CHICAGO | The day before Rod R. Blagojevich’s world came crashing down, he stood before the TV cameras confident and defiant, as always, declaring he had nothing to hide, even as a giant political scandal was about to engulf him.
“If anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead,” said the boyish, helmet-haired governor, looking jaunty in a black leather jacket and turtleneck.
As it turns out, the feds had done just that.
The next morning, FBI agents woke him with a phone call, then led him from his house in handcuffs. And so began a bizarre, 18-month melodrama expected to culminate Thursday in Mr. Blagojevich’s trial, where he stands accused, among other things, of trying to trade or sell President Obama’s vacant Senate seat - for personal gain.
In the year and a half since his arrest, Mr. Blagojevich has lost his job and become a political pariah and a comic punch line. But he’s maintained the bravado that defined him as governor with repeated declarations of innocence that are vintage Blago: Confrontational. In the limelight. Never giving an inch.
“There has always been a damn-the-torpedoes aspect to his personality,” says state Rep. John Fritchey, a friend-turned-critic.
That’s been obvious as the impeached governor has popped up everywhere: Early-morning radio, late-night TV. On stage with Second City comic actors lampooning him. At a block party where the avid Elvis fan crooned one of the King’s songs.
And most recently, Mr. Blagojevich, now 53, was on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” where he seemed baffled by a computer, and was, for the second time in a year, fired.
“I think people are intrigued by him, fascinated by him,” claims Glenn Selig, his Florida-based publicist.
So is it wise for Mr. Blagojevich to be clowning around while facing serious charges?
“I think he has a great sense of humor, and he’s willing to laugh at himself,” Mr. Selig says. “Self-deprecation is not necessarily a bad thing. He’s the real deal.”
Those who’ve followed Mr. Blagojevich’s career have another view.
“His ego won’t allow him to give up the stage,” says Kent Redfield, a professor emeritus of politics at the University of Illinois at Springfield. “He has this supreme confidence in his ability to win people over.”
Mr. Blagojevich’s loose-lipped style has some former associates wondering if the ex-governor’s endless patter is designed to show potential jurors he’s full of political bluster, not criminal intent.
Mr. Blagojevich has his own explanation.
“I … have this need to tell everyone and anyone who would listen that I didn’t do anything wrong and that I am innocent of any criminal wrongdoing … ,” he wrote in “The Governor.”
Mr. Blagojevich maintains he wasn’t trying to sell or trade Mr. Obama’s Senate seat and was trying to arrange a deal in which he’d appoint Lisa Madigan, the state’s attorney general. In exchange, her father, House Speaker Michael Madigan, his nemesis, would push through a public works bill the governor wanted.
Both Madigans say that’s news to them.
Mr. Blagojevich later appointed Roland W. Burris, creating a new furor when the newly named senator repeatedly changed his story about his contact with the governor’s friends and aides before he was chosen.
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