Rod Blagojevich’s 2010 appearance on Celebrity Apprentice ended like so many careers of bad politicians — in a cloud of toxic dust created by dangerously quick finger-pointing.
The Illinois Democrat, having earlier said he thought his team’s week four project had gone well under his management, was informed by host Donald Trump that his team had lost and that he could potentially be fired for it.
It was at this point that Blagojevich changed his tune, denouncing his teammates’ lack of work ethic and personality clashes.
Olympic athlete Michael Johnson, another member of Blagojevich’s team, was having none of it.
“Everyone was great all this time,” said Johnson. “And now all of a sudden, ass on the line, you start throwing people under the bus. That sounds to me like you’re making things up.”
Trump ultimately agreed. After firing the impeached governor, he confided to co-host Erin Burnett, “I feel badly for him. He tried … he couldn’t handle it. We gave him a task, and he just couldn’t physically handle it.”
Indeed, Blagojevich projected an unduly sympathetic image on that show. Having been surrounded by a team of handlers throughout his political career, he was unable even to turn on a computer.
Yet, he knew how to use a cellphone. In one scene of the show, he was caught unleashing a torrent of profanity over his own phone, possibly to the attorney in his corruption case. Blagojevich had been caught on tape in another phone call, trying to exchange the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama for a cushy nonprofit job after his gubernatorial career was over, if not for a position in the Obama administration. Blagojevich would be convicted on several charges related to that scheme and also for trying to extort political donations from the CEO of Children’s Hospital. He had demanded that the executive raise $25,000 or else an increase in state reimbursements for pediatric specialists would be canceled. Blagojevich was handed a 14-year federal prison sentence.
Such corruption was typical of Blagojevich’s Illinois: a true American kleptocracy, in which his chief of staff was also accepting envelopes stuffed with cash from the infamous developer Tony Rezko. The former governor, like his Republican predecessor George Ryan, was sent to prison for his own robust role in maintaining Illinois kleptocracy.
Illinois will always remain a locus of corruption if presidents start going easy on its corrupt governors.
President Trump is now considering clemency for Blagojevich. But it is incongruous for him to point out the political corruption in places such as Chicago and Baltimore, yet to reward with pardons and commutations the politicians who are caught turning their cities into swamps of corruption.
It is appropriate for a president to pardon or commute the sentence of a contrite offender, especially one whose punishment never fit his crime — such as, for example, a minor drug offender serving a lengthy sentence. But Blagojevich is no petty offender. Corrupt politicians offend against everyone when they abuse their power in order to gain personal advantages.
Blagojevich is not even sorry for his crimes. Before penning in our own pages what seemed like an earnest plea from behind bars for prison reform, Blagojevich had also written a Wall Street Journal op-ed last spring denying responsibility, titled, “I’m in prison for practicing politics.”
“Here I am in my sixth year of a 14-year prison sentence for the routine practice of attempting to raise campaign funds while governor,” he wrote.
Blagojevich knows well that this is not the case. But as on Celebrity Apprentice, he is pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for his own actions. Stand clear of the swiftly moving fingers, pointing sharply at everyone but himself.
