whom were Democrats. The general election in November was little more than a formality.

US Representative Dan Rostenkowski, the city's biggest political heavyweight in Washington, DC, whose political patronage army in Chicago was formidable, backed Kulas, who also had the tacit endorsement of Mayor Richard M. Daley, who by then had been elected mayor thirteen years after his father's death.

Still, Blagojevich had two things working in his favor: Mell's political army of precinct captains and Blagojevich's own ability to sell himself to voters.

From the moment the campaign began, Blagojevich plunged headlong into retail politics. In the morning, he went to coffee shops and El train stops. At night, he went to bowling alleys and restaurants. Part of the district was inside Mell's Thirty-Third Ward, but most of it wasn't. Blagojevich called Paris Thompson and asked him to get a few friends together to knock on doors inside the one public housing project in the district. Patti walked
the neighborhoods too, knocking on doors and selling her husband to skeptical voters.

The whole thing had the atmosphere of a family business. Years later, while campaigning for reelection as governor, Rod and Patti talked openly about this first campaign as one of the happiest periods of their lives, when times were simpler, everything was new, and the constant pressure to raise campaign cash was nonexistent.

It was also during this campaign that Blagojevich first utilized that keen memorization ability he had cultivated as a child for political ends. Before groups small and large on the stump, Blagojevich recited the famous orations verbatim (or close enough that few people noticed). Blagojevich knew that while he was politically savvy, he was rarely the smartest man in the room.

Before Election Day, Blagojevich stood before a crowded hall of Thirty-Third Ward precinct workers and supporters after being introduced by Mell. Many in the crowd, loyal soldiers to Mell over the years, wanted the state representative job for themselves. But Mell picked his sonin-law. Those were the breaks, especially in Chicago politics.

Blagojevich didn't have much original to say, but he knew he could quote someone else to sound more substantive. As he stood before dozens of mostly hard-bitten city workers, he recited from Shakespeare's
Henry V
in which King Henry tried to rally his underdog troops before they battled the French.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother and gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhood cheap while others speak that fought with us on St. Crispin's Day!”

The city workers stood silent, not sure if Blagojevich was even finished and undoubtedly wondering if Mell had lost his mind putting this goofy guy up for the state rep seat. Then Blagojevich added one original line of his own: “Al Ronan never did that for you!”

They all cheered.

Blagojevich, who had a great ability to win crowds over through self-deprecating humor and telling audiences what they wanted to hear, had won over his first one.

Over the next two months, Kulas never even met Blagojevich, who nonetheless ripped the incumbent for being inattentive to voters' needs and not fitting in with the residents of the newly drawn district. As Election Day
approached, Blagojevich felt the momentum building. The
Tribune
editorial board endorsed him, describing him as “an impressive young attorney who knows the communities in the district better.” Mell's army, meanwhile, knocked on doors, jammed signs in yards, and pushed palm cards at the polling places.

Election Day arrived on March 17, St. Patrick's Day, a day when voters in Illinois would make history by nominating Carol Moseley-Braun to be the Democratic challenger for US Senate, defeating incumbent Alan Dixon. In what would be termed the Year of the Woman, Moseley-Braun would go on to become the first female African American senator in US history.

It was also a historic win for Blagojevich. He defeated Kulas by more than 4,000 votes out of more than 17,000 cast. One vote that Blagojevich didn't get was his own. Because he lived outside the district, he voted for Kaszak. Still, that night he picked up the phone and called his mother, Millie, to inform her of the victory.

“I won, Mama,” he told her. Millie told him she was proud of him and wished his father was still alive to see his youngest son's achievement. Then, in a story Blagojevich would tell numerous times over the years, she exacted two promises from him.

“Now son, promise me you'll always be honest,” Millie said. “And promise me you'll never take bribes.”

“Of course I'll never take bribes,” Blagojevich said. “Not only would that be dishonest, it would be illegal, and I'd never do anything to dishonor the memory of my father.”

Then she asked one more thing: “Do you think you can get Aunt Daisy's sonin-law a job?”

Blagojevich would later tell the story as a joke. It garnered cheers and laughs from crowds who appreciated a sense of humor from a politician who winked about even his own family's duplicity regarding Chicago-style politics and patronage. Publicly, everybody condemned typical Chicago politics, but privately, everybody knew how the game was played. The Aunt Daisy joke fit perfectly within the story Rod loved to tell in selling himself to voters. He was a Chicagoan just like them. But he wouldn't break the rules.

