I know all this because I am one of Fritchey’s Facebook friends. Two, three, sometimes five times a day –– “I’m afraid to admit I don’t spend more than two hours away from my laptop or iPhone” – Fritchey posts up his latest thoughts for all to see. And it doesn’t matter whether he is sitting on the floor of the state legislature, where he is assistant majority leader, or on his way to a candidate forum in his quest to join the Cook County board, or on vacation in Cabo San Lucas.

If John Fritchey moves, you can read about it on the Internet. And this is an interesting position for a 46-year-old man to put himself into: especially if you consider he is a 7-term state representative from the north side of Chicago; the chairman of the Illinois House Judiciary Committee; the likely successor to Forrest Claypool as a voice of reform on the county board; both a product of the old Democratic machine in Chicago and, by his own admission, its greatest critic; and a man who really, really, really would like some day to be mayor of Chicago.

Like Being John Malkovich

“My Facebook page is like a political version of Being John Malkovich,” he jokes. “This is who I am, and part of who I am is a guy who loves music, and part of who I am is a passionate state legislator, and part of who I am is a father. You are going to get my irreverent sense of humor. You are going to get my diatribes. You are going to get posts that reflect I am having a day and posts that reflect I’m having a good day. I do not want to check who I am at the door simply because I’m in public service,” he adds.

Fritchey has 2,700 Facebook friends and another 700 followers on Twitter. On any given day, his page percolates with lively interactions with his fans. (Example: “What is your take on the budget, John?” Fritchey: “We’re screwed.”) Fritchey knows it is not the typical political page. Many of his colleagues look at him like he has a screw loose, but Fritchey says he had one of those “safe” political pages–when he was running in the special election to succeed Rahm Emanuel in Congress–and it almost drove him crazy. Too many politicians use Facebook to post up press releases or have their staff write it “and then it sounds like you are tweeting sound bites.”

“The worst situation is having staff write it as if they were the elected officials,” he says. “I think that’s disingenuous. If you’re going to do it, do it yourself. Let people see who you are.  I’ve kind of taken a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get position . . . and I think people appreciate that window into me as a person.”

Always An Outsider

That person was born on March 2, 1964 on an air force base in Bossier City, Louisiana. His father, an airplane mechanic, met his mother when he was stationed in Morocco but they were divorced before he turned two. Instead of going home, she decided to give her boy all the benefits of American citizenship. She took him north to his father’s boyhood home in Olney, Illinois, then on to Chicago where she worked as a waitress, bank teller and office manager. She got remarried to Sidney Swibel, brother of Chicago Housing Authority chairman Charles Swibel and, from his home in Marina City, Fritchey attended Chicago Latin School.

Even in high school, Fritchey was attracted to computers, crude as they were. He recalls learning to program in BASIC with punch cards. He did well in school. He went on to attend the University of Michigan and Northwestern Law School on scholarship. But his Moroccan ancestry and humble roots made him feel out of place in a school that catered to some of Chicago’s wealthiest families. “I always felt like an outside. I always felt like I had something to prove,” he said.

Fritchey spent two years as an assistant in the Illinois Attorney General’s office before starting his own private practice. In 1992, he married Karen Banks, daughter of the recently deceased Sam Banks, a zoning attorney whose brother Ald. Bill Banks of the 36^th ward, not only chairs the city council zoning committee but ran what was for many years the most powerful Democratic ward organization in the city. Three years later, the state representative from Chicago’s northside, Rod Blagojevich, decided to run for Congress. Fritchey looked at the ward map, saw his house was a couple hundred feet inside the border and announced his candidacy.

The Son-in-Law Swap

Fritchey’s first election is sometimes referred to as “the son-in-law swap.” In exchange for the Banks family backing Blagojevich in the 36^th ward, Ald. Dick Mell, who was Blagojevich’s father-in-law, threw the weight of his own 33^rd ward Democratic committee behind Fritchey. Mell has continued to be a strong Fritchey supporter through the years while Fritchey’s relations with his wife’s side of the family have become tangled, and occasionally frosty. “I have undying respect for my wife’s family, but I haven’t spoken to Bill Banks in months. We are very different politically.”

When he first went to Springfield in 1997, Fritchey was 31 years old, the third youngest member of the General Assembly. “I got sworn in on a Wednesday and expected to change the world by Friday,” he jokes. A self-described bull in a china shop, he quickly staked out ethics reform as an area where he thought he could make a difference. He pushed passage of an Inspector Solicitation Conduct Act prohibiting state employees from shaking down businesses they regulate (the underpinnings of the case against former Gov. George Ryan). He was the chief sponsor of the Pay to Play bill, co-sponsor with then state Sen. Barack Obama of the 2003 ethics reform bill, and rose to become chairman of the house Judiciary Committee.

He was one of the first legislators to have an email address (mystaterep@aol.com), the first to blog, and the only one I know who has Tweet Deck on his laptop so he can simultaneously monitor his Facebook page, his emails, his tweets and other tweets that mention him. It’s nerdy, but it’s also good politics. Over the years, he has built up a list of 15,000 email addresses. He can target mailings–“to women in the 32^nd ward who have contacted me on an environmental issue, for instance”–without sending out a barrage of spam to people who could care less, or post up an idea for legislation on Facebook and get instant feedback. “I don’t understand why every elected official doesn’t seize on this. It costs me next to nothing, and if you are willing to invest the time, it is the most efficient way of reaching people imaginable.”

“I love being a legislator,” he says. “I still get the same sense of awe walking into the Capitol today as I did the first day I got there. But I think I matured a ton. A lot of the things I fought for nobody else was willing to take on when I got there. Now everybody wants to do ethics and reform because they are in vogue.”

Frustrations in Springfield

Fritchey’s ardor for Springfield began to wane about the same time Obama took the presidency. He had risen to be assistant majority leader to Rep. Michael Madigan. But as everyone in Springfield knows, Madigan calls all the shots. Under the Blagojevich regime, legislative had also turned into a long slog to nowhere. When he was first elected, legislators met in Springfield 50 or 60 days a year and spent the rest of the time in their district. Today, they will spend 150 to 200 days.

“I like working hard, but I don’t like working hard and having nothing to show for it,” he says. “It’s hard to climb out of the dysfunction embodied in Springfield. The partisanship, the vitriol, the ramifications of a $13 billion budget deficit. These are all frustrating things.”

Obama’s election opened a door for Fritchey to get out; and he took it, with disastrous results. When Emanuel resigned to become Obama’s chief of staff, Fritchey was one of 12 Democrats who ran in a special election to succeed him. The race lasted only seven weeks. In the coldest days of January and February, fewer than 15 percent of the Democrats turned out and County Board Commissioner Mike Quigley won with 11,553 votes. Fritchey raised and spent more money on the race, but finished a disappointing second, his support siphoned off by other candidates, including some backed by his wife’s uncle.

“It will never sit right with me how I was treated in the media,” he says. “You had Pat O’Connor, the mayor’s floor leader, in a race that obviously he couldn’t win but I somehow got spun as the machine guy.”

Fritchey says Banks’ 36^th ward organization was of no use to him––“They all laid down on me”––and Mayor Daley, irked that Fritchey went back on his earlier support for the privatization of Midway Airport, stayed out of the race. Had he won, Fritchey believes he would have been considered a viable candidate to succeed Daley. But the media never gave his record its due, he says. “I spent 13 years working for reform in Springfield, and all the media could focus on was my wife’s family.”

New Horizons – The County Board?

Last February, Fritchey won the Democratic primary for a northside seat on the county board and is an odds on favorite to win in November. At the press conference announcing his candidacy, he was flanked by Forrest Claypool, the long time reformer who is giving up the post, and Mike Quigley, the man who beat Fritchey in the Congressional race.

The county board is hardly the place a politician goes to make a name for himself. Cook County is the second largest in the country. Under the best of circumstances, it is a bureaucratic nightmare. Although the county board has jurisdiction over the sheriff’s office and state’s attorney, county courts, county jail, county hospital, and numerous social service offices, the first two are run by politicians elected in their own right and the others are their own special kind of hell––where almost all the clients are poor.

After years of patronage hiring under board Presidents John and Todd Stroger, the management systems are outdated, property taxes are stretched thin and the highest sales tax in the nation has voters outraged. Righting the ship in Cook County is like raising the Titanic.

“When Mike Quigley first talked to me about this, I said ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’ I’d rather eat glass than go to the county board.” Then Fritchey compared it to the life he could look forward to in Springfield. And he found a silver lining.

The primary victory of Fritchey, and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, and especially Toni Preckwinkle as county board president, means there is now a critical mass for major changes in how the county board conducts business.

“The biggest legacy that Claypool and Quigley left was focusing public attention on all the problems,” Fritchey says. Now that both of them have moved on, “there is a void for a vocal reform leader.”

In Springfield, Fritchey was a policy wonk.  On the county board, he welcomes the opportunity to try his hand at improving the administration of government services.

“I want to go where the need is. I want to go where the fights are,” he says. “I can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. And I think there are battles to be won there so this is a way to reinvigorate myself on a new battlefield.”

