“I WAS WAY OFF!”

1/13/09

In my seminal 12/30/08 post (“ROLAND, ROLAND, ROLAND, KEEP THEM PUNDITS ROLLIN’…”), I stated

“Roland Burris will never sit in the U.S. Senate.”

While things are never as they appear in Casablanca, or Chicago, it looks as if Mr. Burris will be sworn in as our state’s junior senator later this week and will indeed sit in the U.S. Senate.

Why was I so sure that Mr. Burris would not reach the Senate? For the same reason that Rod Blagojevich gave for allegedly holding people up for the seat: a U.S. Senate seat, though relatively inconsequential in the local political landscape, is too valuable a commodity to give away. Though the people that matter in local politics were not seeking cash money for the seat, as was Mr. Blagojevich, they were seeking a different currency: favors, power, and deals that are desirable of themselves and because they can ultimately be a source of cash, perhaps more than Mr. Blagojevich ever conceived. I also thought, accordingly, that a deal was cut with the seat as the prime bargaining chip: Pat Quinn becomes governor, he appoints Lisa Madigan to the Senate seat, and things go smoothly in the legislature for Mr. Quinn. I still think that the deal was in place but that the powers that be underestimated Mr. Blagojevich’s audacity, Mr. Burris’s meretriciousness and vanity, and Dick Durbin’s pusillanimity.

One could argue, and very legitimately so, that Messrs. Blagojevich and Burris had the law on their side. After all, the law states that the governor has the duty and obligation to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat, and Mr. Blagojevich was, at the time of the appointment, and remains the governor of Illinois. But there was sufficient ambiguity in the Senate’s ability to pass on the qualifications of its members, or the validity of the selection process, that the Democratic leadership, if it wanted to delay the appointment until Mr. Blagojevich was out of office, could have done so. And since when did something as trivial as the law stop a determined politician from doing what he wanted? Further, on 12/30, when Mr. Blagojevich appointed Mr. Burris, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senator Dick Durbin, our senior senator, released a statement that anyone Mr. Blagojevich appointed “cannot be an effective representative of the people of Illinois” and would “not be seated” by the Democratic caucus. I apparently overestimated the resolve of the Senate Democrats and their determination to stick to stated principle. (And it is indeed a sad day in America when I overestimate the resolve of the members of the zoo that once was considered the world’s greatest deliberative body.) As soon as it was hinted that blocking Mr. Burris’s appointment could be construed as even remotely racist, Messrs, Durbin and Reid, as is the wont of most politicians, folded like a cheap card table, or a certain baseball team that plies its trade on Chicago’s north side.

One has to admit that Mr. Blagojevich, though lacking the finesse and vision of the more polished practitioners of Chicago politics, in this instance has beaten the masters at their own game, primarily by exploiting two (or perhaps 57) of their weakest links, a downstate dilettante the Chicago pols mistakenly put into the Senate and his pathetic colleagues in that most august body. The Democrats have retained the seat, though it was hard to imagine their losing it. Roland Burris has his eccentricities, and, while these will probably surface during his tenure in the Senate, the local Dems certainly could have done worse. (Our jackanapes of a senior senator comes immediately to mind.) Doubtless the Republicans are overjoyed; their only hope (and it remains a faint hope) of gaining this Senate seat lies in running against Roland Burris, not because he is Roland Burris (Mr. Burris, despite being a serial primary loser, has never lost to a Republican. Admittedly, this is not much of a statement in our state.), but because he got his seat through the clever duplicity of Rod Blagojevich and the spineless pusillanimity of Dick Durbin. But let’s see how long voters’ memories are; I’m betting not much longer than your typical situation comedy.