He is a liberal, but he’s not a latter-day lefty. He cares for his country and is not nuts.

He’s a professional.

(Oh, man, I hope I haven’t just written the man’s obituary!)

After the 2006 election where Blago was re-elected, with strong support of Democratic leadership, and continued endorsements from his Chicago cronies (Obama included), in spite low popularity among voters that drove a relatively strong Green Party showing by defecting Dems:

Overall the GOP had over a 14% drop from their previous governor vote totals.

Blagojevich had a 6% drop.

The number of people who actually voted for governor only dropped 1.5%. The explanation was the relatively strong showing by the Green Party candidate, Whiney, who more than tripled the 3rd party showing from 2002 even before figuring in the others. Blagojevich came up over a 110,000 votes shy of his earlier totals and a more liberal 3rd party candidate picked up over 360,000 votes. Meanwhile the GOP bled off more than 220,000 votes.

A county by county breakdown showed the most dramatic percentage drops of Republican support in traditionally conservative counties, and though the Chicago area is generally considered liberal, it also contains a significant portion of the Republican voters too, the Chicago area bled a great deal of Republican voters as well.

2006 was a double hit against the IL GOP with the national backlash against Republicans having a coattail effect in State/local elections, but worse with a further “RINO” effect against Topinka who had some notoriously socially liberal views. And even worse in that Topinka was smeared for her association with George Ryan directly in attack ads… which increased the doubts that a Republican would be less corrupt, especially as Ryan, the last Republican governor, was on his way to prison.

2006 was the year the IL GOP lost every state-wide office to the Dems and the Dems gained a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly here.

Not sure if anything could have changed the 2006 general election results. Everything was working against the GOP that year. It doesn’t get the Democratic leadership off the hook for swinging their support to Blago over Eisen in the primaries though. Eisen actually had a fairly decent showing under the circumstances (no dem leadership support and running against an incumbent of her own party).

The Dem primary in 2006 was, for all intents and purposes, the governor election that year, and Democratic leaders demonstrably backed a well known corrupt yahoo they didn’t like that much out of fears they wouldn’t achieve a full strangehold on power. Instead they didn’t get the power (Blago, as expected, continued to run his office as a petit dictator in spite of their desires for policy) and they got themselves a far more embarrassing corruption black eye.

Granted, I was frustrated by the GOP infighting in the general given how much I despised King Rod, but while that was a significant factor, it was driven by frustrations with the national party and previous problems with the State party as well. The primary blame must be laid at the feet of the Democratic leadership, especially the Chicago machine politicians and those in bed with them, who looked the other way or personally gained at the expense of our State’s image and prosperity.