New GOP leader wants to 'clean up' Illinois
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Though all eyes remain focused on Sarah Palin after her take-no-prisoners convention speech, we must not miss the other news of this day.
Fellow citizens of Illinois, today is the last day Robert "Individual K" Kjellander will serve as a Republican National Committeeman.
"You don't have to sound so gleeful," admonished Kjellander when I reached him by cell phone here at the GOP convention in St. Paul.
No glee, honest. But no sorrow either.
Illinois, thanks to a bipartisan band of fat-cat insiders, is notorious for influence peddling and pay-to-play. And Bob Kjellander and his Republican comrade-in-arms, Bill "Co-Schemer A" Cellini, have been at the forefront of where's-mine politics for decades. Their alphabet designation was a gift from the feds in a government proffer.
Neither has been charged with any crime.
Here at the GOP convention this week, Kjellander has been spending quality time with his old college classmate and close friend, Karl Rove, longtime master of the dark arts of the Bush administration.
But at home in Illinois, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald continues to view Kjellander through his own special lens.
Kjellander and Rove's names flew around the courtroom in the recent federal prosecution of Illinois Gov. Blagojevich's high-profile fund-raiser, Antoin "Tony" Rezko. A government witness testified that Rezko told him Kjellander was working with Rove to get Fitzgerald axed.
Though both Rove and Kjellander said it wasn't true, we now know thanks to the political scandal at the Bush Justice Department that indeed the sharp knives were out for the corruption-busting Fitzgerald.
Seems he was doing too good a job investigating corruption.
The irony of Kjellander's retirement is that his replacement is a former federal prosecutor. Patrick Brady, who served at the Justice Department in Washington, is Illinois' new Republican National Committeeman.
"We have a terrible reputation in the country, and it's time to clean it up," Brady told me in St. Paul.
Though seldom united, on that particular point both the moderate and conservative wings of the Illinois GOP heartily agree.
Kjellander's little deals with the Democrats have been embarrassing. Like when his Springfield lobbying business, Springfield Consulting Group, used Tony Rezko as a lobbyist, and in one fee alone picked up a tidy $809,000 in a state pension bond deal courtesy of the Blagojevich administration.
As for Kjellander, he is remorseless, and he is rich.
"Look, I have done a lot of work for this party over the years. Haven't done anything wrong. I've been controversial but a lot of it is unfounded," he said.
Nobody's naive enough to think the retirement of Bob Kjellander is a giant step toward establishing good government in Illinois.
Then again, in this political desert, any step at all seems a minor miracle.