Tarnished dome - Widespread corruption and sleazy politics undermine the best efforts of the state's honest civil servants
NSIDE STORY: A FAREWELL TO SPRINGFIELD
Tarnished dome - Widespread corruption and sleazy politics undermine the best efforts of the state's honest civil servants
By Christi Parsons, who is joining the Tribune's Washington, D.C., bureau this fall to cover the Illinois delegation in Congress
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published September 10, 2006
The silver dome of the Illinois State Capitol was gleaming in the afternoon sun, a shining beacon amid a prairie of soybeans and cornfields. I was a young reporter that day in 1995, on my way to start a new job covering state government for the Tribune. I was not naive, but I came to town with a fundamental respect for the work that took place beneath that majestic roof. From the distance, it appeared awesome and beautiful.
It was also corrupt, sneaky and underhanded, as the next 11 years of reporting would show me in no uncertain terms.
The decade of work that began for me when I arrived in Springfield would turn out to be one of the most outrageous in the annals of politics, even by Illinois standards.
You would think it would be hard to top all those stories of wining, dining and hand greasing that had previously emanated from the state capital.
But as we were vividly reminded last week with the sentencing of former Gov. George Ryan, the culture of sleaze was alive and on the rise in Springfield.
Within hours of my arrival, I got the first clues that the Capitol was something less than a chapel.
My introduction to the place confirmed every bad stereotype about the workplace culture, which looked like a 1950s movie set.
My first day on the job, I was greeted in the pressroom by a visitor drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. He mused that I must be the "broad" they'd sent down from Chicago.
Not long after that, I introduced myself to a legislative staffer who flipped through a copy of Playboy as we talked.
By comparison, the famously chauvinistic Senate President James "Pate" Philip seemed a sensitive, modern man, merely rolling up some papers he was carrying at the time we met and cheerfully patting me on the head with them.
The conduct in public was hardly more highly evolved. On the Senate floor, lawmakers puffed away on cigars while passing multimillion-dollar deals--sometimes without pretense about the benefits for their cronies and campaign contributors. One lobbyist once stood outside the House chambers and distributed envelopes stuffed with cash to legislators.
What the Tribune bureau and other journalists dug up over the coming years makes those snapshots look like scrapbook nostalgia.
During the trial of some high-priced state vendors in the late 1990s, we learned that some people think it's perfectly acceptable to treat state officials like contestants on a game show. The proprietors of Management Services of Illinois Inc. handed out trips to Germany and Mexico, tickets to the Super Bowl and cash awards. The "winners" never batted an eye, even though they were supposed to be supervising the vendor's work for the state.
And they worked for Gov. Jim Edgar, viewed as one of the cleaner guys ever to hold office.
While Ryan was secretary of state, some of his friends ran a kickback scheme that made the MSI scandal look like small potatoes. With one influential lobbyist hooking up state staffers with prostitutes in Costa Rica, the Illinois story line was as audacious as anything ever carried out at Tammany Hall.
The old-style operating methods didn't end there. There have been probes of charges that state employees working for Republicans and Democrats alike have done political work on taxpayer time, conduct so commonplace that it often elicits a "so what else is new?" shrug from Statehouse insiders.
When one former chief of staff was sent to prison recently for running such an operation, the news stories didn't even make the front page of the big papers.
There have been some changes over the decade, to be sure. The elections of Chicago Democrats as leaders of the House and Senate and as governor have put a greater number of women and people of color in positions of prominence, giving the place a slightly more 21st Century look and feel--at least when the legislature is in session.
But if you think the old-school way of doing things is over and done with, think again.
These days, prosecutors are zeroing in on questionable hiring practices in the administration of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, providing plenty of examples of old-style politics as practiced by the new crew.
Keeping the faith
You might think that after 11 years of covering this sort of thing day in and day out, I would have a jaded view of the state capital. After you've spent a long day at the circus, the clowns aren't really all that funny anymore.
In fact, as I move to Washington to start a new assignment for the newspaper, I can think of lots of reasons to feel otherwise--thousands of them actually, in the names and faces of the people who have been betrayed and besmirched by the sleazy operators.
The Capitol is a magnet for people from all over the state and country who come on a mission.
I've spent the last decade talking to activists, staffers, lawmakers and lobbyists from the far right and the far left and everywhere in between, a remarkable number of whom put their hearts into trying to make the world a better place.
Yes, there are lazy state workers to fit the jokes, who don't stare out the window in the morning because there wouldn't be anything to do in the afternoon.
But there also are hundreds of them who report to work every day to make sure someone is looking after the poor, neglected and sick.
They schedule the news conferences, monitor the political contributions, deliver the mail and pay the bills.
They buff and polish the Capitol so that, when citizens arrive to witness their democracy in action, they might also be filled with a sense of awe at its beauty.
And as for the journalists who populate the place, they're cynical, crass and rude, and they've been known to make children cry.
But they're proud to be watchdogs; otherwise they'd take higher-paying jobs as lobbyists and public relations professionals.
They don't turn a blind eye to those you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours practices.
Not `just politics'
Those who do turn a blind eye often explain that the practices are "just politics," suggesting that insider dealing and favors for friends and supporters are an acceptable way of doing business in Illinois.
The wheeling and dealing makes both for fascinating news stories and for a potentially dangerous level of disenchantment among citizens.
But I doubt that's the culture that Abraham Lincoln was eulogizing when he bid the place an affectionate farewell in 1861.
"To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything," he said.
Would Lincoln say the same today? Maybe, instead, he would utter the line attributed to him on a popular local T-shirt.
It reads, "They'd have to shoot me to get me back to Springfield."
