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her the position she wants hinges on having a strong party machine providing the funds and the voting blocks. In terms of "getting out the vote" and "campaign contributions", those 3000 patronage positions are again, <bleeping> golden! Many of those 3000 employees have in turn hired people who owe loyalty-and their job-to those 3000 people. And those folks' loyalty is suspect: this makes a huge, whopping sector of the Machine untrustworthy and probably unreliable to raise either the money or the votes needed to assure any election "goes the right way". Especially in this tough economy, those 3000 positions can be parlayed into tremendous influence and cash donations. And it's not only the governor or Senate seat: other Illinois seats must be filled, like Rahm Emmanuel's seat in the Illinois House.

Anyone who doesn't see the national significance of this has apparently forgotten where the White House Gang came from. Blagojevich's impeachment and indictment created a spectacle of cabinet members' side-stepping and double-shuffling unsurpassed in American history. Every one of those folks climbed the Illinois political ladder the same way Blagojevich, and Burris and Mike Madigan did. Only a fool would believe that all of this can go on year after year, yet none of these folks saw it, knew it or participated in it. Only a complicit media prevented proverbial heads from rolling down the Capitol steps.

Preventing the General Assembly from removing these 3000 people won't end the patronage system. It simply makes it less likely that it will work to the benefit of Illinois Democrats. Leave them where they're at-unless someone gets the goods on an individual dead to rights. Many of them may well be entitled to those seats based on their merits - there is no way to know at this point. They probably can't be any worse than the group that replaces them-and it may assure, for once, that Machine politics has to actually make an effort to represent the voters. It should be interesting. Let them squirm-at every level.

Learn more about this author, Linda Sunkle-Pierucki.
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