And if you want a ringside seat, you might want to sign onto Fritchey’s Facebook page for a blow-by-blow account.

What is it about the lieutenant governor job that I’m missing? The only official task is to chair the Illinois Rivers and Waterways Commission and, unofficially, wait around for the governor to get indicted or die in office. And yet 12 people, six Democrats and six Republicans, eagerly stepped up to run for the office and some, like Cohen and Plummer, spent lavishly to get it.

I never doubted Cohen’s credentials for the post. I even voted for him. A pawnbroker/businessman who can size up a Democratic race as astutely as he did, cadge endorsements off aldermen who claim they never met him, and win in spite of a TV commercial that looked like an ad for a truck driving school seemed like a perfect fit in Springfield. Too bad we’ll never see him in action.

I wasn’t around for the flurry of media attention that accompanied his victory, but being Scott Lee Cohen must have been quite an adventure last week. Here he thought he had put his stormy divorce, his steroid rages, his live-in prostitute girlfriend days behind him, when wham, every fluff head TV reporter with an Internet connection starts digging through court records for his delinquent child support ($54,000), unpaid rent ($40,000) and federal and state tax liens ($324,000 going back to 2001) like there’s something wrong with that.

Didn’t he offer to discuss all this with Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown when he first opened his campaign? And didn’t Brown write about him? Three times? Reporters who wouldn’t give him the time of day during the campaign now were camped out at his doorstep pushing court records in his face. Where were they when he was asking to set the record straight –– before people even knew he had a record?

I don’t blame Cohen for feeling like the Rodney Dangerfield of politics. He didn’t get no respect. He had to spend $2 million of his own money just to get his name out there. He sponsored a job fair nobody covered. Put billboards on the Kennedy. Bought airtime on all the networks. No one worked harder to get his name in front of the voters. And what kind of coverage did he get in the media? Nothing. Nada. Not a peep, pro or con.

Scott Lee Cohen won the democratic nomination for lieutenant governor with 213,000 votes –– in a primary where 7.5 million Illinois citizens were eligible to vote. Only 1.7 million of them went to the polls and 913,000 took Democratic ballots. Cohen won with 30,000 more votes than his nearest rival, but 93,000 of the Democratic voters––even as they stood with the ballot staring them in the face––never bothered to cast a vote in the lieutenant governor contest.

You want to look for someone to blame for this fiasco, dear citizens, blame yourselves. Sure, you can also blame a lackluster field of candidates, an office that has no meaning, and a media too decimated by budget cuts to serve an informed electorate. There is plenty of blame to go around. But if you are among the 78 percent of registered voters who did not even go to the polls, it might be better to keep your mouth shut altogether.

So Democratic state chairman Michael Madigan has decreed that Cohen must leave the ticket––for the good of the party––and a new candidate will be chosen by the party committeemen who will be worthy of running for that high office alongside a constitutional amendment Madigan is sponsoring to abolish it. Oh what a wondrous life it must be down that rabbit hole in Springfield.

The question that will not go away as fast as Cohen is where did he get the $2 million. Is the pawn business that lucrative? Did he borrow it? With that credit history? Find it stuffed in a mattress? Two million dollars doesn’t just grow on trees. (Unless you are a Plummer where that is precisely where it grows.) And there’s no record Cohen got substantial campaign contributions from anyone except himself.

What the Scott Cohen affair vividly demonstrates is that if you’ve got the money, you can shoot right to the front of the pack in Illinois politics. And that is precisely the problem. I don’t think we’ve heard the end of this little episode in democracy, nor should we.

* Photo courtesy of Marshall Rosenthal.

If a charismatic and popular Democratic president can’t pass health care reform with a solid majority in the U.S. House and 60 of the 100 seats in the Senate, the lament goes, how much change can any president bring? The answer, I’m afraid, is not much.

Sure, there are always things a president can do on his own. On his first day in office, President Obama signed executive orders to close down Guantanamo, ban prisoner torture, and end the revolving door between White House staff positions and offices on K Street. He gave a well-received speech to the Islamic world in Cairo and re-drafted the marching orders for Iraq and Afghanistan (for better or worse). Through the cabinet departments, he has affected thousands of small matters with a thousand regulatory changes, and made big changes on Wall Street, in the auto industry and global markets using emergency measures approved during the Bush administration, including juggling money in the TARP accounts.

But major changes in public policy invariably must pass through Congress, and, as the last eight months has demonstrated, Congress is the lowland swamp of politics, placid on the surface, murky below, infested by disease-carrying lobbyists and dominated by snakes and crocodiles with no other interest than their own self-preservation.

The irony is that it took a debate over health care to bring all this to the surface. Health care was not Obama’s strong suit in the campaign. Other candidates had far more detailed and more strongly-held positions. But in “the fierce urgency of now” Obama convinced himself health care reform would never have a better chance than when the winds of change were strong, and blowing at his back.

The Devil in the Details

He sent his package up to the Hill on a bed of olive branches. In Obama’s formulation of reform, he would outline the parameters, then he would leave it to the legislative process to work out the details. Republicans and Democrats, consumer advocates and industry lobbyists, patient caregivers and patient advocates all would have their say. There would be hearings and compromises, debate and discussion, but he promised, “We’re going to get it done!”

Alas, health care reform is very much undone today because the devil is in the details. Every step of the rocky path toward passage has proven perilous, and idealism has taken its knocks at every turn. The first sign of danger came when Republicans in the U.S. House sat on their hands and refused to participate. This left House Democrats an open field to lard up their bill with favors for the special interests. That in turn set the stage for even more horse-trading in the Senate, where the infamous Senate rule 22 governing filibusters meant Democrats would need every one of their 60 vote majority to get anything passed.

Over the summer and early fall, the issue that dominated health care reform was whether there should or should not be a public option. The vigorous debate Obama envisioned on Capitol Hill played out with far more fervor in the blogosphere. Liberal bloggers defiantly pressed for a government health plan as a way to rein in greedy health insurance companies; conservatives debated whether it was the first or last step on a slippery slope to socialized medicine.

In their own separate but identical way, the cable newsers flogged the health care debate like it was a rerun of the 2008 campaign, a second chance as it were for the demagogues on Fox and MSNBC to get in their licks at the other side. It had the same viewer appeal as an election (and almost as many TV advocacy spots): passionate spokesmen, heartrending personal stories, villainous opponents, and a deep, fundamental philosophical division over whether the government should or should not be in the health care business. (That train, of course, left the station years ago. Medicare and Medicaid alone, not to mention hospital subsidies, research grants, insurance re-imbursements, drug patents, veterans’ care and disease control, constitute 23 percent of federal spending every year.)

Show Me The Money

Meanwhile, the actual bills that were working their way through Congress were so much more than an up-down vote on a public option that the halls of Congress swarmed with lobbyists. Some 338 health care entities registered to lobby on the issue and over the last two years they have spent $635 million doing it. According to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics and Northwestern’s Medill News Service, the health care lobbyists included 13 former lawmakers and 166 former aides to committees and party leaders who were shaping the bills. At least 14 of them had worked for House majority leader Steny Hoyer and 13 were former aides to Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, whose Finance Committee version passed in the Senate two days before Christmas on a 60-39 vote.

By then, Baucus’s bill had become a 2,074 page Christmas tree of special interest favors (many added with no public debate). To win over the vote of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, Baucus inserted $300 million in added Medicaid for parishes struck by Hurricane Katrina. For Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, there was a clause to reimburse his state for any added Medicaid costs in the bill. For Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a last-minute exemption from the Cadillac health tax for longshoremen in his state. Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd won authorization of federal funds to construct a university hospital that can only be built in Connecticut. Florida Sen. Bill Nelson got $3.5 billion to allow seniors in his state to keep their Medicare Advantage policies while seniors in other states were losing theirs. In handing out favors to other states, Baucus didn’t forget his own. The final bill assures that the 2,800 residents of Libby, Montana, who were exposed to asbestos in a local vermiculite mine will be eligible for enhanced Medicare assistance.

Many of us grew up on history class lessons of senators who, on momentous occasions when great issues were at stake, stood out as exemplars of courage. This was not one of those occasions. The examples of senators acting in venal and petty pursuit of their own self-interest were far more numerous, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made it seem like that was a good thing. “I don’t know if there is a senator that doesn’t have something in this bill that was important to them,” he said. “And if they don’t have something in it important to them, then it doesn’t speak well of them.”

A Winking White House

Up until the Massachusetts special election last week, President Obama wasn’t particularly concerned with how Reid “got it done.” Whatever got the Senate to 60 votes was good by him. Now that Scott Brown’s election has dropped that to 59, however, the rhetoric coming out of the White House has gone from “the fierce urgency of now” to the less inspiring “watching sausage-making is never pretty.”

In the State of the Union address, Obama tried to climb back onto the moral high ground. He admitted health care has become enmeshed in too much horse-trading and vaguely offered to “take my share of the blame for not explaining it better to the American people.” In an earlier interview with  ABC’s Diane Sawyer, he called the health care debate “a big mush,” adding “I didn’t make a bunch of deals. There is a legislative process that is taking place in Congress and I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked.”

