Golden (13 page)

“We're all trying to figure out how to say your last name out here,” Clinton answered.

With his primary victory in his rearview mirror, Blagojevich and his campaign staffers felt confident about their chances in the November general election.

Blagojevich pounded away at several themes: Flanagan's opposition to abortion rights and gun control and his signing of then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, which upset unions. Axelrod also brought on Pete Giangreco, another well-known media consultant who specialized in direct-mail pieces.

“You need to go see Mell,” Axelrod told him.

Inside Mell's ward office on the Northwest Side, Giangreco met Blagojevich for the first time and was taken by his drive for success. After joining the campaign, Giangreco discovered Blagojevich's immense talent for retail campaigning. He'd have boundless energy visiting El stops for hours at a time or Polish delis on Milwaukee Avenue. At parades, Blagojevich's skills as a runner paid off as he sprinted to both sides of the street, shaking nearly every hand. He fed off the crowd's energy with his affable personality and vigor. “It was unbelievable,” Giangreco recalled later. “Some people just have this talent and some people have
it.
In front of crowds, when he turned it on, he had
it.”

Privately, though, Blagojevich would reveal the toll
it
took on him. He would become shy and reserved. Amid a flurry of campaign events one day, Blagojevich paused and looked at those assembled around him. “I'm the guy who has to go out there and perform,” he said.

Axelrod was also concerned about something other than Blagojevich's opponent or his peculiarities. His old employer, the
Chicago Tribune,
was doing an exhaustive investigation into Mell and Blagojevich.

Several of the newspaper's best investigative reporters were pulling almost every piece of paperwork at city hall imaginable related to Mell, including timesheets and checks that Blagojevich received from the city while working for Mell's ward organization between 1989 and 1993 when he left to become a legislator. One of the motivations for the increased scrutiny was the fact that in a few months Chicago was hosting the Democratic National Convention for the first time since 1968. All the eyes of the world would be on the city and its politics, and the newspaper's highest editors wanted to give the city's visitors in August a taste of the city's sometimes infamous political scene.

Blagojevich saw it as little more than a vendetta being waged by a newspaper that years earlier had become identified with the Republican Party through its editorial page. Still, he felt the pressure as reports got back to him about all the calls and inquiries the reporters were making about him and his father-in-law.

“They're conducting a goddamned proctology exam on me,” Blagojevich ranted to one associate. “I know they aren't looking this hard at Flanagan.”

When he finally sat down for an interview with
Tribune
reporters Laurie Cohen and Robert Becker, Blagojevich was his sociable self. Meeting at Mell's ward offices at 3649 N. Kedzie Avenue, Blagojevich didn't come alone. Alongside him was John Kupper, an Axelrod associate, who wanted to know what the paper was
really
working on.

“Let's not conduct this under some facade of standard political reporting. Let's be straight about this,” Kupper told the pair. “Our feeling was this was a request to follow a campaign to write a political story. There obviously was something else going on here that we weren't fully informed of.”

Axelrod was particularly intense about advocating for Blagojevich. He closely followed the
Tribune
reporters' work and even conducted a shadow investigation of his own, interviewing Blagojevich and others who were also talking to the reporters. He questioned the entire premise of the effort, arguing the assignment itself placed big pressure on them to come back
with a story, whether one was really deserved or not. He even wrote up a multipage memo that he sent to high-up editors arguing his case, which created some ill will among those reporters working on the story.

“I did it with reluctance because I was a reporter and I know it would piss me off,” Axelrod recalled. “But I had a responsibility as well, so I sent it.”

In the meantime, Blagojevich sat down twice with the newspaper's reporters. A focus of their questions was those payments he received from city hall while working as Mell's staffer. The records weren't clear about what exactly he did to earn that money. They showed Blagojevich getting paid by several city hall committees run by other aldermen even though Blagojevich insisted he never worked at city hall.

Blagojevich himself also fired off a memo, an eleven-page letter in which he answered a few lingering questions but also spouted off that he felt he was being treated unfairly. “The
Tribune
has devoted hundreds, if not thousands of hours, apparently pursuing every possible disparaging bit of information about me in almost an unprecedented game of ‘Gotcha.'”

In August, the
Tribune
wrote a massive profile of Mell, declaring him the “Lord of His Ward,” and in October, just weeks before the election against Flanagan, the newspaper carried an in-depth report laying out some of the questions surrounding Blagojevich, especially that questionable work at city hall.

Blagojevich, meanwhile, kept up the torrent of fund-raising. Even Joe Cini, still working as Blagojevich's fundraiser, suggested putting the brakes on a little. But Blagojevich wouldn't relent.

