Harold Washington's Words Still Ring True

I’ve been a fan of Celebrity Apprentice (CA) ever since it first came on the air. And even though I am rarely home to see it when it first comes on the air on Sunday night, you can be assured that I will catch it over the Internet the next day. What makes this season episodes of CA apprentice even more fascinating is the appearance by former Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Now I’ve never been a big fan of Blago. He was always a sleazy character in my book. But because I really didn’t know him, CA would give me the perfect opportunity to see him in a different light. Unfortunately, my hopes for that to happen quickly fell short as one of Blago’s first words on the show was that he is “An innocent man wrongly accused.” Now Blago has all the rights that the constitution gives him to profess his innocence. But would he be a real “team player” or was he using the show to promote his legal troubles.

The latter appears to be more his motives. In the very first episode of CA, Blago allows some food to sit and go cold while acting as a waiter. He was speaking to people professing his innocence while the food sat unattended waiting for him to pick it up and deliver it to the table. The second and third episodes of CA also showed Blago in a poor light. Again too much emphasis on his legal woes and not enough attention paid to the tasks he needs to be completing. Plus in the third episode, Blago is given a laptop and he is so technically challenged that he doesn’t even know how to turn it on. But it was the very last episode in which he appeared that doomed him. He was given a Blackberry or some other type of smart phone and was incapable of sending a text message. Funny and yet…sad. Because while holding the position of governor of this great state, he made decisions which affected all of our lives and yet lived such a privileged lifestyle whereby he didn’t ever have to practice what he preached. He had others to do it for him as he would often say.

As I pondered Blago’s incompetence with text messaging, it made me rescore just how important a Lt. Governor candidate is in case they ever have to assume the position of Governor. It was fun to have Pat Quinn as the Lt. Governor. His quirky nature was easy to dismiss. It is not fun to have Pat Quinn as Governor. Blago had said upon leaving office that he had been fighting attempts to increase our taxes and all Quinn has talked about since being appointed Governor is increasing them. It is very easy to solve the fiscal problems for this state by asking the taxpayers to pay more. It takes a real leader to come in and look at the state’s budget and slash waste and fraud first before asking taxpayers to pay more into an insatiable system.

Plus the fiasco about who will be Quinn’s running mate has forever tarnished him in my book. First he wanted Hynes, then Tammy Duckworth, then State Sen. Susan Garrett before finally settling on Sheila Simon. I too, am one of the angry, irate African American voters who didn’t like the way Art Turner was summarily overlooked in the process. My anger runs so deep that Quinn has forever been renamed by me to be Quinn-Ain’t-Our-Friend.

I also went back and looked up that commercial that played in the waning days before the primary where the late Mayor Harold Washington said of QAOF, “I was nuts to do it. I must have been blind or staggering. I would never appoint Pat Quinn to do anything. Pat Quinn is a totally and completely undisciplined individual who thinks that government is nothing but large easel by which he can do his PR work. He almost created a shambles in that department. The Revenue Department was in a slow process of being revised…and made into a whole. He went in there like a bull in a closet. Wouldn’t do what he was told, which was to put the systems in there which I had discussed thoroughly with him. No he thought that department was a PR plantation and he didn’t do his work. And he was dismissed and should’ve been dismissed. My only regret is that we uh hired him and kept him too long. That was perhaps my greatest mistake in government in terms of appointments.” And the same can be said of QAOF of being appointed governor. A big mistake. But not one we have to live with. Recently Bill “Dock” Walls has announced that he is reviving his campaign for Governor and will run as an Independent. Thank goodness the mistake that is currently in the governor’s seat can be removed this November by electing Walls to the job. You can hear and learn more about Walls this Sunday night on WRLL 1450AM from 10 until Midnight.