The president did a good job in his speech identifying the public’s “deficit of trust” in the way Washington works. “What frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day.  .  . .  Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game.  But it is precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people.  Worse yet, it is sowing further division among our citizens and further distrust in our government.”

But Obama’s first year in office has given the public more than speeches to go by. You don’t name Rahm Emanuel your chief of staff unless you intend to make deals with Congress, and putting him in charge of the health care negotiations was like asking Evil Knievel to write the highway safety regulations. Nothing is out of bounds –– unless you crash. As Mark Halperin and John Heilemann point out in their new book “Game Change”, even as a freshman senator, Obama was skeptical about what could be accomplished in the Senate. “The glacial pace, the endless procedural wrangling, the witless posturing and pettifoggery, the geriatric cast of characters doddering around the place: all of it drove him nuts.”

In his first year of engagement with the process, after all the past promises of change, there is little evidence that Obama played the game any differently; or if he did, that it was a winning strategy.

The lesson of the last eight months has been the hard to swallow reality the legislative process, as it is euphemistically called, is agonizingly slow, petty and pernicious – largely by design – and it’s not going to get any better in the coming years. The new free flow of corporate cash into politics all but assures that entrenched interests will become more entrenched; and special interests that have no champion will––for the right price––find one. Until Congress can come up with a way to change that, any sausage coming out of the factory will look very much like tainted meat.

Well then, maybe your church would like a minister who thinks we need less religion? Does that work for you? Sound crazy? Well it is.

You’re starting to understand why today’s Republican Party is in a bit of a quandary.

Because even if you like the things Republicans are supposed to believe in – free enterprise, frugal government, a strong defense, lower taxes – my guess is you’re more than a little bothered by what actually happens when today’s Republicans are put in charge: Growth in government with little point or purpose – much less fiscal responsibility. A stupid and expensive invasion of Iraq that  turns our young soldiers into targets riding around in inadequately armored cars.  Oh yeah, and an exploding deficit that comes from cutting taxes while increasing expenditures. What’s wrong with this picture?

It’s the sort of thing Republicans like to blame on Democrats, except it happened when George Bush was in the White House and Republicans controlled both the House and Senate in Congress. OK, let’s go back to the football coach metaphor. Ready?

Win One For The Gipper

It all began with The Gipper – Ronald Reagan – a labor union president (the Screen Actors Guild, you can look it up) who was transformed into a conservative Republican. Reagan set out on a mission –– to get even with the US government. He achieved success beyond his wildest dreams. Mission? Get even? What do I mean by that?

Well, back in the day, during an early experiment with “progressive” taxation, America had marginal tax rates that ran as high as 90 percent. 90 percent of your income? You bet. Most rich folks were smart enough to avoid those brackets, but Reagan, a not-very-sophisticated movie star walked smack dab into that black hole in the tax code. Wham! The Gipper got hammered and thrown for a big loss. He was pissed.

And who could blame him? His movie star days behind him, he had a tough road ahead.

Fortunately, his brother was an ad man. Neal Reagan, a West Coast ad exec, did what a good brother does. He got Ronnie a job as the host of Death Valley Days. One thing led to another, notably an even better job and a better salary hosting GE Theater, and the steady work delivered a steady paycheck – until Reagan couldn’t keep his lip buttoned about big government and the TVA. But that’s another story.

Now don’t let Reagan’s easy-going manner and naps fool you. He was a hard worker. He combined his acting skills, his work habits, and his Irish anger to build a powerful political persona that led him to the California governorship. He used sure-fire crowd-pleasing laugh lines like “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” They came from his heart… and from his pocketbook . . . and he parlayed that passion into the presidency. But the growth of his philosophy had within it the seeds of destruction for the Republican Party.

Reagan got his revenge – but something else came in on his coattails.

I Hate Government. Vote for Me.

The Republican Party gradually evolved from a mix of progressive and conservative voices (remember Nelson Rockefeller, Chuck Percy, and Ed Brooke?) to a bunch of pols running against the government they were elected to lead. See where this is going? Now we’re getting to the part about the football coach who hates football. This is not the person you want running the team.

Sure, too much government can be a bad thing. So can too little. (If you don’t believe me, go visit Somalia.) And I think we can agree that a 90 percent tax rate goes past progressive into something else entirely. (Sweden maybe.) So it’s easy to understand why Ronald Reagan was honestly angry and passionate about his crusade. But anger is no substitute for judgment.

After eight years watching Bush run a “government is a bad thing” kind of government, my none-too-subtle conclusion is that when you elect people who think government is a bad thing, that’s exactly what you get. Sure, we can always use a few naysayers. No problem. Put ‘em on the cost-control committee so they can track down the $800 screwdrivers. But if you don’t believe that government can actually do a few good things, you’ve got no business running the government.

At its heart, thinking “government is a bad thing ” never has a happy ending. Because when you hate what you’re supposed to be doing, the unhappy fact is . . . you’re no damn good at it.

All political autobiographies take a certain amount of liberty with the truth, especially those written by unknown politicians first emerging on the public stage. Presidential contenders write (or have ghost written) their life stories to give supporters a plausible narrative that explains why they are running. They speak of obstacles overcome that developed their character, formative experiences that gave them insight into how the world works, and brushes with social injustice that inspired them to run.

Sarah Palin’s autobiography may be the first to making running for office itself the story of her life––character, insight and inspiration being pretty much fully formed by the time she left Sunday school. Think of it as Cinderella goes to Washington––almost.

Humble Roots

It will come as no surprise she came from humble roots. Her father was a high school science teacher and accomplished hunter, her mother a church volunteer. They arrived in Skagway, Alaska, in 1964 with Sarah still cradled in her mother’s arms. The town was an old prospector’s stopover along the Klondike Trail, “the Las Vegas of the North,” she recalls where “piano music and the laughter of dance hall girls spilled onto the same raised-plank sidewalks that still lined Main Street.”

Five years later, her father moved the family north to a small town outside Anchorage to teach at an elementary school while her mother worked part-time as a school lunch lady. A few years later, they moved up the Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) Valley again to “the one-horse town of Wasilla,” and that is where a young Sarah Palin blossomed.

Palin remembers raising chickens, catching fish, digging for clams and picking wild berries as a young girl; hunting moose and caribou with her father, kicking up rooster tails from the back of snowmobiles with her brother, and doing household chores with her sisters, including food canning and stacking firewood for a house that had no other heat. It was a life of 4-H clubs and Campfire Girls, Sunday School and Bible Camp, American Legion poetry contests (Palin won in 3rd grade with a poem about Betsy Ross), books (The Pearl, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Animal Farm), selected television shows (Brady Bunch, Lawrence Welk, 60 Minutes, The Wonderful World of Disney, Saturday Night Live), and lots of “good clean fun.”

“I remember banging on the upright piano in the living room and twirling around the floor to Heather’s first record, The Sound of Music,” she writes.

It was up at Bible Camp in Big Lake one summer that Palin looked around at “the majestic peaks and midnight sun, the wild waters and teeming wildlife” and decided, “If God is powerful and wise enough to make all this and thought also to create a speck like me, there surely must be a plan, and He’d know more than I did about my future and my purpose.”

The Rewards of Faith

A good part of Palin’s appeal is how her faith was rewarded by accomplishment, not extraordinary accomplishment, but the kind of satisfactory life ordinary citizens aspire to. She became a star on her state championship basketball team and began dating her future husband Todd, a Yupik Eskimo whose family ran a string of Salmon fishing lines in Bristol Bay. “He cussed. He chewed. He didn’t go to church,” she recalls, “But when he told me he had become a Christian and had been baptized at a sports camp a few years earlier, that was the clincher for me.”

It took Palin five years at a handful of state and community colleges before she obtained her degree from the University of Idaho. To pay her way, she entered and won the Miss Wasilla beauty pageant and finished second in Miss Alaska (while being named Miss Congeniality). To be near Todd in the summers, she worked messy, obscure jobs on the “slime line” in Bristol Bay, processing crabs, cutting open fish bellies, scraping out eggs, and plopping the roe into packaging.

By the end of her third summer there, “Todd and I didn’t want to spend more time apart. So we took our broke butts down to the Palmer Courthouse and lassoed a magistrate to pronounce us man and wife,” she writes. They celebrated that night with dinner at Wendy’s and moved into an apartment with Palin’s sister in Anchorage. Sarah worked in customer service at the local utility and Todd became a baggage handler by day, snowplow driver by night, until BP oil offered him a permanent job in the oil fields near Prudhoe Bay – just as Sarah was about to deliver their first baby.

Small Town Politics

Palin’s American Life becomes a matter of public interest only when she runs for and wins a seat on the city council of Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 6,300) in 1992. At the time, Wasilla had no police. Many of the roads were dirt. There was no municipal garbage collection. And strip malls were popping up along the highway with no zoning regulation to guide development.

“I wanted to speed things up in our little town, to keep us growing and prospering by embracing laissez-faire principals and promoting Wasilla as a pro-free enterprise kind of town,” she writes.

