Blagojevich, just the latest in a long line of corrupt Illinois politicians

Punchline, sociopath, exhibit A for the status quo of corruption – whatever Rod Blagojevich is to you, members of the Illinois Reform Commission want you to know something: It’s not about Rod. Not just him, anyway.

“It’s too easy to pin the blame on him,” said Brad McMillan, a commission member, on Thursday night during a town hall meeting in East St. Louis. “Some state lawmakers want us to focus on him,” he said, instead of addressing the root problems.

But that would be wrong, he said.

Take the case of Orville Hodge.

More than half a century ago, the popular statewide elected official, a Republican with a guaranteed future in higher office, was discovered to be siphoning hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money out of the public till and putting it into his pockets.

That was, he had decided, an unofficial duty of being auditor of public accounts.

Hodge bought for himself, among other things, a veritable fleet of cars.

In the wake of his being led off to prison, the public clamored for reforms to make sure what he had done couldn’t happen again.

But as commission member Sheila Simon, daughter of former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, said in Springfield last month, amid the post-Hodge clamor came a silken voice to ward off the more extreme reform urges among legislators.

“Just because the preacher runs off with your wife doesn’t mean you burn down the church.”

The speaker?

None other than the man found, on his death almost 20 years later, to have shoeboxes stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and checks intended for state coffers among his personal belongings.

That Paul Powell, longtime Democratic state lawmaker and secretary of state, stood in the way of those 1950s reforms matters even in 2009, commission members say.

Republican, Democrat, Chicago, Downstate, 1950s, 2000s – no matter the specifics, the result is the same: The people of Illinois lose.

That, said Simon, is the reason she is on the commission: “It’s time to start some fires.”

A refrain of commission members is that when it comes to reform in Illinois, it’s now or never.

“It is really critical,” commission member Brad McMillan said Thursday, to get the public involved. “In the next month, everything is on the line.”

The commission issues its recommendations next week to Gov. Pat Quinn, who has promised to use his bully pulpit to urge the legislature to approve the recommendations before adjournment at the end of May.

McMillan said Quinn and the commission couldn’t do it alone.

“The only way we have any chance is if the public gets totally involved. As a former chief of staff for a member of Congress I know for a fact it makes a difference,” he said.

Another commission member, Kate Maehr, said, “Democracy is a team sport. It requires people to participate. All the rules in the world don’t help democracy stay strong and healthy. That’s the voters’ choice. We need to give the people in the state of Illinois the opportunity to be heard. The feelings out there are strong.”

The job of the commission, she said, is to “make sure those voices are heard and heeded.”

Dennis Holtschneider, another commission member, urged people to contact their legislators and also their friends, urging them, in turn, to contact legislators. “Please. Call.”

Commission chairman Patrick Collins, who did not attend Thursday’s town hall meeting in East St. Louis, has made a point of asking elected officials who spoke to the panel whether they would expend their own political capital on pushing the reform proposals through the legislature.

All have given their assent.

But Collins, staid and low-key, doesn’t exactly emulate the Peter Finch character in the 1976 movie “Network,” famous for stirring the masses with the cry, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Collins instead prefers to say, “We have a voice, not a vote.” He notes that none of the commission members are political professionals using the panel to burnish a resume.

But Lisa Madigan, the state attorney general, saluted Collins when she spoke to the commission in Chicago recently. After he punctuated a point by saying he was a neophyte, she replied, “Nobody would call you a neophyte.”