Chicago Straight

The arrest of Governor Rod Blagojevich in December cast a shadowy light on the relationships among four leading players in the Illinois Democratic Party—Blagojevich, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod. The new president and his two aides would like to minimize their dealings with the disgraced ex-governor. But the record tells a more complex story

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By the time of the 2006 gubernatorial race, the clouds of scandal had grown darker over the Blagojevich administration. Suspicions—and subpoenas—were flying around state government. U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had already nabbed half a dozen Blagojevich insiders in various hiring, extortion, and bribery schemes. At the center of these scandals was “Public Official A,” as court documents put it—Governor Blagojevich.           

With more than $20 million to spend on his reelection—more than twice what was available to his Republican opponent, the state treasurer, Judy Baar Topinka—Blagojevich unleashed a punishing barrage of attack ads. The campaign, devised by Bill Knapp, a respected Beltway veteran who replaced Axelrod in Blagojevich’s circle, tied Topinka to the corrupt ex-governor George Ryan and helped sink her campaign.

Throughout, the leading state Democrats stood with Blagojevich. By then, Obama had tried to distance himself from the governor, and several Obama associates say he was put off by Blagojevich’s seeming scratch-your-back manner of governing. So, why would Obama—the supposed Mr. Clean of politics—support a scandal-ridden governor’s reelection bid? In July of that year, a reporter for the Daily Herald asked Obama that very question. “I have not followed closely enough what’s been taking place in these investigations to comment on them,” then-Senator Obama said. “Obviously, I’m concerned about reports that hiring practices at the state weren’t, at times, following appropriate procedures. How high up that went, the degree at which the governor was involved, is not something I’m going to speculate on.” Obama added that he was unwilling to condemn Blagojevich, and he even offered to help him out: “If the governor asks me to work on his behalf, I’ll be happy to do it,” he told the Daily Herald.

Blagojevich never asked—his jealousy of the Illinois senator, by then, bordered on outright hostility. Giangreco recalls that the governor would often derisively refer to Obama by his childhood nickname, Barry, typically in a nasally voice—“Baaaaary Obama.” Blagojevich seemed genuinely stunned that the same guy who got clobbered by Bobby Rush and coddled by Emil Jones was now the hottest political phenom on the planet. In the Mell interview in the fall of 2007, I asked the alderman—who by then was estranged from his son-in-law—if he knew how Blagojevich felt about Obama’s rapid rise. “It’s eating him, I guarantee, it’s eating him,” Mell told me. “He looks at Obama and asks himself, ‘Why isn’t that me? I’m as charismatic as you. I can deliver a speech as well as you can. I can seem as sincere as you.’ I can guarantee you that he wants Barack to fail so bad.” 

People close to Obama cite several reasons why he supported Blagojevich in 2006. For one, “No Drama” Obama didn’t want to “make waves,” in Chicago parlance. “It would make news if he hadn’t [supported Blagojevich],” says Giangreco. “You’re the junior Democratic senator from Illinois and you’re not going to endorse the Democratic governor? We’re Democrats; we elect Democrats. That’s what it came down to with Rod.”  Indeed, only a handful of elected Democrats spurned Blagojevich in 2006, most notably the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, who stayed out of the race, and Bobby Rush, who broke ranks and supported Topinka. (In an illustration of how baroque Illinois politics can get, Blagojevich’s archenemy, the Illinois House speaker, Michael Madigan—Lisa’s father—cochaired the governor’s 2006 reelection campaign.)

Obama had another reason to back the tainted governor. With a run for the presidency in mind, Axelrod and Obama’s other top advisers felt that Obama should keep far away from state political infighting. “Remember—after he got elected to the U.S. Senate, he was not ‘Barack Obama.’ He was ‘Barack Obama Mick Jagger,’” says Shomon. “He didn’t have time to get involved in Springfield.”

Obama’s critics see his endorsement of Blagojevich as cowardice or, worse, hypocrisy—proof that he is no better than your typical Chicago machine pol. As the Tribune columnist John Kass once put it: “Is Obama corrupt, the way the caricature of Chicago-style corruption is often drawn, with some beefeater alderman reeking of gin, stuffing an envelope into his breast pocket? No . . . but Obama looked the other way in order to prosper and assiduously avoid conflict with the machine to the point of embrace. In this, he offered . . . a glimpse at the real man inside the nice suit, the Chicago Way.”

* * *

On the night of Obama’s election as president, Blagojevich put on a brave face and grudgingly joined the crowd of a quarter million at the victory celebration in Grant Park. He would have preferred to stay home. “We really had to push him to go,” says the first former Blagojevich aide. “I think it hurt him too much to see Barack.” Blagojevich left after just half an hour, well before Obama took the stage.

