Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich is gone.
On Thursday evening, the Illinois state senate ousted him from office after every last one of the state's 59 senators found him guilty of abusing his power after the brazen Blago was caught on tape trying to sell the United States senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama.
And thus comes to an end the most ridiculous political spectacle in Illinois governance since … well, since its last governor was sent to prison – but this time with way more delusions of grandeur, lady-cursin', and an outsized persecution complex. (The next Illinois governor is going to have a lot to live up to. Someone get Dan Rostenkowski on the horn – pronto!)
The 59-0 vote to remove Blago from office is ultimately less interesting than the 59-0 vote taken immediately thereafter, which bans him from ever holding public office in Illinois again. It's exceedingly unlikely – even in Illinois, even in a national political culture that loves a comeback, even in a country where Tom DeLay can still be invited to talk shop on cable TV news – that Blago's career would have been resurrected by the electorate, so the vote, while providing a tidy bit of insurance, was, perhaps, mostly symbolic.
It's nonetheless a sweet bit of lemon juice poured into the wound of the oxygen-sucking Blago, whose love of attention sent him running to every plugged-in microphone and camera in a three-state radius and found him accepting the bizarrest of chat show invites, oft with amusing results, like tucked in amongst the women of The View with the jaunty demeanor of an Ocean's Eleven cast member with a new film to promote. For a man whose most fervent desire is to be seen, to be heard, to be important, the cruellest cut of all is not being asked to leave, but being relegated to oblivion.
After listening to Blago flap his jaws for weeks, disgorging seemingly endless streams of delusionally self-serving and self-pitying bloviations, I cannot conceive of a more perfect going away gift than a big bag of Nobody Cares. And as he extracts himself, wrenchingly, from the spotlighted glare of live television one last time, diminishing to his disgrace, I am blissfully content in the thought of never speaking, nor even thinking, of him again.
Or at least until his trial on federal corruption charges.