“They,” in this case, are stories that speculate about future political maneuvering that will take place, if such and such a politician is successful in his or her bid to win a higher office.
SPECIFICALLY, WE IN Chicago are subjected to the stories of who would replace Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate, should he actually succeed in being elected the 44th president of the United States.
For those of us who live in parts of Chicago or Illinois near the Great Land of Hoosiers, we get their overflow stories, most of which are trying to tout the concept that a President Hillary R. Clinton would want Evan Bayh – the former Indiana governor and current senator from Indiana who also is the son of a long-time Hoosier politico – to be her running mate.
I’m going to reveal one of the great “secrets” of political reporting – such stories are a crock. They fill newspaper space or broadcast airtime, and they appear to be filled with substance. But they are little more than lucky guesses.
Hoosier voters would like to believe that this is the face of the next vice president. Photograph provided by U.S. Senate.Should it turn out that Bayh does become vice president under President Clinton the second, or that Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes does move up to the U.S. Senate to be an ally of President Obama, there will be reporters who will tout out their yellowing clips as evidence that they somehow knew way before everybody else what was going to happen.
IN REALITY, NOBODY knows how these maneuvers are going to work out because it is way too premature to be seriously expending brainpower on such issues. You could come up with just as accurate a guess on how future political succession would take place by merely throwing a dart at a board with the names of various politicos written on scraps of paper.
Whoever you hit is the person you can say you’re predicting for greater things (or maybe you want to use your dart points to “kill” the political aspirations of government officials you can’t stand).
What got me going on this topic was the big story in Monday’s editions of the Munster, Ind.-based Times of Northwest Indiana, which wants to think that one of the next great politicos in this country will be someone they have been covering for years.
Their story touted the work Bayh has done to push the Clinton campaign across Indiana, with the possible end result that Clinton (not Obama) would actually win the Hoosier primary on May 6 (deadline for Indianans to register to vote was Monday). His reward, the newspaper would like us to think, would be the V-P slot for the next four years.
TO HIS CREDIT, Bayh isn’t trying to claim the political prize (which really requires nothing more than a pulse, on the off-chance that the president ceases to have one). He told the Times, “She should be totally focused on winning the nomination. It would be wrong for me to even speculate about anything like that.”
Of course, Bayh as V-P would be a moot point should Obama manage to keep his delegate and popular vote leads and ultimately go on to claim the presidential nomination for himself at the Democratic convention in Denver.
But a “President Obama” would create his own set of political speculations – who would replace him in the U.S. Senate?
A Senate seat in Washington is one of the top political prizes for a government official whose focus is on Illinois (Chicago mayor and Illinois governor are the others). Getting the right to finish up the last two years of Obama’s term in office and go into the next election cycle as an incumbent would be a significant career boost.
UNDER STATE LAW, the Illinois governor gets to pick the successor – and there are no set guidelines he must follow for picking an Obama replacement. He can go for whomever he wants, for whatever reason he thinks is worthy.
I’ve heard the speculation of Hynes or Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan getting picked by Blagojevich. Both hold high-enough ranking posts within Illinois government that tabbing either for the U.S. Senate would not look like a Blagojevich joke, and it also would have the bonus for Blagojevich of eliminating potential rivals for the gubernatorial post.
Particularly in the case of Madigan, that would be a factor, since political observers have long speculated that the reason her father, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, groomed her so carefully for political office (an Illinois Senate seat for a few years, then the attorney general’s post) was so she could someday be Illinois governor.
Of course, there’s always the possibility of promoting an Illinois politician who already is a part of the Washington scene – one of the members of the House of Representatives could be shifted over to the Senate, which would then lead to speculation about who would be the new U.S. House member from Illinois.
REPS JESSE JACKSON Jr. and Jan Schakowsky (the latter of whom knows Blagojevich from when both served in the Illinois House in the mid-1990s) are considered the favorites there. Either would make a qualified senator, and the advantage of a Jackson selection is that picking the namesake son of the civil rights leader would stir up the anger of many a social conservative who would see it as the ultimate evidence that Illinois politics is little more than a sewer.
If I had to pick who would get sent to Washington to replace a “Senator Obama,” I literally would put those names on the dartboard, then start throwing with my awkward right-handed motion that quickly reveals why I never got to pitch for the New York Yankees.
It really is too soon to seriously speculate about this. We really have to wait until after the nominating convention in August before we can seriously guess who might get picked. Anything before then is just a wild guess.
In fact, there’s only one possibility that has come up in recent weeks that I will go so far as to comment on definitively – anybody who seriously thinks that Rod Blagojevich is going to pick himself to serve as U.S. senator from Illinois is delusional – quite possibly from not taking their medications.
IT’S TRUE THAT Blagojevich theoretically could pick himself. But it makes no sense.
A post in Washington, to the Chicago political mentality, is a move “up and out.” In other words, it is a “promotion” to a political world that has little to no say in the day to day operations of Chicago politics.
These are the reason why Rod Blagojevich would never seriously consider appointing himself to replace Barack Obama in the Senate, should Obama succeed in winning election to the presidency. Photograph provided by State of Illinois.Why would a governor give up his post to move to Washington? He already ranks among the Top Four politicos (currently, Richard M. Daley, Richard Durbin, Obama and Blagojevich – all Democrats) from Illinois.
There’s also the fact that Blagojevich has already done the “D.C. Scene.” He served six years in the U.S. House of Representatives from Chicago’s Northwest Side, and gave up any chance of moving up in the Congressional hierarchy in large part because he and wife Patricia wanted to live in Chicago.
BLAGOJEVICH ALREADY GETS enough grief for being the governor who doesn’t want to live with his family in Springfield – even though the state provides a fully funded and staffed residence for its governor.
There’s no way he could ever get away with being the Senator who won’t live in the District of Columbia. And his wife (the daughter of Chicago alderman Dick Mell) would kill him if he seriously tried to move the family to the D.C. suburbs.
So, sorry folks. For those of you who despise Blagojevich and were hoping an Obama victory could be an excuse to get rid of him, it just won’t work that way. You have a better chance of getting a “recall” election for Blagojevich, than you do of someday seeing “Senator Rod.”
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EDITOR’S NOTES: Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., already has a place to live (http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/880337,CST-NWS-senate06.article) in Washington, unlike Lisa Madigan or Rod Blagojevich. She’d like to move up to the Senate.
Some Hoosier political observers would like to see if they can reduce Birch Bayh from a long-time D.C. powerbroker in his own right to nothing more than the father (http://nwi.com/articles/2008/04/07/news/top_news/doca7a5ca844213521486257423007ec4a5.txt) of a vice president.
Rod Blagojevich wasn’t exactly the most anonymous politico Chicagoans have sent to Congress (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/b000518/), but he wasn’t exactly a Washington power hitter either.
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