Golden (11 page)

If Blagojevich's cocksure attitude came off as naive or vain, or both, lawmakers still generally liked Blagojevich personally. He was always go-along, get-along, friendly, and charming. And, in the end, he often voted along party lines on major issues such as school funding, gay rights, and crime.

He befriended downstate legislator Jay Hoffman and lakefront liberal Carol Ronen, who was his seatmate on the House floor. Both would become among Blagojevich's closest political confidants. His personality was such he was even good friends with several Republican lawmakers.

But Blagojevich wasn't the most serious lawmaker in the House. During session as votes were being debated, he often played games, challenging fellow lawmakers to use certain words or phrases in their speeches. He was also constantly on the phone at his desk on the floor, chatting away and ignoring most of the action around him. On more than one occasion, as legislators stood at his desk waiting to get his attention, they overheard Rod make the sound of two quick kisses. “I love you,” he said. “Good-bye.”

“Who are you talking to?” one legislator recalled asking.

“Oh, that was my mother,” Blagojevich said.

Before Blagojevich even arrived in Springfield both he and Mell were dreaming of bigger things. He hadn't even been sworn in as a state representative and Blagojevich's name was being floated in a gossip column as somebody to keep an eye on to replace US Representative Dan Rostenkowski. Not long before, the idea of replacing Rostenkowski would have been unthinkable. A congressman from Chicago's North Side since 1959, the burly, no-nonsense Rostenkowski had brought billions of federal dollars back to Chicago and become head of the powerful tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. Everywhere he went, people called him Mr. Chairman.

But for nearly a year, Rostenkowski had been under a cloud as his name was being connected with the ongoing Congressional Post Office Scandal.
By July 1993, the US House postmaster had pleaded guilty to helping several congressmen embezzle money as part of a scheme where congressmen converted stamps they received as part of their public office to cash. Though not mentioned by name, federal court papers cited “Congressman A” in the scheme. It soon became clear that “Congressman A” was Rostenkowski.

The controversy made the state's most powerful congressman suddenly somewhat vulnerable. Mell began pushing hard for Blagojevich's name to be in the mix of those in line to replace him. The strategy was that, even though he hadn't accomplished much in Springfield, Blagojevich would appeal to lakefront liberals who he had come to work with in the Illinois legislature as well as the district's working class, who bonded with Blagojevich over his name and status as Mell's sonin-law.

In October, Blagojevich sent out an open letter to voters criticizing the man everyone knew as “Rosty.” Chastising Rostenkowski's support for President Clinton's North American Free Trade Agreement, Blagojevich said it would steal jobs from the city. “I have lived on Chicago's North Side my entire life,” he wrote. “It is my feeling that the concerns and problems facing our community are not being adequately represented in Washington.”

Mell's precinct workers jammed Blagojevich's brochures on doorsteps across the Fifth congressional district, from Lincoln Park to suburban Melrose Park. The pamphlets spelled Rod's last name phonetically four times: BLA-GOYA-VICH. It even carried a campaign-like slogan: “Blagojevich: hard to pronounce, easy to remember.”

Other politicians were also mulling a run. Blagojevich's pseudo-running mate in 1992, Nancy Kaszak, was considering it, as was State Senator John Cullerton.

Blagojevich soon ramped up his game in Springfield, proposing more legislation, backing an effort to ban casinos from making campaign contributions, and calling for a statewide referendum on whether assault weapons should be banned. And by early December 1993, Blagojevich made it official—sort of. He would run for Congress, but only if Rostenkowski didn't. Kaszak also filed. Both Blagojevich and Kaszak filed to run for two offices— for Congress and for reelection to their state House seats.

One published report stated that Mell reached a private agreement with Mayor Daley, who supported keeping Rostenkowski in Washington because of his massive pull there: Blagojevich would drop out, but only if the mayor agreed to back Blagojevich for the congressional seat two years later. When Rostenkowski filed for reelection, Blagojevich and Kaszak both dropped
out. Cullerton stayed in the race, as did three others. When time came for Mell and Blagojevich to endorse, they backed Rosty. The political calculation wasn't complicated. If anybody else won, he or she would be the new face of the Fifth Congressional District and Blagojevich's window for the seat wouldn't be open in 1996. If Rostenkowski won, his fate would be determined soon enough by federal prosecutors or voters.

A few weeks later Mell hosted his annual fundraiser, an event that was quintessential Chicago politics. The alderman invited senior citizens from the neighborhood to come in from the cold Chicago winter to play bingo. The price of admission was that they had to sit there and listen to a bunch of politicians hawk themselves. After the candidates spoke for a few minutes, Mell would proudly announce how much money the candidate was throwing into the pot for the next game. Every year, the event drew more than one thousand seniors, giving the candidates a captive audience of loyal voters. The politically charged bingo game was always held just before the March primary in a large hall at Gordon Tech, a local Catholic high school close to Mell's house.