“If a fundraiser would give him $100, he'd want $150. If it was $150, he'd want $200. If it was fifty people at an event, he'd want a hundred,” recalled a campaign staffer. “He was never satisfied. It was always more, more, more. He never let up.”

Blagojevich raised $1.5 million—two times more than Flanagan. The money helped pay for commercials, including a controversial radio ad about Flanagan's vote to repeal an assault weapons ban. The commercial featured a Chicago police officer talking about how a semiautomatic pistol was used to injure him and kill another officer and implied that Flanagan was anti-cop.

Of all the winning challengers in the nation, Blagojevich was one of the biggest spenders. The $1.5 million he raised was third, behind only
California Democrat Ellen Tauscher ($2.5 million) and Utah Republican Christopher Cannon ($1.7 million).

As plans were made for the victory celebration, Blagojevich's campaign settled on the site of the party: A. Finkl & Sons Co., the same steel mill where Blagojevich's father had worked as a machinist. Everyone agreed it set the right tone for a campaign that was on the side of the working class that had been forgotten by a Congress led by Newt Gingrich, while portraying Blagojevich as a Jimmy Stewart-like everyman.

By Election Night's end, the Fifth District had a new congressman. Blagojevich won easily, garnering 64 percent of the vote. “This vote sends a clear message to Newt Gingrich and the radical right: Your revolution is over. Common sense has prevailed,” Blagojevich told the hundreds at Finkl. After the celebration at his father's place of business, Blagojevich took time the following morning to honor his mother, thanking voters at the Jefferson Park train stop where she once took tickets. “Our next campaign begins as soon as we're done with this El stop,” he said.

On the floor of the House of Representatives in early January 1997, the Democratic congressmen from Chicago huddled together and welcomed two new members to the delegation: Danny Davis, a former Chicago alderman from the West Side, and Rod Blagojevich.

Despite being the third-largest city in the United States, Chicago could sometimes be surprisingly parochial, especially when it came to its politics. It looked like Council Wars Redux as Davis and Blagojevich joined Luis Gutierrez and Bobby Rush in Congress, two former Chicago aldermen who made names for themselves fifteen years earlier during the original Council Wars. With his ties to Mell and Vrdolyak, Blagojevich was the clear outsider in the group. Davis, Rush, and Gutierrez had been staunch allies of Mayor Washington, as had been the father of another recent addition, US Representative Jesse Jackson Jr.

But on this chilly morning, there was no continuation of the bad blood from the previous decade, despite the odd scene of Mell sitting in the gallery excitedly waving his arms and hands like a schoolboy at his first baseball game.

The excitement had been almost too much for Blagojevich earlier in the day. He had jumped out of bed at 5:00 A
M,
before the sun rose, to take a
long run around Washington, jogging around the Lincoln Memorial and allowing the moment to settle over him like a warm blanket. He was about to become a United States congressman. My dad would have been so proud to have seen this day, Blagojevich thought to himself.

Hours later, Rod thanked his childhood friend, Mike “Lou Nova” Ascaridis for coming and then on the House floor stood alongside Patti and five-month-old Amy, dressed in a cute little red suit, who had traveled from Chicago for the swearing-in ceremony. This would be his first act as a congressman and Rod was already breaking the rules: The House does not allow congressmen to bring spouses on the floor. They can only bring staffers and children under twelve years of age. So while Amy qualified, Patti did not. But a minute later, after he took the oath, Rod was officially a congressman.

One way Blagojevich tried to make his mark was by continuing to distance himself from his father-in-law. Around Christmastime, Mell had irked Blagojevich once again when the alderman joked to
Grain's
political reporter Greg Hinz that he wasn't sure he needed to buy Blagojevich a gift this year because “Don't you think I've bought him enough this year?”

It was another example of the types of comments that fed the up-and-down relationship between the two. And no matter how true the quip might have been, it only fueled Blagojevich's desire to do whatever he could to be his own man.

While Blagojevich compromised by hiring some Mell-connected people—like Chuckie Lomanto's wife Kitty—to run his offices in Chicago, he hired a group of young men and women for his staff in DC with no connections to Mell. As his chief of staff, he hired John Wyma. For nearly a decade, the mild-mannered and sharp Wyma had worked in DC in a variety of spots for congressmen from Wyma's home state of Michigan. Blagojevich's legislative director, Chris Davis, had worked in the office of House Democratic Whip David Bonior, also of Michigan. As his press secretary, he hired Matt Devine, a former political reporter who was the son of Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine. Back in Chicago, he hired as his assistant Mary Stewart, who had worked for Blagojevich in Springfield.