Blagojevich and Hair Make Impression on The Daily Show

By Heather Huntington on September 29th, 2009

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Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been hitting every media outlet from Howard Stern to Chelsea Lately in an effort to promote his new memoir, The Governor. I caught him on the 9/24 episode of The Daily Show.

As a former Chicagoan, I was very interested to see exactly how batshit Blago was going to come off. Not only did I vote for him, but I remember a praise-singing conversation I had with my husband after he stood up for stem cell research in the wake of a particularly bloody battle. I lamented the shame that a ballsy Democrat such as he couldn’t be in the running for national office (not that I don’t love Obama, don’t get me wrong). We decided he was a good solid politician, but just not charismatic enough for national office.

Apparently we were also insane that day. Although, in my defense, it’s been years since I’ve lived in Chicago, so perhaps he was busy doing various red-flag-raising stunts in the interim years that made his ultimate, and ridiculously colorful demise less shocking to those in the know.

Regardless, when the senate seat selling scandal broke I was pretty stunned and horrified. Then to see him flame out so flamboyantly and insanely – insisting against all semblance of reality that the fix was in and he was innocent – oh my.

That Blago went on The Daily Show — given the profuse amounts of jokes for which he was the gleeful butt over the year — would have been surprising were his reserves of deranged narcissism not quite so bottomless. I couldn’t wait to see the war that would erupt.  After a couple of harmless hair jokes, Jon Stewart showed the applause-worthy chutzpah to tell it like it is — that the tapes make it pretty clear Blago is guilty and he has to be insane to think otherwise.

But then Blago surprised me. Not only has he concocted a somewhat plausible excuse — that the next thing he said after ‘I’ve got this thing and it’s f-ing golden’ were along the lines of ‘and if you don’t think I’m going to leverage it for health care and jobs for the good people of Illinois, then you’ve got another thing coming’ — but I actually almost believe him. He claims that the tapes, when played in full, will exonerate him (they can’t be played in full for legal reasons), and is begging for his accusers to allow them to be played.

Do I think he’s telling the truth? No, I don’t. I think that if he gets the tapes played and they further incriminate him, he’ll claim parts were missing. Or he’ll concoct another story, then another. But there is a part of me, a little shred, that wishes he were.