Word: blagojevich
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...burly, affable childhood friend who is a dead ringer for the male model Fabio. After a sympathetic caller declares that the governor's staunchest political foes - including Illinois house speaker Mike Madigan, Governor Pat Quinn and state senate president John Cullerton - deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit, Blagojevich urges would-be assailants to aim for the head. Within a few mind-bending minutes, he slams Quinn's tax policies, speculates about the percentage of politicians who cheat on their wives and admonishes listeners to brush their teeth and to avoid the scourge of video poker. When all 10 buttons...
...Hearing Blagojevich sermonize about corrupt politicians strikes plenty of people as the height of chutzpah. But Blagojevich is a creature of his times, the purest embodiment of a culture in which scorn is just another form of attention. And few people are as capable of smiling their way through caustic interviews and brutal daily encounters. Blagojevich, a former Golden Gloves boxer, seems convinced - perhaps by the fans who still snap up his bobblehead dolls on eBay or stop him on the street to pose for pictures - that he can brawl his way back to respectability. "When the facts come...
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...