Four years into her tenure, she decided to challenge the incumbent mayor and won with a total of 616 votes (versus 446 for her opponent.) The stakes were small––the Wasilla city budget was only $6 million covering 53 employees––but she put everything she had into winning the post. (“We lived by the creed that passion is what counts,” she writes about her high school sports career.) gave everything to the campaign. She enlisted Republican legislators to be on her campaign literature

Once in office, Palin had a way of turning every issue into a clash of personalities. “At times I felt like the mayor of Peyton Place,” she says.) Inside of three months, she fired the police chief and museum director (“we didn’t need a full-time cabinet member to ‘curate’ such artifacts as license plates from the town founder’s tractor”), got into a row with the town librarian over censorship, and prompted the local newspaper to editorialize “you’re either with her or against her.”

It’s fair to say Palin’s political worldview was shaped by her ten years on the Wasilla city council. Two key aspects of Palin’s political personality developed there: First, she learned to seamlessly integrate her family life into her political life. She campaigned door-to-door carting her kids along in a red wagon, took her babies to council meetings, and asked their advice on road trips between political functions. And second, she came to see politics as team building. Her political views run along the lines of Reagan Republicanism — a strong defense, lower taxes and less government interference — and not much deeper. But  give her a mission, a time clock and a goal to shoot at,  and, by God, she’ll get it done — no matter who she has to throw under the bus.

When term limits forced Palin to leave in 2002, she took a flier on a race for lieutenant governor (and lost). She turned out to be such a gung-ho campaigner for the Republican gubernatorial candidate that fall that he appointed her to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, where she earned her maverick spurs. She challenged a fellow commissioner (the Governor’s chief fundraiser) over his conflict-of-interest as both an oil company contractor and state Republican Party chairman provoking what she calls “a head-on confrontation with the forces of corruption in the highest levels of the state.” He resigned, she resigned, but “the fire in my belly” for public service remained. Cradling her baby Willow by the fireside, feeling “a longing inside me. . . a sense of purpose hovering beyond my vision,” Palin decided to heed the advice of Jeremiah 29: “For I know the plans that I have for you” and run for governor. She won in 2006 on a promise to clean house in the state Capitol.

McCain Comes A Calling

When John McCain came knocking in 2008, Palin had been in the governorship all of 20 months. She’d had some quick successes with ethics legislation (on the heels of federal indictments), budget vetoes, and new oil and gas exploration efforts. Her approval rating with the public were soaring as high as 80 percent. What Palin understood (that McCain’s people never quite grasped) was these successes came in a very unique political climate

Although Alaska is the largest state in the union by land mass, it has only 683,000 residents, so it the 4th smallest state in the population. Juneau, its capital, is over 500 miles from the major population centers in Anchorage and Fairbanks, and all but inaccessible by road. The state legislature consists of only 40 members of the House and 20 Senators, who meet for 90 days a year. And $10 billion of the $14 billion annual state budget (roughly 25% of New York City’s) comes from oil and gas fees and royalties.

When Palin received the call from McCain asking her to be his running mate, she was touring the Alaska state fairgrounds with her children. They were in the right-to-life booth next to a poster featuring a young Piper with angel wings attached to her shoulders that Palin had contributed to the cause. She thought it might be her son Trak calling from Iraq. Instead it was McCain. But she wasn’t shocked, she writes.  “I certainly didn’t think, Well, of course, this would happen. But neither did I think, What an astonishing idea. It seemed more comfortable than that, like a natural progression.”

Living in a Bubble

The Cinderella story Palin sets out to tell takes a detour in the last 200 pages of “Going Rogue” as Palin recounts what it was like on the presidential campaign trail. Her writing is alternately catty, combative and fiercely proud as she flails about knocking her handlers, chastising the press, defending her every misstep, and reveling in the adoration of the crowds that gathered to hear her speak. She is quick to blame anyone but herself for the Republican ticket’s disastrous showing.

When first called to Arizona, Palin is encouraged by her vetting session with campaign aides. They knew everything about her, including Bristol’s pregnancy. She warms quickly to McCain and his wife Cindy. When McCain asks whether her husband was prepared for the rigors of a campaign, she boasts that  “our very normalcy, our status as ordinary Americans, could be a much needed fresh breeze blowing into Washington, D.C.”

In that answer lies the substance of Palin’s appeal and the reason why it will never be great enough to get her to the presidency. As much as politicians speak the glories of the common man, we the electorate do not really  want an ordinary president. That’s why we don’t draw straws to see who goes next. We want someone who can command our respect, dazzle us with their oratory, or impress us with the breadth of their knowledge.  Intelligence, experience and judgment do count when we choose our leaders and, flawed as it is, the overly-long process through which contenders must now navigate their way to the presidency all but assures the last two finalists will have demonstrated all three. Picked from obscurity four days before joining McCain’s campaign, Palin had little to show on those counts.

Although her introduction to party faithful at the Republican convention was good political theater, Republican operatives assigned to her campaign went to extraordinary lengths to shield her from the media. Reporters could dig in Alaska for past accomplishments, but there were slim pickings outside Wasilla’s tight-knit gossip circles. So direct access to the candidate by reporters was the only other way to reveal her positions. For whatever reasons (and we’ll have to wait for his book to find out) McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt built a bubble around Palin, and both she and the public suffered from the isolation.

Had she more experience herself in national politics, or a network of wired-in contacts outside the campaign, she might have reached beyond it. As it was, she was squired from one world leader to the next, fitted into clothes that were not her own, and handed index cards during debate prep with questions on one-side and “non-answers” on the other, as she says.  She could come up with her own one-liners -– “palling around with terrorists” – but needed approval from headquarters to let ‘em rip. The divide only got worse as the prospects worsened. By election night, Palin had carefully prepared a concession speech to thank McCain for his effort, but Schmidt put the kibosh on it.

“I wanted to tell Americans to keep on fighting for what is right––and not to let anyone tell them to sit down and shut up,” she writes.

“Absolutely not,” Schmidt said. “I don’t even know why you wrote a speech. Nobody told you to.”

Resignation

“Going Rogue” has a hard time coming to an end. Palin seems to have written at least three final chapters (and keeps writing them in Facebook.) She doesn’t want to leave off with bad taste of the campaign, so she moves on her reasons for resigning the governorship. (She got tired of “fighting the bull” and wanted to break “the bureaucratic shackles that were now paralyzing our state.”)

She wants to let her fans know vision for America in one chapter. She wants to get in one last jab at the mediain another by inviting them up to work a slime line during the salmon hunt in Bristol Bay. And she wants to leave the door open to run for president in 2012, on her own terms. She wants a lot of things, for herself and the country. But most of all, she doesn’t want the fairy tale to end.

3:10 P.M. EDT

MR. GIBBS: Good afternoon. How is everyone? Welcome to our four-and-a-half minute flight from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Bristol, Virginia.

Go ahead, fire away.

Q What have you heard about the (House Committee on) Energy and Commerce deal? What has the President heard about it? And what does he think?

MR. GIBBS: I think staff has updated him largely on the notion that the committee has made some decisions — they’re going back into markup. The President is enormously thankful for members in the House and the Senate that are continuing to work together to make progress on getting health care reform for this country.

Obviously, the news is a big step forward. It incorporates — legislation that incorporates what the President was talking about today in reforming insurance, cutting costs for businesses and families, and providing affordable and accessible insurance to those that don’t have it. So I think it is a promising step for progress.

Q Does it advance the hope of an August — some progress before the recess?

MR. GIBBS: Well, I think we are making progress before the recess. I think the agreement includes the fact that the bill won’t be voted on in the full House by the time the House leaves for August, but again, I think it’s a promising development and we’re one step closer.

Q Secretary Gates said that Iraq, bringing home 5,000 troops, you know, if violence stays the same way it is or is being reduced — if violence is being reduced, the way you’ve seen it. Are you guys taking any concrete steps towards, I guess, changing the withdrawal timetable?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, obviously the President, commanders on the ground, and folks like Secretary Gates laid out a timetable earlier this year to withdraw our troops. We certainly agreed that if conditions on the ground continue to improve, it’s possible that timetable could be accelerated, but we’ve done nothing concrete except continue to watch the situation. Obviously there are a lot of — lots of political reconciliation that still has to be worked on, and a security situation that we’re continuing to be mindful of, even as many in the world focus on things like Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Q So did he get ahead of you then?

MR. GIBBS: No, I don’t think so. He’s the Secretary of Defense. (Laughter.)

Q What’s the thinking behind the recalibrated message today, or the tweaking of a message today to focus on the consumer protections?

MR. GIBBS: Well, look, I mean, I think we’ve always had — look, I think the legislative process tends to focus on the legislative process. There’s committees that people haven’t heard of, debating different aspects of the legislation. The President thought it was tremendously important to spend some time today talking about what he’s always said had to be an important component of this bill in changing the way insurance companies operate and deal with millions of consumers across the country. He’s talked literally since the beginning of me being with him more than five-and-a-half years ago as a candidate for the U.S. Senate talking about health care and mentioning his mom and preexisting conditions and dealing with health insurance companies.

