Word: blagojevich
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Still, he doesn't make it easy on himself. In April, Blagojevich volunteered for the NBC reality show I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! When a federal judge squelched the idea, Blagojevich sent his wife Patti to gobble tarantulas instead. Later, in the summer, the fervent Elvis Presley fan made headlines for belting out the King's "Treat Me Nice" at a Chicago block party. "It was unbelievable," says Tom Duff, president of the post-production company that hired him for the gig. "This guy was our governor, and he's turning up his collar and singing...
...Flickering Dream Not long ago, Blagojevich's reviews were mostly glowing. The first Democratic governor in Illinois in a generation, he had charisma, connections, deep coffers and a Horatio Alger-type bio. "You have to remember, a lot of people thought that Rod Blagojevich had a very good shot at becoming President of the United States," says Mike Jacobs, a state senator from Rock Island, Ill., and a former friend. "I know that sounds comical today...
...ease with which Blagojevich climbed the political ladder - and his upbringing in the back-scratching, wheel-greasing vortex of Chicago politics, where more than 1,500 people have been convicted of public corruption since 1970 - may explain why Blagojevich somehow considers dangling a U.S. Senate seat "routine." Even today, the comeback he's attempting to engineer - he told TIME he is "not ruling out the possibility" of a return to politics - is being driven in part by dollars. "We're in debt because I was an honest governor," he says. "O.K.? And now I don't have job prospects. This...
Cloudy future aside, Blagojevich has a keen sense of the past. At the press conference following his impeachment, he bewildered observers by reciting a passage from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If," and his memoir is sprinkled with references to the giants of history - from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to Winston Churchill - and personal comparisons to figures as varied as Icarus and Martha Stewart. During an interview with TIME, he rattled off a passage from Teddy Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" speech at the Sorbonne in 1910, delivering the punch lines with a showman's flourish...
Read "Governor Gone Wild: The Blagojevich Scandal." Read "Behind the Blagojevich Mess: A State in Disarray...