“Governor's re-election bid a shambles, observers say”

That’s the headline yesterday, but not in Illinois.

Yet.

Kentucky’s Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher was indicted by a Grand Jury on three misdemeanor conspiracy charges for breaking a state law forbidding hiring on political considerations.

Patronage hiring, to translate.

Kentucky’s governor, like our own, is running for his second term in office.

And, headline yesterdayhe’s angry, just like our governor is when he "uncovers" something wrong in his administration.

The article from which my headline came says the governor could pardon himself. That’s probably better than spending time in a state prison. He's already pardoned everyone else involved in the scandal.

Who does this sound like?

(The governor) entered office in 2003 on a pledge to cut "waste, fraud and abuse" in state government. He promised to “clean up the mess” in the state capitol.

It could be Blagojevich, but it’s Kentucky’s governor.

And, today, Governor Rod Blagojevich announces the firing of the people he picked to run state hiring…back in April.

Here is the Saturday Chicago Tribune story.

Read the more detailed Sun-Times story, too.

The Kentucky governor tried an affirmative defense, too, but it obviously didn't work.

Mayor Richard Daley’s hiring team is on trial for violating patronage hiring rules and Governor Rod Blagojevich decides to fire his hiring team.

Timing is everything.

ABC’s Andy Shaw did a story last October on a developing Federal investigation into Blagojevich hiring abuses. (Actually, the Channel 7 reporter used the word, “practices.”)

Of course, Governor Blagojevich could not pardon himself from a Federal conviction.

But there is more irony than his annoucing the personnel firings the first week of Daley's counterparts' trial.

Blagojevich announced them the day after after former Republican Governor Richard B. Ogilvie’s patronage chief, Don Udstuen, got told he would spend the fall, winter and most of next spring in a Wisconsin prison.

Of course, Udstuen’s offenses had nothing to do with patronage. They were about bribes.

Another involved in the Ogilvie administration’s systematic replacement of Democrats with Republicans was Alan Drazak, Director of the Department of Personnel. Drazak figured out a way to put the people Udstuen selected on the payroll. He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 9th. He so angered Cook County Democrats when he played the same role when Ogilvie was sheriff and county board president that Senate Democrats refused to confirm him as director. He remained an "Acting Director."

Among Drazak's offenses was laundering Udstuen’s share of the Secretary of State vendor bribes that went to Larry Warner. (Warner got 1/3, Udstuen got 1/3, and 1/3 went elsewhere, according to testimony.)

No wonder the first reform of government in the United States was civil service.

Also posted at McHenry County Blog.