That year, Mell invited Rostenkowski. “We want a great ovation for the guy who can bring home the bacon,” Mell bellowed as Rostenkowski made his way through the crowd of standing and applauding seniors. Mell slowly instructed the seniors that Rostenkowski's number on the ballot was twenty-two. “It's a very easy number,” he said.

Blagojevich soon took the microphone and explained that while he had thought about running against Rostenkowski, he decided not to for the good of the congressional district. “I have to think about you first,” he told the crowd. For his part, Rostenkowski kept his speech short. “I'd like your support,” he said gruffly. “I'm not going to make a speech—let's play bingo!”

A few weeks later, Rostenkowski won easily and appeared safe to get reelected yet again in the highly Democratic congressional district. In the general election, he'd be facing some no-name Republican attorney named Michael Flanagan.

Blagojevich even had time to campaign for Rostenkowski because he had no primary opponent. The same couldn't be said for Kaszak, who had two primary opponents and had to fight off a challenge of her petitions by operatives with Mell's organization.

Kaszak had apparently upset Mell enough by filing to run for Congress, and she sought the advice of Speaker Madigan, who told her to talk directly with Blagojevich about it. But when Kaszak did, all Blagojevich did was nervously smile and swear he had nothing to do with it. “It's a Mell thing,” he insisted. “It's not me.”

Just weeks after winning the primary, Rostenkowski was indicted. While the charges as part of the post office scandal were not totally surprising, the news reverberated from Chicago's Northwest Side to Washington and weakened Rostenkowski's standing. Still, many Democrats and pundits thought an indicted Dan Rostenkowski had a better shot of winning than Michael Flanagan.

But on November 8, 1994, the nation witnessed one of the most decisive political victories by a political party in history. Republicans took over both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years. One of those wins was Illinois's Fifth congressional seat. On that night, Flanagan held his victory party at the Bismarck Hotel—a historic hotel near Chicago's city hall that was long used by the Democratic power structure for meetings, events, and victory parties of their own.

Asked whether he was trying to stick it to the Democrats by hosting his party there, the thirty-two-year-old Flanagan said, “That was the idea.”

While Republicans were basking in the shocking win by Flanagan, Mell suddenly saw all his calculations for Blagojevich's political future falling perfectly into place. There was just one setback. Along with the Republican sweep in Washington, Springfield also witnessed a historic change in power as the GOP took control of the Illinois House, kicking Madigan out as speaker and making Blagojevich a backbencher in the minority party. Blagojevich feared any efforts to increase his profile through his work as a state representative would be limited to introducing legislation that might sound good to voters but never go anywhere.

Still, he quickly went to work in 1995, joining forces with some Republicans by introducing tough-on-crime legislation to get something passed. He then joined a group of lakefront and suburban Democrats who tried to distinguish themselves from the old guard with a more reformist platform that included requiring competitive bidding for state office leases and a casino license, as well as reforming welfare rules. But, as feared, they saw little success as the GOP moved forward with its own agenda and saw no reason to help the sonin-law of a Democratic city ward boss who was clearly setting his sights on a congressional seat now in Republican hands.

No longer having to tiptoe around the leviathan Rostenkowski, Blagojevich and Kaszak both began positioning themselves for a congressional run in 1996 when Mell asked Kaszak to meet. The two got together at the Ann Sather restaurant on Belmont Avenue, a Swedish-themed cafe owned by a politically active leader in the city's gay community. Mell asked Kaszak if she'd consider holding off running for Congress against Blagojevich.

“I've got another seat lined up for you,” he assured her. But with Mell not offering too many specifics and having been stabbed in the back with the petition silliness, Kaszak said no. With her solid record in Springfield and her last name in a heavily Polish congressional district, she felt she had a good chance to win and owed nothing to Mell. She was going to run.

By June 1995, just seven months after Flanagan's win, both Kaszak and Blagojevich said they were running to get the Fifth Congressional District seat back in Democratic control. Blagojevich made his announcement at Foreman High School, his alma mater. Trying to show a cross-section of his support and what Blagojevich would later call his “great combination,” he was joined by liberal lawmakers Ronen and Judy Erwin as well as longtime Democratic machine aldermen Bernie Hansen and Bill Banks.

With Banks's powerful Thirty-Sixth Ward and his own Thirty-Third, Mell was lining up the right support. He even met with Mayor Daley, who rarely endorsed candidates in Democratic primaries but in this case promised to back Blagojevich. Tim Degnan and Jeremiah Joyce, two former state senators who had become top aides to Daley, joined Blagojevich's campaign committee. Before long, Blagojevich hired one of Daley's top strategists. David Axelrod was a former
Chicago Tribune
political reporter who had become a go-to campaign consultant in Illinois since managing Paul Simon's upset win over Republican US senator Charles Percy. Now he was working for Blagojevich.