It was a story Blagojevich wasn't always consistent in reciting. Before becoming governor, Blagojevich often finished the story by saying while he tried to help Aunt Daisy's sonin-law, he never got him a job because the sonin-law found another job. When running for reelection as governor in
2006, Blagojevich finished the story this way: “Thirteen years later, I'm governor, and my aunt Daisy's sonin-law, he's still unemployed!” That version always got more laughs.

But on St. Patrick's Day 1992, it was Rod and Mell who were the ones laughing as they basked in the glow of the victory. What's more, Ronan lost to Kaszak. It was a highlight of Mell's career as a kingmaker. And the ward boss did it by selling to the public two candidates portrayed as reformers. Later that week, a sign could be seen in Mell's ward office: A
L
R
ONAN
R
EST IN
P
EACE.

On Tuesday, November 3, 1992, Rod Blagojevich easily defeated Republican Daniel Reber by a more than 3-to-1 margin. When he arrived in Springfield two months later, Blagojevich took along with him the chip on his shoulder he had begun fashioning as a youngster.

Looking around the House floor, Blagojevich saw some of the same types of people he had met at Northwestern: men and women—even fellow legislators elected on a “reform” platform like he was—who he felt were elitist and didn't have to scratch for success like he did. They had this job handed to them by moneyed or powered interests. Occasionally he would mention these feelings to fellow legislators, some of whom had to bite their tongues. This was coming from the guy who had a House seat given to him by Dick Mell?

But Blagojevich didn't view it that way. Of course, Blagojevich acknowledged, Mell helped him. But he also went out of his way to let people know he felt he had won the seat by campaigning hard and raising cash. These North Shore and lakefront do-gooders who came from wealthy families didn't appreciate the plight of Chicago's working men and women. And because they didn't, they were hypocrites who didn't deserve his respect. They talked about helping the working class and the downtrodden, but they didn't really know what it was like.

“I do. I'm one of them,” he said.

Also on the House floor Blagojevich saw Speaker Michael Madigan. Short and skinny with cold blue eyes, Madigan had been speaker since 1983 and ran the chamber like a fiefdom. Democratic members of the House swore allegiance to him and followed his every direction. And if they didn't, they soon found themselves on the outs and facing a well-funded,
Madigan-backed challenger in the next Democratic primary. Despite both the governor's office and the Senate being in Republican hands, many considered Madigan to be the most powerful politician in the state. A master of the process of governing, he killed legislation he didn't like in the House while he often figured out ways, through compromise or coercion, to get bills he supported passed and signed into law. If he wasn't the most powerful man in Springfield, he certainly was the smartest. The tired but true expression among legislators was: “Madigan plays chess while we're playing checkers.”

To Blagojevich, Madigan embodied the authority he often fought against. And while Blagojevich said he would vote with Madigan most of the time, he told colleagues if there were issues he felt he could champion to challenge the state's power structure, he'd cross the party line. If it upset the speaker, it was a risk worth taking. And if it got him a little publicity, that was just another benefit.

Blagojevich's attitude about taking on the elites and Springfield's entrenched politicians came not only from his personal attitude but also from the fact that, at thirty-seven years old, he was still struggling to figure out what he stood for and what his political beliefs were—a pursuit that never really ended. He was the college conservative with the Republican father who had to blend his beliefs into the reality of being a politician in Chicago where Democrats ruled. Other than “fighting for the working guy,” Blagojevich didn't have much of a political philosophy.

“He lacked substance. He rarely cared about issues except how they would help him politically,” one ex-staffer recalled. “And that success only reinforced his behavior.”

It didn't hurt that his North and Northwest Side legislative district was filled with middle-class folks who fit the definition of “Reagan Democrats,” residents of the city's Bungalow Belt who held traditional values and hated taxes. Years earlier, many of these same men and women sent Mayor Richard J. Daley notes of encouragement for how he and the Chicago police handled those hippies protesting the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

Early on, Blagojevich focused mostly on two issues average folks in his district cared about—guns and gangs. But he also took occasional shots at Madigan and others in power. Though he had little chance of getting anything passed, the bills burnished his image as a reformer and satisfied that itch to stick it to authority. One bill specifically aimed at Madigan called for lawmaker term limits. Another would have required the state to auction
off 10,000 low-digit license plates—a well-known political perk in Illinois doled out to those with clout. Yet another would have required lobbyists to disclose how much in campaign contributions they made to members of legislative committees they testified in front of. That bill tweaked General Assembly leadership, who one night happily attended fundraisers where lobbyists contributed to legislators' campaigns and the following morning appeared before those same lawmakers to press their cases.