It’s a problem that millions of Americans face each year, they’re losing their coverage because of it. Their coverage is — people may buy a policy that has an unwieldy deductible or a co-payment schedule that doesn’t really provide them the safety net they need.

So I think the President thought it was enormously important that we talk to the American people about the many aspects that are in the bill, including these important protections for American families.

Q Robert, what prompted his opening remarks on the economy? Was it the improving conditions or his deteriorating poll numbers or –

MR. GIBBS: Or the deteriorating conditions — no, I — (laughter) –

Q Well –

MR. GIBBS: No, I think the President — look, I think the President has talked throughout the six months he’s been in office as — when he’s in an audience of people, he wants to be able to talk to them frankly about where we are. So I think he outlined today — I think he used the Newsweek example of “The Recession Is Over” cover to say we still got a long way to go. We’ve pulled back from that precipice.

We all have watched and we’ve all heard and read stories — some of which you all have written — where the discussion wasn’t whether or not we were improving of what have you, but how far — how much further we could fall; could we go off the edge of that cliff into what some are calling the Great Recession, or as some were betting that we could fall into a depression. We’ve pulled back from the brink. We’ve made some progress. But we’ve still got a long way to go.

We were in a state today where the unemployment rate last month was 11 percent, which is well above the national average, and one of the many states that are in double-digit unemployment. So even as we’re seeing progress, even as we’re seeing the recovery plan cushion the blow, like the President talked about it would, as we’ve seen the impacts of stabilizing the financial system, we’ve still got a long way to go to create jobs and relieve the anxiety that millions of Americans face. So I think he just wanted to provide people with an update on where we were.

Q Robert, on this, the emphasis today on health care insurance reform, is that an acknowledgment, in some sense, that the opening emphasis on cost containment was kind of a political bust?

MR. GIBBS: No, because if we don’t contain costs — if we don’t contain costs, then there’s no such thing as reform. If all we’re doing is taking a system that we can’t afford now — that families can’t afford and small businesses can’t afford and governments can’t afford — and simply extend that 10, 20, 30 years in the future, we won’t be able to afford it even more. If we don’t address cost, if we don’t address quality, if we don’t address insurance reforms, if we don’t address all of those things as part of comprehensive reform, I think we’re going to lose the promise of what the President believes we’re capable of doing.

Q Any news on the beer summit tomorrow? One specific question: Where are Mr. Gates and Mr. Crowley going to be staying in Washington?

MR. GIBBS: I’ve got to tell you, I don’t honestly know. I believe the arrangements — their travel arrangements are being made privately. So I don’t know — I don’t know if they’re coming in and going home tomorrow. I don’t know if they’re staying — I love these little flights over the mountains in Virginia; we had one of these flights in the campaign — it was like this for about a half an hour, on a half-an-hour flight. So, yes, I was real excited to get back on that plane.

I don’t know if they’re staying or going back. All I know is, you know, we’ve got — we’ll see them tomorrow at the White House at 6:00 p.m. And I know — I don’t know if — who is accompanying Mr. Gates. I know Sergeant Crowley is bringing some members of his family.

Q And is that going to be — how is the press going to be handled on that?

MR. GIBBS: Delicately. (Laughter.)

Q I mean, is it going to be a pool spray at the beginning? I mean, what –

MR. GIBBS: Yes, my sense is what we’ll probably do is a pool spray at the beginning.

Q Wouldn’t a spray at the end be more useful?

MR. GIBBS: For who? For –

Q For America, it’s his teaching moment.

MR. GIBBS: I’ll take that under advisement.

Q Glenn Beck’s comments, any response?

MR. GIBBS: No. I would be a busy man if that’s all I did. I would say this: I think there are far more important issues than responding to somebody who is trying to get ratings.

Thanks, guys. Get buckled up.

Q Can I follow-up real quickly on the beer? All my folks are asking this. Any choices made on what beer the President –

MR. GIBBS: The President will drink Bud Light. As I understand it — I have not heard this, I’ve read this, so I’ll just repeat what I’ve read, that Professor Gates said he liked Red Stripe, and I believe Sergeant Crowley mentioned to the President that he liked Blue Moon. So we’ll have the gamut covered tomorrow afternoon. I think we’re still thinking, weather permitting, the picnic table out back. All right?

Q Thanks, Robert.

MR. GIBBS: Great picture right there.

Q What’s this [picture] –

MR. GIBBS: Well, that is — Broughton High School is about — is probably about a half a mile from where I went to college, NC State. That is a picture, I believe, provided, helpfully, from the NC State athletic department sports information director. It’s an individual picture. When we took team pictures — yes, that is an earring in my ear, yes. And did you notice that guy looks a lot more relaxed and a lot less stressed those days than he does now?

Thanks, guys.

3:20 P.M. EDT

The news that only 14. 5 million Americans are out of work is “a sign that we are making progress,” Christina Romer, a White House economic advisor, said. At this rate, it should take only six more months before the number of people going back to work exceeds the number losing their jobs.

If you are planning on going back to work in the auto industry, however, you are returning to a business that is selling 9 million cars a year, not the 16 million of a few years ago. If you are in financial services, your business is now even more regulated (if not owned) by the government. If you are in real estate . . . well, you know the story. You probably are already back at work and still not selling any houses.

Road graders and bridge builders have a bright future ahead, if your idea of a bright future is grading roads and building bridges. With $787 billion available in federal stimulus money, rebuilding America’s infrastructure is a top priority of the Obama administration. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to get excited about infrastructure. Break out the champagne. We’re celebrating the completion of a new 18” sewer line down Division Street next week.

On the streets of Chicago, I find it hard to see the same glimmers of hope economists in Washington see. The excesses of the last decade were so great, the slide in economic activity so precipitous, and the government response so monumental, there is no easy path back to what used to be called normal.

In academia, economists can debate whether the recovery, when it comes, will look like a “V” or a “W”? Will it dip and rebound; or will it dip, bounce back, dip again and then rebound? What if it turns out to be more like an “L”?

When this crisis began, there were identifiable villains. Subprime mortgages, unregulated Wall Street financiers concocting arcane financial instruments to sell them, overpaid auto executives flying in private planes to Washington to ask Congress to bail out their bad decisions. But the cancer has spread, in no small way because we took the loans, bought the houses, threw our money into the stock market, and ran up credit cards and second mortgages to buy all kinds of things we didn’t really need.

Watching the stock market became a national obsession. I have friends who used to go online every other week to re-balance their 401(k) portfolio. A few more emerging market funds here, a little less reliance on the mid-cap value funds there. And the smug satisfaction that their nest egg was growing every month even without any new contributions from them. No more. Nobody even wants to look at 401(k) statements. Sure the stock market is up 35 percent since March, and my 401(k) is only down 15 percent from where I was two years ago. But that’s my retirement fund, I remind myself. Not that it’s going to let me retire anytime soon.

The best gauge of the economy today is state and local tax revenue, both plummeting. They’re an instant guide to who’s working and who’s spending; and there are a lot fewer people in both categories. California will collect $24 billion less this year than it spends. Illinois has an $11.6 billion shortfall. The city of Chicago has adjusted its income projections twice this year to account for dwindling revenues from sales, property and other municipal taxes on entertainment, cigarettes, and liquor sales. All but the liquor taxes are yielding less revenue than projected.

To make up for a projected $300 million deficit, Chicago is asking city employees to take 16 days off without pay in the second half of this year. Project that out over 2010 and it amounts to a 13 percent pay cut. The furlough program is being billed as a stopgap measure until tax revenues bounce back to their pre-recession levels. Does anybody really believe that’s going to happen soon?

The layoff/furlough scenario is widespread. It runs across almost all industries. Families have responded, as they typically do in recessions, by cutting back on vacations, entertainment, dining out and other non-essential purchases. Maybe they put off buying a new car for a year. Or pass on new mulch for the old garden.

This time around, that may not be enough. In this trough of economic activity, some unpleasant truths are emerging that will force us to adjust our expectations:

• Retirement at 65 is not a right, or even an option. With life expectancy rates showing the average American will live to age 77 (80 plus for women), retirement patterns set in the 1940’s no longer apply. The decline in company pension plans, and particularly the economic stress aging baby boomers put on the social security system, will force workers to work longer.

• Higher education will become increasingly unaffordable for many students. Applications to community colleges and public institutions are up because private college tuition (now hovering around $50,000 a year) has grown beyond the combined resources of parents’ savings and college loans.

• The American health care system will change dramatically. The escalating costs of health care and growing number of people who are priced out of health insurance will force a shift in how health care is provided. Merely extending government insurance programs to the uninsured won’t resolve the problem. The rise in health care costs will need to be reined in. This will mean greater government control, fewer options for patients and, in all likelihood, lower salaries for doctors, nurses and health care professionals.

• Wages will not keep pace with consumer costs. The Federal Reserve so far has finagled a massive infusion of low-cost money into the financial system without triggering an inflationary spiral. Companies that have cut or maintained prices to keep market share, however, are chomping at the bit to get back to profitability. Any jump in commodity prices (oil, for instance, which is back on the rise) could set off a wave of price hikes. Meanwhile, there’s no real incentive in times of high unemployment to pay more for labor costs.