But the governor still had a couple of political chits left, and one in particular was the “fucking golden” (as he put it on tape) opportunity to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy. For weeks, his phone had been ringing, as wannabes promoted themselves. “I’ve never had more friends than I do today,” Blagojevich cracked to reporters the day after the election. In the days that followed, the scramble for the seat intensified. And Blagojevich gleefully stoked the flames, ordering his staff to leak names to the press. “He really wanted to keep everybody off balance,” says the former aide. His alleged efforts to cash in on the opportunity led to his arrest on December 9th—before he could pull off the scheme, Fitzgerald said at a news conference that day.

Two days after the election, on November 6th, Emanuel accepted Obama’s offer to become his chief of staff. Even some inside Obama’s inner circle were somewhat surprised by the choice. Emanuel had never been an integral adviser to Obama’s Senate and presidential campaigns—maybe a valued sounding board here or there, but hardly a principal. Indeed, Emanuel had stayed neutral during the heated presidential primary, unable to choose sides between his old friend Hillary Clinton and Obama. But right after the election, Emanuel became indispensable to the president-elect. David Axelrod told The New Yorker that “months before the election,” Obama had mentioned that Emanuel would make a great chief of staff, given his experience in the White House and Congress. Axelrod himself added that Emanuel was “a friend who the president has known for a long time from Chicago and whose loyalty is beyond question, and who thinks like a Chicagoan.” 

As the game played out with Blagojevich, Emanuel became the key participant for the Obama team, though Emanuel’s precise role remains unclear. Greg Craig’s report concluded that Emanuel had just a handful of conversations with the governor’s office pertaining to the Senate seat—one or two with Blagojevich and four more with his chief of staff, John Harris. Craig concluded that the discussions were all appropriate.

The Craig report also related that Emanuel called Blagojevich when he took the chief of staff job to give him a “heads up” that he would soon be resigning his House seat. During that conversation or in a second that followed, Emanuel suggested that the governor appoint Valerie Jarrett to the Senate seat. Craig’s report claimed that Emanuel advanced Jarrett only because “he knew she was interested.” Two sources with knowledge of the discussions—one close to Obama and the other to Blagojevich—say Emanuel’s motives were more complicated. “Rahm wanted her out of the White House,” says the Obama insider. New to Obama’s inner circle, Emanuel had heard the stories from others inside Obama’s campaign that Jarrett could be difficult. “Emanuel was hoping she’d be senator so he wouldn’t have to share Obama with her in the White House,” the former confidant of Blagojevich says. In the end, Jarrett took herself out of the Senate-seat derby.

At the same time Emanuel was discussing the Senate seat, he was also talking about the status of his own seat. By accepting the chief of staff job, Emanuel had to give up—at least, for the time being—his dream of being the first Jewish Speaker of the House. According to the first former Blagojevich aide, Blagojevich and Emanuel discussed the possibility of finding a “seat warmer”—someone who could temporarily fill the vacancy until Emanuel could reclaim the seat after his stint in the White House. Blagojevich told Emanuel that he would look into it, according to the aide. By law, the governor didn’t have the authority to name Emanuel’s replacement. But Blagojevich instructed his legal counsel, William Quinlan, to explore his options. (Quinlan  did not respond to questions.)

In one conversation recorded by the feds on November 13th, the governor told John Harris that in exchange for an unknown favor involving Emanuel’s old Fifth Congressional District seat, he wanted Emanuel’s help raising “10, 15 million” for a new nonprofit organization that Blagojevich would oversee. “When [Emanuel] asks me for the Fifth CD thing I want it to be in his head,” Blagojevich said to Harris on the tape. Though it’s not publicly known whether Harris relayed Blagojevich’s message to Emanuel, the exchange suggests that Blagojevich considered the congressional seat as another valuable bargaining chip. (In the end, Emanuel’s seat was filled by an election.)

Was Emanuel as uninvolved as the Craig  report disclosed? In December, the Sun-Times—citing sources close to the investigation—reported that Emanuel had been recorded on 21 wiretapped calls to Blagojevich’s camp, at least 15 more than Obama’s internal report revealed. The Craig report also did not disclose Emanuel’s alleged conversations with John Wyma, also reported by the Sun-Times. (A White House official, speaking not for attribution, called both newspaper accounts “false,” and said the White House stands by the Craig report.)

* * *

Shortly before the start of the December 30th news conference in which Blagojevich would defy and confound the political world by appointing Roland Burris the state’s new junior senator, the governor met with Burris and a small group of aides in the governor’s office in the Thompson Center. They made small talk, discussing logistics for what was surely expected to be a three-ring media circus. Then they prayed. 

Throughout, Blagojevich was bouncing with excitement, almost gloating, according to two people who were in the room. “You watch, you watch,” he kept muttering, as if anticipating the trouble he would cause his political enemies—Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, others uncounted. “You watch, you watch. . . ."  

This article appears in the June 2009 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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