{"id":3237,"date":"2008-12-10T08:30:33","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T15:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2008\/12\/10\/blagojevich-blegh\/"},"modified":"2008-12-10T08:30:33","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T15:30:33","slug":"blagojevich-blegh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2008\/12\/10\/blagojevich-blegh\/","title":{"rendered":"Blagojevich Blegh"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two days ago, I thought something was just about to hit when\u00c2\u00a0 Rod Blagojevich\u00c2\u00a0came out for the strikers in front of Bank of America&#8217;s Chicago branch in ordering Illinois to quit doing business with them.\u00c2\u00a0 It struck me as\u00c2\u00a0this sort of constituency builder of a man with no constituency &#8212; an approval rating in the single or lowest double digits.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, a search through google news search shows up the first &#8220;connection&#8221;, such as it is,\u00c2\u00a0the opinion\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/blog.heritage.org\/2008\/12\/09\/two-stories-about-the-same-thing\/\">from out of\u00c2\u00a0the Heritage Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>What strikes me about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsday.com\/news\/printedition\/nation\/ny-usblag105959225dec10,0,262250.story\">the scandal<\/a>, and the\u00c2\u00a0auctioning off of Barack Obama&#8217;s\u00c2\u00a0old Senate seat , is\u00c2\u00a0seems less slimy than the process had been.\u00c2\u00a0 There was this somewhat bizarre process going on where the various Senate aspirants suddenly had to curry the favor of a politically discredited politician who they would otherwise not be touching with a ten foot pole and treating as a leper, mainstream news speculators running through scenarios of how various candidates might make agreements on how they could suck up energy from potential primary candidates if he should be stubborn enough to run again and other &#8220;scratch each other back&#8221; manuevers.\u00c2\u00a0 The specter of cold cash and blatant quid pro quos at least erases a political fiction and is in some manner a little less cynical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two days ago, I thought something was just about to hit when\u00c2\u00a0 Rod Blagojevich\u00c2\u00a0came out for the strikers in front of Bank of America&#8217;s Chicago branch in ordering Illinois to quit doing business with them.\u00c2\u00a0 It struck me as\u00c2\u00a0this sort of constituency builder of a man with no constituency &#8212; an approval rating in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}