• Taxes will rise. You thought the government could do all these bailouts and run up huge deficits without somebody paying the piper? Think again.

There will be optimists out there – there always are – who say this just means we have to learn how to do more with less. The truth is we have to learn how to do less with less. Because there is less to go around.

The Limbaughs, led by the radio voice of Rush Limbaugh, contend there is no room in the party for supporters of higher taxes, immigration reform, abortion rights, gay marriage or, for that matter, any gays at all.

They call themselves True Republicans, and there is some support for their claim in the party platform Republicans have routinely passed at their conventions going back almost 16 years.

The Snowes –– named after the last remaining voice of moderation in the party, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) –– represent everyone else, a dwindling lot.

The latest polls show only 21 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans. In the northeast corner of the country, there is not a single Republican representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the Midwest, Democrats hold the governorship of every state except Indiana, where Mitch Daniels is serving out a second term.

On National Public Radio, David Brooks predicted the other day that the party is in such disarray it will take 12 years before Republicans can again mount a credible challenge for the presidency.

Twelve years is a long time for the two wings of the party to fight over who rules this mole hill of a minority. But 12 years is ample opportunity for moderate Republicans to plant their own flag on Capitol Hill and have a credible, and immediate, impact on the national debate.

Call them the Reasonable Republicans (or Re-Republicans.) By any name, this centrist coalition would include not only Snowe and Specter, but Republican senators Dick Lugar (R-Indiana), Christopher Bond (R-Missouri), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and, of course, Mr. Maverick himself, last year’s Republican standard-bearer John McCain (R-Arizona).

Add in a few moderate democrats like Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman and, ideologically, Max Baucus of Montana and Kent Conrad of North Dakota (who chair the Senate finance and budget committees); name Colin Powell the new party chairman; and you have a force to be reckoned with.

In the Senate, where President Obama’s agenda hinges on 60 votes to break a filibuster, the Re-Republicans would sit at the pivot point on critical issues. In the nation at large, the new party would be a haven for fiscal conservatives who don’t want to be required to pass a right wing litmus test on the social issues to join.

American government runs on a two-party system. Third parties, as a rule, generally rise up on the fringes during presidential elections and quickly die off. The most successful in recent years was led by Ross Perot, who siphoned off enough votes in 1992 (18 percent) in 1992 to assure the election of Bill Clinton. The most notorious was Ralph Nader’s Green Party, whose three percent total tilted the 2000 election from Al Gore to George Bush.

The notable exception in history to the failure of third parties is the Republican Party itself. With the Whig Party divided over slavery, Republicans fielded their first presidential candidate in 1852 on a platform of “free labor, free land and free men”––slavery taking third place to the economic issues of the day. The Republicans finished a distant second in that election (and the Whigs finished third.)  Eight years later, the Whig party disappeared and Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president in history.

It is too early in the Obama administration to identify issues on which the president is vulnerable. But there are any number of his proposed programs that might go awry.

A principled conservative opposition could single out government intervention in the economy that discourages private enterprise; government oversight of industries like automobiles that, however well-planned at the top, invariably puts the execution in the hands of lower level bureaucrats who respond more to political influences than market forces.

Most Republicans and more than a few Democrats would agree that the less the government intrudes on the operation of private companies, the more efficiently they will run. On that premise, a new party might be born.

The Re-Republicans have many options for asserting their core principles:

• Obama’s stimulus package of $787 billion in federal spending is loaded with wasteful projects. (No doubt.)

• His subsidies for alternative energy projects like corn oil ethanol only encourage the use of foreign oil instead of curbing it; and they miss the opportunities for free trade pacts with South America that offer far more efficient sugar-based alternatives.

• His “cap & trade” energy proposal will delay our economic recovery. On the vague notion that he is reducing carbon emissions, Obama is actually creating a government set of regulations that will hinder heavy manufacturing industries as they attempt to recover from this depression.

• Obama’s support of the “card check” union-organizing tool not only invalidates the American right to a secret ballot, but will further depress our chances of an economic recovery.

• His administration of the bailout program for banks (TARP) unduly rewards Wall Street financiers for their mistakes at the expense of community banks who are the heart and soul of our cities and towns.

• The national health care plans coming out of the Democratic-controlled House don’t take advantage of the economies offered by a free competition among private health care insurance companies.

• And his education initiative doesn’t adequately allow local communities to define how, and what, the parents want their children to learn.

In a reasoned discourse on where the nation goes next –– in this time of crisis -–– these are the questions a loyal opposition should be asking.

But the Limbaughs aren’t in any position to ask them. They are too preoccupied setting the standards for membership as a true Republican. As long as their criterion is a “family values” agenda set in the days of Ozzie and Harriet, there aren’t many people who want to apply. (Ask Levi Johnson and Bristol Palin.)

“The former party of Lincoln and liberty has now melted down to a fundamental core of aging, rural Dixiecrats and intrusive scolds,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times. “It’s position on the American spectrum of ideas is somewhere between a doomsday cult and Scientology.”

If the political future of America is to be determined in the realm of public discourse, we have to engage in a discussion of specific programs and how, specifically, to execute or oppose them. In these depression-era times, that is a discussion of economic policy from the perspective of both conservatives and liberals who are willing to engage in an honest debate over the role of government in the private sector.

It is not a debate over-shadowed by whether sex education can be taught in the high schools, whether condoms can be distributed in Africa, gays can serve in the military, or women who want abortions should go back to finding back-alley doctors who use coat-hangers to scrape their uterus on the sly.

If that is the how Rush Limbaugh envisions the Republican Party of the future, I have a new name for them: The Know Nothing Party.

The 5th is as Chicago as Chicago gets, a sprawling district on the north side that extends from Lincoln Park’s bull’s eye view of Lake Michigan to Schiller Park’s ass-eyed view of O’Hare. For the last 50 years, it has been a Democratic stronghold, home to such Hall of Fame crooks as Danny Rostenkowski and Rod Blagojevich, well-known hereabouts as a “safe seat” where the incumbent, once elected, has the seat for life.

When Rahm Emanuel gave it up to become Barack Obama’s chief of staff, the race to replace him attracted a record 12 Democrats, 6 Republican and 5 Green Party candidates in the primary. They were, for the most part, a non-descript collection of politicians, but they all shared a trait common to all Illinois politicians: they knew how to count.

In the 2008 general election – the one that drew a record 130 million voters to the polls last November – Emanuel got 170,000 votes in the 5th versus 50,000 for his Republican opponent. Running unopposed in the earlier primary, he still drew 94,000 votes.

In the wake of Obama’s game-changing victory, some idealists thought the race to replace him would be another step forward into a new kind of politics. What they forgot was that this was a special election, conducted in the two coldest months of the year, under conditions that all but guaranteed only the most hard core Democrats would turn out.

The winner, our next congressman for life, is Mike Quigley, who won the primary with 11,553 votes (and beat his Republican opponent 2-1 in the special general election with only 7,634).

Credit Where Credit is Due

It takes nothing away from Quigley’s victory to say that, as a reformer, he ran a classic Chicago-style campaign.

“Every election is different, but in all of them the key is to figure out who your voters are and how to get to them,” Quigley’s campaign manager Tom Bowen said after the dust cleared. “We knew we wouldn’t have as much money as the other candidates, but our polling told us we had a strong message, which was essentially Mike’s career, that played well with seniors and the undecideds in the northwest corner of the district. So we got to them early with direct mail, and we kept sending it.” In the end, it was somewhere around a dozen pieces.

“Mike’s career” would be his 10-year tenure on the Cook County board where he has been a constant and vocal thorn in the side of the Strogers (both father John and son Todd) and the patronage army they amassed as board presidents. His efforts have been praised often on the editorial pages of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, and won him both their endorsements in the special election race.

In his campaign literature, Quigley championed the “300 stitches” he received as an amateur hockey player, proof positive he was ready for politics. But he ran more like a fullback in Woody Hayes’ three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense.

Although all three top-tier contenders came from Chicago’s liberal Lakeview neighborhood, Quigley knew that more than 60 percent of the voters lived west of Western Avenue. Strategically and surgically he worked the nursing homes, bars and community centers in the west side of the district where his polls showed the other candidates were virtually unknown.

Still it’s fair to say, even with aggressive campaigning and a crack field organization, all that campaigning would only have won him a close second – if the vaunted Democratic machine he was up against had not broken into factions like the fossilized dinosaur it has become.

The Zam Zam Banquet Hall

As is their custom, the 19 committeemen who make up the 5th District regular Democratic party met on a cold Sunday in January at the Zam Zam Banquet Hall  to slate their candidate. The committee consists of powerbrokers from the eight city wards and 11 townships that make up the district, and each has a small army of precinct workers they count on to turn out the vote, even in the most inclement weather.

They sat arrayed on a two-tiered dais draped in white linen to look like a wedding cake. In each chair sat a very big ego. In one was Ald. Richard Mell (33rd ward), who in past sessions used his clout to slate his son-in-law Rod Blagojevich for the post.  Next to him was state representative John Fritchey (32nd), who was proposing himself for the nomination.

