SmartRemarks

At 4:52 p.m. yesterday, the Illinois Senate voted unanimously to remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office, following his earlier impeachment by the Illinois House. Seven minutes later they voted to ban him from ever holding any future public office in Illinois. And by 5:30, Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn had been formally sworn in as our new governor.

(This neatly demonstrated just what the U.S. Congress should have done with George W. Bush years ago, when the news of his illegal wiretapping program broke… but spilt milk and all that.)

Blago himself appeared during the late morning for an excruciating-to-hear “closing statement” in the trial he had otherwise eschewed, playing to the cameras as usual with what amounted to a campaign-style speech, complaining about the Senate’s procedures but offering no evidence nor submitting himself to cross-examination. His public tone was, needless to say, markedly different from the private one captured by the FBI’s wiretaps. At one point he actually said to the assembled legislators that the charges against him were “just politics”—that “you guys all know what it’s like out there when you’re running an election.” He insisted (again contra the tapes) that his ends were to serve the public, and the means didn’t matter.

Through it all, he demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of what it means to govern in a free country. Blago (not unlike Bush) seems to think it means being a ruler. What’s really important, and what he utterly failed at, is being a leader.

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Tags: Blagojevich, economy, Illinois, Pat Quinn

A completely subjective list, of course. But what the hell… aren’t they all?

Going in to 2008, one could hardly open a magazine or flip a channel without hitting a media comparison to 1968. It was 40 years ago (a nice, round number), and it was a paradigm-shifting political year that looked familiar, with an open competition for the presidential nomination in both parties, all while a war was on overseas.

As it turned out, 2008 was a momentous year in its own right, arguably the most significant year in decades, and without question one we will all remember vividly. But it was not assassinations and riots that made its mark in the history books, unlike in 1968; it brought distinctive events all its own.

There’s not really a lot of room for debate over the two most significant news events of the year, and the annual AP survey of news editors corresponds with what almost all of us would surely conclude on our own, a point-counterpoint of encouraging and discouraging developments:

1) The presidential election of Barack Obama

I’ve already written quite a bit about this one, of course… but suffice it to say that it’s historic for the fact that he’ll be the first African-American president; it’s historic for the fact that he won with a (generally) upbeat, honorable, serious campaign; and it’s historic in that it marks a realignment back toward progressive politics after a generation of destructive radical conservatism, and after eight years of arguably the single worst president in American history. How Obama really performs in office of course remains to be seen, but what he’s accomplished so far this year stands on its own.

2) The worst economic meltdown in our lifetimes

Written more than a little about this, too, of course. It seems almost quaint now to recall that when I started this blog, back in mid-September—although we now know that we were already nine months into a recession—it was still possible to ask “how bad is the economy?” and wonder if it would still get worse. Within days, everything started to go to hell in a handbasket… in a way that seems to have created a destructive feedback loop, where every new development just exacerbates what came before. Homes foreclosing, jobs disappearing, businesses (and entire industries) collapsing, credit freezing, investments evaporating… we’ll remember this for a long time, no matter how much we might prefer to forget it.

After that, the choices grow more arguable. My assessment:

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Tags: Blagojevich, Chicago, climate, Congress, economy, Election 2008, financial crisis, FISA, history, Illinois, international, iPhone, journalism, Madoff, media, Obama, Top 10 lists

We all knew Gov. Rod Blagojevich was under a federal investigation, but nobody expected developments as dramatic as what happened today. FBI agents arrested Democratic Gov. Blagojevich at his home this morning, at the direction of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald—the same man who brought down his predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan.

(Chicago is famous for its political corruption, but the state of Illinois as a whole is really no better, and it has always been bipartisan. In fact, this was our fourth governor out of five to be indicted, and if he’s convicted—not something to bet against—he’ll be the third out of five.)

Fitzgerald is emerging as the incorruptible prosecutor of the century, “a modern-day Elliot Ness“:  alongside his gubernatorial investigations he’s made time to convict Scooter Libby in the Valerie Plame case, not to mention former Sun-Times owner Conrad Black, and he’s also looked into the Daley administration. In fact, Blago’s Chief of Staff John Harris (also arrested today) spent nine years working for Daley, and his nose was none too clean then either; Daley and the rest of City Hall’s fifth floor must be feeling a little nervous themselves at this point.

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Tags: Blagojevich, Chicago, Illinois, Obama, Patrick Fitzgerald, Rahm Emanuel

Tomorrow night, we’re going to have a president-elect. That means, of course, that he will vacate his seat in the U.S. Senate. There’s been remarkably little mainstream media coverage of this—everyone’s attention has been focused on more immediate matters—but Obama has no heir apparent for that seat, and it’s an open question who’s going to replace him.

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Tags: Biden, Blagojevich, Illinois, Obama, Senate