Jamie Weinstein

With the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s presidency upon us, pundits are deluging op-ed pages and cable news shows with their analysis of year one in the Age of Obama. But whose opinion can we trust? What analyst can we turn to for unfiltered truth?

Well, why not America’s most trusted politician? You know, indicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Great political theatre.

With an anniversary of his own just recently passed in December (the one-year anniversary of his arrest, that is), I thought I would see what the man who governed Illinois when Obama was making his meteoric rise in politics, first in Illinois and then nationwide, thought of how his former constituent has done in the White House.

“You can make a very strong argument that [President Obama] is just, you know, a more eloquent Bush,” Blago told me over the phone at the end of December, expressing his disappointment in Obama. “Obama gets elected and his first economic stimulus plan is what? He takes our money, the taxpayers money, calls it economic stimulus and gives it to the big banks.”

And that’s not all.

“The president promised that unemployment would go down to 8 percent when he said it and now it is better than 11 percent. Afghanistan, okay? Promised we would get out of Afghanistan. Like Bush, not only are we staying in Afghanistan, he has actually increased the number of soldiers in Afghanistan. And then the health care bill when he is gutting pre-existing medical conditions, when he is gutting the public option, and when he is gutting getting affordable medicines from Canada, opening up the marketplace to American consumers to buy a necessity like medicine, when he is gutting that he is governing like Bush.”

Just to be clear, calling a fellow Democrat a carbon copy of Bush is just about the worst insult a liberal can fling.

As Blago sees it, Obama is a man who squandered his opportunities despite his many talents. And the reason for his failures lies in his weakness.

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“The first mistake he made,” Blago explained, “was that he basically went to Harry Reid and Pelosi and said ‘here I want health care why don’t you guys put a bill together’ instead of doing his own bill. Now compare that to Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. He had his New Deal program and he got his fellow Democrats in his first 100 days to pass most of it. Compare that to Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. OK, when Ronald Reagan wanted his tax cuts he got his fellow Republicans with their majorities to pass those tax cuts in the first couple of months. This president squandered it.”

Getting away from Obama for a bit, I asked Blago what he thought about senators like Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson getting big payoffs for their respective states in the Senate Health care bill in exchange for their votes. Does it strike him as hypocritical or unfair that this ‘pay to play’ scheme does not involve criminal charges while he is be prosecuted for something not all-to-dissimilar?

“Yes, I am being prosecuted for routine politics and they are not. So yeah, it is interesting, isn’t it?,” Blago wondered aloud, before continuing. “So you are asking me why I get prosecuted for this sort of thing and the others aren’t do I think it is hypocritical? It is certainly inconsistent. And the other irony is what I did was for the good of the people.”

Blago’s main problem with the payoffs to Sens. Dodd, Nelson, and Landrieu, among others, is not that they are inherently unethical, but that the senators cut deals for their state in support of what he termed a “shitty bill” that “sells out their constituents.”

The indicted former governor simply finds that behavior “disgusting.”

The courts will determine whether Blago is as innocent of the charges against him as he contends. The way Blago explains his current predicament is that not only is he innocent, but he was just trying to make a deal for the good of his constituents. This is not surprising. Many criminals proclaim their innocence before being sent to the slammer. Certainly, from the segments of conversations that have been released by the FBI, things don’t sound so great for the former governor.

“I’ve got this thing and it’s f***ing golden,” Blago colorfully explained in one conversation the FBI recorded while tapping his phone, seemingly speaking of his power as governor to appoint Barack Obama’s replacement in the Senate. “I’m not giving it up for f***ing nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”

But in his favor, Blago is calling for all the tapes to be released, a move that he says makes him and his situation the “anti-Watergate, anti-Nixon.”

We’ll see.

Yet, Blago spoke with such passion during the interview that one gets the impression that perhaps we have not seen the last of this political natural. Though he says he is still hopeful about Obama becoming the progressive president that he once believed he would be, Blago’s searing criticism of the Obama presidency to date gives voice to the deep disappointment felt on the left.

So what if it turns out, as Blago so ardently argues, that the man with the perfect politician hair is completely innocent of the charges leveled against him? Could an exonerated Blago rise like a phoenix? Could an exonerated Blago, perhaps, present himself to disappointed left wing activists as a progressive alternative to a President Obama who has lost his hopeful luster in 2012? Could Blago be the change that the Democratic activists have been waiting for in 2012 in the form of a left-wing primary challenge against his former constituent?

Almost certainly not. But it surely would make for unbeatable political theatre.

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