A few seats down sat Ald. William Banks (36th), chairman of the city zoning committee (and Fritchey’s uncle-in-law) and Ald. Patrick Levar (45th), chairman of the city council aviation committee that runs O’Hare airport.

Also on the dais was Illinois State Senate majority leader John Cullerton (38th); Ald. Eugene Schulter (47th), a 34-year council veteran; and Patrick O’Connor (40th), who bills himself as Mayor Daley’s unofficial floor leader in the city council and was also offering his services as congressman for life.

O’Connor had been the first to declare his interest in the seat, but his claim to be Daley’s right-hand man did curiously little to gain him the mayor’s endorsement. He raised only $35,000 before the race, expecting the money to start flowing as soon as the committee made it’s pick.

Fritchey, the younger and more aggressive committeeman, was not waiting for Mayor Daley to endorse. He brought $200,000 to the table and quietly lined up the support of six of the eight Chicago aldermen who sat on the committee.

In the traditional way committeemen votes are weighted according to turnout in each ward, those six men represented 48 percent of the votes in the room (versus the 18 percent O’Connor could count on from his own vote and the committeman in the adjoining ward.)

After the first round of voting, the handwriting was on the wall. The aldermen O’Connor so effortlessly “led” in the city council had turned against him. If Fritchey had twisted one more arm among the suburban committemen––whose votes count for substantially less––the machine endorsement was his.

Instead, he mysteriously backed off. On the second ballot, his supporters joined in a resolution in favor of an open primary that passed overwhelmingly. Perhaps Fritchey hoped that by not shoving defeat in O’Connor’s face, the alderman would graciously drop out. Proud and stubborn, O’Connor not only didn’t pull out he redoubled his efforts to win.

“It was a fight for primacy among the organizational democrats,” one insider observed.  “Pat wanted to establish primacy in his ward, and he did.” But it cost the party regulars the seat.

When primary day rolled around, Fritchey received 9.150 votes and O’Connor, 6,140. Their combined total would have swamped Quigley by 3,700 votes. In one brief morning, when the Democratic party machine failed to endorse, the race became a free-for-all.

A Crowded Field

There were other contenders among the 12 Democrats that would also have an impact on the race. Chief among them was State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, who represented the Lakeview district next to Fritchey’s. In the early 90’s, Feigenholtz and Quigley were young political activists working together in the same office. Quigley, in fact, ran one of her early campaigns.

But in the 10 years Quigley served on the county board, Feigenholtz was growing presence in Springfield as an expert on health care, building her own base of political contributors––and itching to run for a higher office.

As the only woman of consequence in the race––the other was an airline pilot who won less than 800 votes––she instantly drew the attention of Emily’s List, which gave her $225,000. On her own, she would raise another $750,000 and, late in the campaign, the Service Employees Union (SEIU) would kick in another $250,000.

Her $1.2 million war chest made her the most well-heeled candidate in the race. To guide her in spending it––and put a scare in her opponents––she hired David Axelrod’s old consulting firm AKP media, which would bring to her campaign all the same sophisticated tools Axelrod used to propel  Obama into the presidency.

Also of concern to Quigley was a newcomer in the race, Tom Geoghegan, a labor lawyer and nationally-recognized author of “Which Side Are You On”, who would become the darling of the blogosphere left. Equally troubling to Fritchey was yet another wild card, Polish doctor Victor Forys, whose 10,000 patients on the northwest side considered him the second coming of Casimir Pulaski.

“Am I Crazy?”

It was just after Christmas that I was drawn into the race by a phone call. The caller was Geoghegan, an old friend from college, the author of my will, and the most unlikely candidate I can imagine running for  office.

“Tell me if I’m crazy, but I’m thinking of running for Congress in the 5th,” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Is this some kind of late mid-life crisis?”

Then I asked him to explain.

Geoghegan said he and a couple friends had been looking over past elections and concluded this special election would be decided by less than 60,000 Democratic voters. [The actual number was 50,000.] In a field of 12 candidates, a top tier of 3-4 candidates would emerge and, barring a Daley endorsement, someone could win with as few as 16,000 votes [Quigley won with 11,500.] With a few breaks along the way, Geoghegan thought he could be that someone.

I asked how he expected to pay for the race. He said he could raise $200,000. [In fact, he raised over $300,000.] Are you going up on TV? No, he said, too expensive. Did he have any community groups or political organizations supporting him? “I represented some nurses in a labor dispute a while ago,” he said, “and I sued Advocate Healthcare for overcharging people without health insurance.”

“So how do you plan to win?” I asked.

“That’s why I’m calling you,” he said. “What do I do next?”

“Well, the first thing you should do is go stand out on the Jefferson El platform at 6 AM and decide whether this is how you want to spend the rest of your life,” I said.

“And then what?” he asked.

“Pray. And raise more money.”

The Importance of Television

It did not take long for every candidate in the 5th district race to establish a website, a Facebook page, a YouTube account, and Twitter followers. Inevitably, what separated the first tier of candidates from the rest was their ability to air political commercials on television.

The cost of TV advertising in Chicago is ridiculously high for a congressional race, especially when you consider 90 percent of the viewers who see your commercial don’t even live in the district that is voting.

But for Sara Feigenholtz, TV advertising was a must. In a race that would last only 60 days, in weather that kept most people indoors, in a district where fewer than half the people even knew her name, it was essential.

“Fortunately, we had the advantage of money, and we decided to use it,” said John Kupper, the senior strategist at AKP who handled Feigenholtz. “Television connects with voters on a personal and emotional level. Because of her mother’s experience as a doctor, and her own work on health care, we felt she had a compelling story, and that story could be told most effectively and emotionally on television.”

AKP designed for Feigenholtz a television advertising campaign that started three weeks before the primary. They were classic AKP commercials: warm, personable little 30-second stories that showed Feigenholtz listening to and caring about people.

By Election Day, every TV viewer in Chicago would see a Feigenholtz commercial 14 times. The metric for measuring that is gross rating points. One hundred gross rating points means 100 percent of the viewing audience will see your spot at least once. Fourteen hundred points means they will see it 14 times.

It was a “buy” that no other candidate could keep pace with, although Fritchey tried. His first TV commercials started airing four days later, but they were clumsy attempts at humor: two bratty kids shouting insults at each other with Fritchey stepping in at the end to say it’s time for a change.

He would buy 800 gross rating by the campaign’s end. Quigley, with a significantly smaller budget, would buy only 400, all in the last 10 days.

“We were very strategic in our television,” Bowen said. “Our target was older voters and we could reach them on shows that were relatively inexpensive to buy. Sara’s strategy needed younger voters, so she had to buy a lot of prime time to reach them. That made TV very expensive for her campaign.”

Expensive or not, Kupper notes that Feigenholtz’s TV advertising had the secondary benefit of raising public awareness there even was a race.

Faced with the prospect of covering 12 candidates fairly, newspapers reporters––with the exception of Carol Marin, in Quigley’s corner, and Don Rose, advocating for Geoghegan –– provided only summary coverage of candidate forums. The TV news departments all but ignored the race until the very last days.

“We had models that showed the more people knew about Sara, the better she did,” Kupper said. “So our hope was to expand the electorate.” But this was an election run under the media radar.

Meanwhile, Back in Irving Park

I went down to the opening of the Geoghegan For Congress headquarters next to the Irving Park El stop on yet another sub-zero day in January. The walls were decorated with ward maps. There were Starbucks coffee boxes and donut trays, clipboards and sign-up sheets on a table––and no people.

Joe Costello, the campaign manager, nonetheless, was  stoked about how good they were doing on the Internet. Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland”, had set Geoghegan up with a Facebook account. Already, he had 750 friends. More profitably, Perlstein also helped Geoghegan establish a page on Blue State Digital, the progressive Democrats fund-raising website and, in the first 14 days, the campaign raised $150,000.

James Fallows, an old friend from Harvard,  had gone overboard endorsing him in his Atlantic blog. Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas” wrote a column praising his campaign in The Wall Street Journal. In The New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg, also lavished praise on Geoghegan. “Chicago’s chance to redeem itself has arrived,” he said.

The kicker, Costello said, was an endorsement just that morning from The Nation, which called him “the next Paul Wellstone.”

“That’ll do you a lot of good,” I said. “How many Nation readers live in the district?”

Eventually, about 40 supporters straggled in. Tom was his old awe-shucks self when I saw him. But when he stood up to address the troops, he became Walter Ruether incarnate.

He flailed his arms and denounced the corporate interests who canceled your pension, overcharged you on your credit cards, and scammed the system to deny you the right to organize into unions. Social security doesn’t need to be protected. It needs to be expanded.

“Real workers have real problems that need to be addressed. I know how it works because I’ve been fighting the corporate interests for 30 years. These people are my clients. Bailing out the Wall Street bankers is a slap in their face,” he said.

A few in the audience took pamphlets to hand out in their neighborhood when they got home. But it was cold. Did I mention that? Really cold. Not a good omen for a candidate with 5 percent name recognition (an unpronounceable name) and no TV advertising.

