Press Success

You have to hand it to the Governor, even with $20 million in your campaign account, you can't buy earned media this good. Eleanor Clift's Capitol Letter column in Newsweek gushes over the All Kids program, and fawns over the Governor himself with tidbits like this:

With his shock of black hair and cherubic face, he is reminiscent of another eager young governor, Bill Clinton circa ’92, even using much the same language about the forgotten middle-class that launched Clinton on the national scene.

There is no question that the article gives him a nice dose of positive national exposure, but I still kind of squirmed when I read the spin job on his about-face on the med mal issue.

His confrontational governing style has made him his share of enemies, including among those who were his friends. A prosecuting attorney in Chicago before he went into politics, Blagojevich enjoyed heavy financial support from trial lawyers. But after he was elected and faced with doctors leaving the state because of high malpractice insurance, he supported caps on malpractice awards. “From a political standpoint, it was a difficult decision,” he says. “From a moral standpoint, it was easy.” That’s the kind of tradeoff rarely made in Washington.

When all is said and done though, this article alone, not to mention all the other press that stemmed from his D.C. trip, is probably the best stretch of attention he's had in quite a while.