The rise and fall of Rod Blagojevich

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. —
The now-former governor, Rod Blagojevich, did it again last week. During one of more than a dozen interviews with national media outlets, he bragged about his low grades in law school.“I got a ‘C’ in constitutional law, which might have been one of my better grades,” he told Cynthia McFadden of ABC’s “Nightline,” as she asked how he could say he had done nothing illegal despite being caught on undercover recordings talking about deals that made it appear he wanted to benefit personally by taking official action.

“Maybe I’m the wrong person to ask,” he said. But, he added, “When this is all said and done, I will be fully vindicated.”Self-deprecating talk about bad grades has been somewhat of a recurring theme for a man who, in six years as governor, often acted as if he thinks he’s smarter than everybody else by dismissing rules and forgetting promises. He told the Chicago Sun-Times back in 2002 that he got an 18 or 19 on the ACT (a college entrance exam with a maximum score of 36), and when then-President George Bush was in Springfield in 2005, Blagojevich used his speech to tell a young essay winner that she could be president because — look at him, an 18 on the ACT and he was governor.

When he quickly signed a controversial bill sought by then-telecommunications giant SBC in 2003, his first year in office, he later deflected a question of propriety by saying, “One of the good things about being governor is I don’t have to be a lawyer again, at least for now. … I don’t have to sit here trying to figure out what the constitutionality is of all of those questions. I’ll leave that for the constitutional lawyers and the judges to make that decision.”Blagojevich also has said there was “a lot of surfing and movie stars and all the rest” at his law school, Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., and “I barely knew where the law library was.”The state Senate is not made up of all lawyers, but this week, they did serve as judges in the case of Blagojevich’s impeachment.

And given the result — a 59-0 vote to remove him from office — maybe it would have helped Blagojevich’s career had he hit the books a bit harder. For it was on grounds that he skirted state law, the legislative process and ethical boundaries as he cut his own path as governor. And the judges in this case said, “Enough.”The man who rose from blue-collar Chicago roots to graduate from Northwestern (with his first two years at the University of Tampa) and to become a lawyer, an assistant prosecutor, a state representative, a congressman and finally, governor, is now unemployed.