A long, painful road for Illinois

In some inexplicable way, I felt sorry for ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Thursday as he delivered his last-ditch argument to the Illinois Senate. There he stood, in the Senate chamber in Springfield, giving an impassioned plea while lawmakers sat silently, perhaps just counting down the hours and minutes before they dealt a fatal blow to his political life. When he concluded his speech, he was advised that he was welcome to stay and listen to the prosecution's closing argument. The ex-governor quietly declined and left the room unceremoniously. Literally and figuratively, no one stood by him. He knew as well as anyone else that his time in public office was done. That was perhaps the only grip on reality he had; in all other respects, the man was and is delusional.

Nevertheless, any sense of pity I felt was equally misguided, especially toward an individual who has willfully inflicted so much pain on my home state. Two short months ago, I was distinctly proud of being a native of the state that had not only produced the president who abolished slavery and held this nation together through a bitter civil war, but also most recently, the first African American ever to hold that office. Little did I know the ugly saga that was about to unfold and rudely extinguish the celebratory atmosphere in the Land of Lincoln. When it did, I joined millions of other Illinoisans in condemning Blagojevich's alleged crimes and calling for his immediate resignation.

And if the man had possessed even an ounce of personal integrity, he would have heeded that advice. He would have recognized the damage he would cause to our state by arrogantly clinging to power even as he faced federal criminal charges. Proclaiming one's innocence as a politician under fire is one story; acting in the best interests of the people who hired you to put them first — not yourself — is another entirely. On the latter, Blagojevich failed miserably and seemed to take pride in doing so. Instead of stepping aside to spare Illinois the trauma he knew it was about to face, the corrupt governor relished every minute he was in the spotlight — at one point, openly defying his colleagues who told him unequivocally not to appoint Obama's senatorial replacement, and at another, engaging on a media blitz while boycotting his own impeachment trial for the purpose of painting himself as a political martyr. Throughout that entire time, he did nothing to convince anyone that he wasn't guilty of every single charge leveled against him.

That's probably because his secretly recorded phone conversations — and even some of the interviews he did this past week — left little or no room for doubt. Yet Blagojevich continually cast himself as the victim and unabashedly exploited his position of authority and prominence as a pedestal from which to wage his twisted, self-righteous personal crusade. In so doing, he ignored the real victim — the people of Illinois, whose government was too busy dealing with a corrupt chief executive to tackle the catalog of problems that the state is currently facing.

Like so many others, I'm outraged and fatigued by the soap opera that has taken place in the past two months — and no less saddened by the tragic direction we've taken since that historic night in early November in Chicago. It's finally time to begin the healing process. There will be some immediate, tangible symbols of this, like the removal of $480,000 worth of tollway signs bearing the ex-governor's name. But it will mostly consist of less visible and more prolonged benchmarks. Perhaps chief among them will be the lessons that the citizens of Illinois — and Americans in general — learned from this mess about the brutal consequences of political arrogance and corruption. We can only hope.