----------
cparsons@tribune.com
Tarnished dome - Widespread corruption and sleazy politics undermine the best efforts of the state's honest civil servants
By Christi Parsons, who is joining the Tribune's Washington, D.C., bureau this fall to cover the Illinois delegation in Congress
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published September 10, 2006
The silver dome of the Illinois State Capitol was gleaming in the afternoon sun, a shining beacon amid a prairie of soybeans and cornfields. I was a young reporter that day in 1995, on my way to start a new job covering state government for the Tribune. I was not naive, but I came to town with a fundamental respect for the work that took place beneath that majestic roof. From the distance, it appeared awesome and beautiful.
It was also corrupt, sneaky and underhanded, as the next 11 years of reporting would show me in no uncertain terms.
The decade of work that began for me when I arrived in Springfield would turn out to be one of the most outrageous in the annals of politics, even by Illinois standards.
You would think it would be hard to top all those stories of wining, dining and hand greasing that had previously emanated from the state capital.
But as we were vividly reminded last week with the sentencing of former Gov. George Ryan, the culture of sleaze was alive and on the rise in Springfield.
Within hours of my arrival, I got the first clues that the Capitol was something less than a chapel.
My introduction to the place confirmed every bad stereotype about the workplace culture, which looked like a 1950s movie set.
My first day on the job, I was greeted in the pressroom by a visitor drinking a beer and smoking a cigar. He mused that I must be the "broad" they'd sent down from Chicago.
Not long after that, I introduced myself to a legislative staffer who flipped through a copy of Playboy as we talked.
By comparison, the famously chauvinistic Senate President James "Pate" Philip seemed a sensitive, modern man, merely rolling up some papers he was carrying at the time we met and cheerfully patting me on the head with them.
The conduct in public was hardly more highly evolved. On the Senate floor, lawmakers puffed away on cigars while passing multimillion-dollar deals--sometimes without pretense about the benefits for their cronies and campaign contributors. One lobbyist once stood outside the House chambers and distributed envelopes stuffed with cash to legislators.
What the Tribune bureau and other journalists dug up over the coming years makes those snapshots look like scrapbook nostalgia.
During the trial of some high-priced state vendors in the late 1990s, we learned that some people think it's perfectly acceptable to treat state officials like contestants on a game show. The proprietors of Management Services of Illinois Inc. handed out trips to Germany and Mexico, tickets to the Super Bowl and cash awards. The "winners" never batted an eye, even though they were supposed to be supervising the vendor's work for the state.
And they worked for Gov. Jim Edgar, viewed as one of the cleaner guys ever to hold office.
While Ryan was secretary of state, some of his friends ran a kickback scheme that made the MSI scandal look like small potatoes. With one influential lobbyist hooking up state staffers with prostitutes in Costa Rica, the Illinois story line was as audacious as anything ever carried out at Tammany Hall.
The old-style operating methods didn't end there. There have been probes of charges that state employees working for Republicans and Democrats alike have done political work on taxpayer time, conduct so commonplace that it often elicits a "so what else is new?" shrug from Statehouse insiders.
When one former chief of staff was sent to prison recently for running such an operation, the news stories didn't even make the front page of the big papers.
There have been some changes over the decade, to be sure. The elections of Chicago Democrats as leaders of the House and Senate and as governor have put a greater number of women and people of color in positions of prominence, giving the place a slightly more 21st Century look and feel--at least when the legislature is in session.
But if you think the old-school way of doing things is over and done with, think again.
These days, prosecutors are zeroing in on questionable hiring practices in the administration of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, providing plenty of examples of old-style politics as practiced by the new crew.
Keeping the faith
You might think that after 11 years of covering this sort of thing day in and day out, I would have a jaded view of the state capital. After you've spent a long day at the circus, the clowns aren't really all that funny anymore.
In fact, as I move to Washington to start a new assignment for the newspaper, I can think of lots of reasons to feel otherwise--thousands of them actually, in the names and faces of the people who have been betrayed and besmirched by the sleazy operators.
The Capitol is a magnet for people from all over the state and country who come on a mission.
I've spent the last decade talking to activists, staffers, lawmakers and lobbyists from the far right and the far left and everywhere in between, a remarkable number of whom put their hearts into trying to make the world a better place.
Yes, there are lazy state workers to fit the jokes, who don't stare out the window in the morning because there wouldn't be anything to do in the afternoon.
But there also are hundreds of them who report to work every day to make sure someone is looking after the poor, neglected and sick.
They schedule the news conferences, monitor the political contributions, deliver the mail and pay the bills.
They buff and polish the Capitol so that, when citizens arrive to witness their democracy in action, they might also be filled with a sense of awe at its beauty.
And as for the journalists who populate the place, they're cynical, crass and rude, and they've been known to make children cry.
But they're proud to be watchdogs; otherwise they'd take higher-paying jobs as lobbyists and public relations professionals.
They don't turn a blind eye to those you-scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours practices.
Not `just politics'
Those who do turn a blind eye often explain that the practices are "just politics," suggesting that insider dealing and favors for friends and supporters are an acceptable way of doing business in Illinois.
The wheeling and dealing makes both for fascinating news stories and for a potentially dangerous level of disenchantment among citizens.
But I doubt that's the culture that Abraham Lincoln was eulogizing when he bid the place an affectionate farewell in 1861.
"To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything," he said.
Would Lincoln say the same today? Maybe, instead, he would utter the line attributed to him on a popular local T-shirt.
It reads, "They'd have to shoot me to get me back to Springfield."
----------
cparsons@tribune.com
posted by Carlos T Mock @ 7:16 PM
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