From Cold to Colder

When Gov. Blagojevich set the date for the special election on January 4, he could have allowed up to 90 days for voters to become familiar with the candidates. He chose instead the minimum 60 days. The compressed schedule worked in favor of the two best know candidates, Quigley and O’Connor.

“It’s very hard to reach the electorate, even in a regular election,” Bowen said, “so you do it with all the standard advertising techniques: repetition, familiarity, quotes from people they know and trust, and pictures of your candidate standing next to the good guys.”

One of those good guys was Quigley’s ally on the county board Forrest Claypool, who narrowly lost his own bid for the county board presidency to Todd Stroger three years ago. Claypool’s popularity in his home district was sky high and he went out of his way to make appearances, raise money and find volunteers to work the streets for Quigley.

As the campaign came down to the finish line, Quigley’s TV ads (and all his direct mail pieces) featured Claypool and the newspaper endorsements.

“The newspaper endorsements are important, especially in a primary because voters don’t have party labels to go by. Everybody is a Democrat in a Democratic primary. So a newspaper endorsement is like a third-party validation from people voters see as impartial.”

“Of course, they are not all that valuable in and of themselves,” he added. “Don’t forget. We spent money telling people we had the Tribune and Sun-Times endorsements.”

Election Day

Election Day itself  was anti-climatic. Not cold, exactly, but not the kind of bright, sunny day you want to start a new democracy in America. True to predictions, less than 17 percent of the voters bothered to cast a ballot.

“I used to think special elections were a good idea,” said Kupper, whose candidate suffered most from the voter apathy. “Based on the low turnout here, maybe we’d be better off with a temporary appointment who serves until the next regular election. I’m not sure 17 percent of voters is representative of the district.”

Low turnout generally favors the machine candidate. Precinct captains who work election after election in the same wards pretty well know the regular voters, and they know how to turn them out. Fritchey, however, didn’t get the benefit of having the whole machine behind him; nor does Bowen believe it would have helped him.

“In a modern campaign, the machine isn’t the monolith it used to be,” he said. “There are lots of other ways of reaching voters these days; and these machine guys don’t really go out and talk to people anymore. They just pass out the literature.”

Among the losers, the most disappointed must have been Feigenholtz, who placed third with 8,269 votes (at a cost of $148 per vote.) The most heartened was surely Dr. Forys. His ubiqitous appearances at all the Polish banquet halls on the northwest side garnered him 5,500 votes, a clear victory in the 38th ward and second place in Banks’ own 36th. The most non-plussed, of course, was Geoghegan, who finished 7th with 3,229 votes.

“I had a blast,” he told me afterwards. “I learned a lot and I worked with a lot of great people.” Would he do it again? “Maybe. But not if its going to be this damned cold.”

Campaign Lessons

There are a lot of lessons to take away from this race.

The first is that money isn’t everything. Quigley spent only $565,000 on the race, less than half Feigenholtz’s budget, and well shy of second-place Fritchey. So having money is a wonderful thing in politics, but knowing how to spent it effectively is even better.

The second is know your voters. Familiarity breeds comfort, and comfort breeds trust. TV advertising and the Internet are critical tools in a campaign, but they are not a substitute for personal contact, especially in a local race.

And the last? People are quick to forget how you got into office as long as you win. Rod Blagojevich ran for governor under a blizzard of advertising that portrayed him as someone he was not. Only the history-minded remember he won because his Republican opponent Jim Ryan happened to share the same last name as his successor, the disgraced former Gov. George Ryan.

Barack Obama, likewise, is now considered a master on the campaign trail. Not many people remember he won his first race for the Illinois house by knocking the popular incumbent off the ballot and ascended to the U.S. Senate only after his more well-funded primary opponent nose-dived in a bitter divorce battle and his Republican general election opponent withdrew in a sex scandal.

In Chicago, you never know what’s going to happen in politics. All you know for sure is that you don’t need a lot of votes to win. You just need more than the other guy.

Now that the charm offensive is over, what are we to make of Gov. Rod Blagojevich?

A conviction in the senate impeachment trial is a foregone conclusion. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow (but exceedingly fine) in the grand jury room at the federal courthouse. In the court of public opinion, Blagojevich has been so skewered by the 76-page finding released by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald last December that the most Blagojevich can hope to salvage of his reputation is a DVD of his greatest hits on Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno and David Letterman.

Elvis has left the building. The governor is so toast even his attorney Ed Genson, who has tolerated all manner of miserable clients in his practice, has abandoned his case. While the issue this week is the Illinois Senate trial – and observers of that august body can rightly ask who are they to judge – losing the governorship is the least of Blagojevich’s problems.

When the official federal indictment comes down in April, there are indications it may charge over 30 counts of official corruption. Selling Barack Obama’s Senate seat and pressuring the Tribune to fire its editorial writers are only the most titillating.

So why aren’t we focused on who is going down with him? Including, as Blagojevich hinted last weekend, “some of those that are sitting in judgment of me.”

As a matter of simple reason, you cannot accept a bribe unless somebody is willing to give it.

The Investigation

The investigation of the governor has been going on for two years and is only the tip of a larger probe into “Pay to Play” politics in Illinois. This is not a game Blagojevich invented. It is a way of life here. The exchange of campaign contributions for legislative favors is so ingrained in the system, anyone who gave to the governor seeking a favor probably has done it before with other politicians. As the evidence against Blagojevich mounts, the likelihood that the feds will give immunity to all of them diminishes.

The feds not only have wiretap transcripts from the governor’s home and campaign office, but his brother’s phone, his chief aide’s phone and perhaps others. They have issued over 50 subpoenas to Blagojevich’s office since 2007 demanding everything from complex hiring records to Patty Blagojevich’s personal calendar.

One issued on December 8, the day before Blagojevich was arrested, demands “notes, calendars, correspondence and any other data” relating to 34 political operatives in Illinois (including Obama aides David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, who are not suspected of any crime). Another issued December 11, sought bid documents from the Illinois Capital Development Board and Transportation Department and similar information on 22 engineering firms and individuals.

The feds have subpoenaed hiring records of any state employee earning over $100,000. They have convicted and incarcerated two of Blagojevich’s key fundraisers, Tony Rezko and Chris Kelly, and gotten the former Illinois Finance Authority director Ali Ata to testify at Rezko’s trial that he gave Rezko a $25,000 contribution in the governor’s presence as a downpayment on his appointment. Now, they also have Rezko, already convicted of 16 counts of fraud, talking about turning state’s evidence.

The 90-day filing extension Fitzgerald asked for (and received) on January 9 was not simply a way for the U.S. Attorney to organize his case. It was a last chance for the rats to climb on the immunity bandwagon before he brings down the hammer on them.

A Dangerous Man

The media blitz Blagojevich conducted in New York this week unfolded with his usual blizzard of bizarre behavior. While it was fun watching him tell Diane Sawyer on Good Morning, America he considered naming Oprah Winfrey to Obama’s vacant Senate seat and the girls on The View muss his hair, the more telling interview came on the Today Show, where he compared himself to Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi.

“Some national figures like Harry Reid are frankly covering their own backside,” he told NBC correspondent Amy Robach in a portion of the interview that was not aired but appears in a transcript.

“And for me to just quit because some cackling politicians want to get me out of the way because there’s a whole bunch of things they don’t want known about them and conversations they may have had with me . . . would be to disgrace my children when I know I’ve done nothing wrong,”

Talking about the interview later on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Robach said she didn’t find the governor delusional. As flighty as Blagojevich gets comparing himself Gandhi (or my favorite, Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), “He truly believes he’s the one who is going to save Illinois from corruption, and he is so serious when he says it,” she said.

Blagojevich’s syntax may be skewed but pay attention to the phrase cackling politicians want to get me out of the way because there’s a whole bunch of things they don’t want known about them and conversations they may have had with me.

If Blagojevich is going down, he’s not going down alone. And that makes him a dangerous man.

The Contents of His Hard Drive

As the man at the nexus of Illinois politics for the last six years, and someone who obviously enjoys pulling the levers, it is hard to imagine Blagojevich does not know who responds to “”Pay to Play” pressure, and who else exerts it. Where do you think he got his shakedown list?

Once you get past the Elvis songs in his iTunes library, the Cubs trivia pages and the Rudyard Kipling folder, what else is there on his computer hard drive?

How many gigs of emails, notes, proposed schemes and stashed away dirty linen on other politicians are there? If Blagojevich is so inclined, his computer could be a roadmap to the whole culture of pay to play. Even without it, his famous encyclopedic memory would be a pretty good guide.

Of course, at the moment, it’s all about his innocence. He’s going to “fight, fight, fight” until the jury comes in, and the verdict is read, and the judge sentences him to 40 years, or as long as it takes for his hair to fall out in a federal prison.

Then the feds are going to give him an opportunity to tell what he knows to prosecutors about others gaming the system – while the facts are still fresh and the possibility exists that he might be out of prison in time to see his youngest daughter graduate from college. And you know what? He’s going to take it.

The investigation of pay to play politics in Illinois won’t end with the prosecution of Rod Blagojevich. It starts there.