Governors, much like Presidents, grew up in the post-depression era into modern chief executives. They acquired enhanced resources to contest powerful legislatures for political leadership such as budgeting and amendatory veto powers. State budgets – a proposed plan for allocating scarce resources over a fiscal year period — became a benchmark for assessing the professional reputation of governors which came to rise and fall with each legislative session. Because everyone fights over public budgets, the often bloody contest resulted in winners and losers. Once enacted, one could look at a scorecard to see how well a governor did in converting formal powers into strength and informal powers of persuasion and coalition building into budget consensus.

Thus, the apparent outcome of Illinois 2008 Fiscal Year Budget provides a reading on the performance of Governor Rod Blagojevich. Sorry to report that no recent governor in Springfield history has so damaged his professional reputation as this governor. Over these past 6 months he has needlessly dissipated his political standing through endless rounds of bluster and bombast. He no longer is to be taken seriously and, due to forthcoming election cycles, opportunities for reversal or redemption are few.

What went wrong? Blagojevich’s consistent avoidance of the state’s fiscal realities and constraints will most be remembered: structural deficit (difference between revenues and expenditures in best of times); underfunded and mounting pension liabilities; public education issues of restricted property tax use, fiscal disparities and funding adequacy; surging medicaid spending; highway and transit funding. Rather than dealing with any of these in a systemic or orderly fashion, the Governor, instead, pursued an ill-fated and unaffordable state sponsored universal health care to be funded in part by the largest tax increase in the state’s history.

The record? 6 months of acrimonious budget posturing; a 107-0 House vote against his health spending tax; endless recriminations against his opponents; repudiation by party leaders; futile special sessions and weekly lapses without a state budget; and finally, a legislatively imposed state budget which the governor says he will rewrite through his veto powers and “newly found” appropriation authority. The budget fight will continue, but the verdict stands. Governor Rod Blagojevich has squandered his political capital like no other recent governor. He has endangered his own political party and worse, made it more difficult for future Illinois Governors to reclaim political leadership through the budgetary process. This will be his legacy.

Donald Haider, Professor of Social Enterprise at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, served as Chicago’s Budget Director and as a special assistant to three OMB Directors in Washington.