Why Does Burris Remind Me of the Doors?

By Mark Riley





The continuing drama surrounding Illinois Senator Roland Burris continues unabated. Just like the sports world has A-Rod, politics has this accidental lawmaker, whose waffling on dealings with associates of of his benefactor, Rod Blagojevich, threaten to bring him down.

So why is it that lately, every time I see or hear Burris' name mentioned in the news, I think back to a song from my misbegotten youth? The song is "Riders on the Storm" by the Doors, and if ever there's storm rider for the 21st century, it's Roland Burris.

Despite repeated calls for his resignation, Burris soldiers on. On Tuesday, I mused that he should announce now that he'd only stay through next year's election. With the media-political nexus calling for his head, even that seems impossible. Or is it? Consider the first verse of "Riders on the Storm"....

Riders on the storm

Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out on loan....

Riders on the storm

For me, that verse defines Roland Burris' situation.


Now even black ministers who initially thought he was getting a bad rap from the media are re-thinking their support. And, as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson puts it, when your credibility rests on matters of syntax and grammar, that's a bad sign.

I for one certainly recognize Roland Burris' service to the people of Illinois, in particular its length. However, you have to ask yourself if those same folks are best served by a politically challenged lawmaker who may well have no shot at the full term he took the job to seek.

It's time for Roland Burris to salvage what's left of his dignity and legacy, and give up that Senate seat. I say this knowing he probably will try to hold out and let the storm pass. Yet if Roland Burris is anything more than "an actor out on loan", he'll recognize it's time to go.

What do you think. Should Roland Burris resign?

Is Burris Toast?

If you read columns and stories from the punditocracy (I know it's not a word), the career of Illinois Senator Roland Burris died one month to the day after it began. He's the guy former Governor Rod Blagojevich named to replace Barack Obama, and we don't need to go into detail about that mess.

Now it seems like just when things were quieting down, Burris himself stirs the cauldron that is his state's politics. At issue is whether he lied to a state impeachment committee about his contact with Blagojevich staffers about the seat he now holds. 

Burris himself says he did have a previously undisclosed conversation with Blago's brother regarding a contribution to the governor's campaign (no need for that now). The senator's denial that his new affidavit changes his original testimony isn't exactly causing people in Illinois or DC to flock to his defense.

In fact, the silence on both fronts deafening. Senate Democrats, who never wanted to seat Burris in the first place, seem to hoping either he'll quit or won't have enough juice to win his party's nomination next year.

While Republicans in Illinois have called on Burris to quit, the more important question is whether he'll be wounded so badly by all this that the Democratic leadership will get behind another candidate.

Roland Burris' biggest sin? After all, no one, not even his most serious detractors, say he actually gave Blagojevich any money. No, his mistake was not disclosing his new affidavit on the matter before the Chicago media got ahold of it.

If Senator Roland Burris is interested in doing the honorable thing here (some might argue he shouldn't have accepted the appointment in the first place), he needs to pull himself out of next year's Senate race now. That's right. Tell the people of Illinois you'll fight for them, but only until they can decide for themselves who they want.

What do you think? Can Roland Burris survive?    

Needed Change or Quick Fix?

Politicians, even progressive ones, sometimes react to controversy with well meaning solutions. Too often, the solution is as bad or worse than the problem. So it is with calls to take away the power of state governors to fill vacant seats in the US Senate.

We all know the drama surrounding appointments in Illinois, New York, and Delaware (quick, can anyone tell me the fourth seat that became vacant?). To fix the problem, Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold wants to introduce a constitutional amendment requiring a special election if a seat becomes vacant.

Sen. Feingold's logic is that what's good for the House is also good for the Senate. There, the constitution mandates vacancies to be filled by special elections. Further, Feingold argues that citizens, not governors, should be the ones who determine who goes to Washington is a Senate seat is vacant.

It all seems to make sense, and certainly there are numbers of people who will back the proposal after the three ring circus that filling seats in New York, Illinois, and Delaware became. And yet, all this doesn't make the special election route a good idea.

First, some clarity. It's not a bad idea because it takes power away from governors (see Rod Blagojevich). Rest assured they'll be the first ones screaming if Feingold's idea gets traction. No, the problem here is that the proposal doesn't seem to be well thought out.

The House and Senate are two different bodies. One represents an estimated 587,000 people, while senators represent entire states. Besides, there will in fact be special elections to fill all four vacant seats next year. Why rush the process?

Blagojevich's alleged vices aside, does the cost of a special election this year, estimated at $30-50 million dollars really solve a problem? Or is it just a reaction to what's gone on this time around? My gut tells me it's the latter, and my experience tells me these kind of fixes almost never work the way their champions intend.

You tell me. Should governors be stripped of their power to fill vacant Senate seats?

BTW: The fourth vacant seat was in Colorado. It became open when Ken Salazar was tapped to be Interior Secretary.

Mandela, King, Gandhi...Blagojevich?

By Mark Riley
Now that the drama over who would be New York's replacement for Hillary Clinton in the US Senate is done (and the governor is in major damage control mode), the scene shifts back to Illinois. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, apparently on the advice of a PR firm, has gone on a media offensive.




His impeachment trial set to start today, Blago is either acting crazy, or crazy like a fox. After appearing on several Chicago area radio stations, he's now going national. Rather than present a defense to those who will judge him, he's going on, among others "The Today Show", "Good Morning America", "Larry King Live", and "The View".

We now know this is a guy not prone to understatement, and utterly without shame. On "The Today Show", Blagojevich actually said that when he was arrested he thought about Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Mohandas Gandhi.







True, all of them did time, but none were ever accused of threatening to withhold children's healthcare funding unless they got campaign donations from a hospital executive. Allegedly, that is.

The particulars of the case have been examined, publicized, and exposed. One would think an honorable politician would step aside temporarily, even as he or she maintained their innocence. Not Blagojevich. He said again over the weekend he's going nowhere. Interestingly, there remain questions about whether prosecutors have enough to convict him on the main charge, trying to sell Barack Obama's old Senate seat to the highest bidder.

That will be for a jury to decide. In the meantime, the current governor of Illinois has carved a fascinating niche for himself in the annals of American politics. He is, however, not unique. If you don't believe me, get ahold of Mark Grossman's "Political Corruption in America", an A to Z overview of the depths those we elect will go to amass power and money.

The Illinois State Senate will no doubt vote to remove impeach Rod Blagojevich, and remove him from office. The only question remaining is whether the process will remove the taint this man has brought to the highest office in his state.



Will Rod Blagojevich's removal from office clean up Illinois politics? You tell me.

Baby Boom Challenge

As we move into a new year, many of us are focused on the need to jump start our moribund economy. It certainly will be Job #1 for our new president. At the same time, however, America faces a different and more daunting challenge. It's one that will take a supreme effort on the part of those that recognize it.

It can't be met with rhetoric from myriad of divides that haunt our society: Black vs. white, liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican, gay, vs. straight. If left unmet, this challenge threatens to gut any economic recovery that takes place in the future.

Think for a moment about some of the more outlandish stories that dotted the American landscape in 2008. From Eliot Spitzer to Rod Blagojevich, from Plaxico Burress to Bernie Madoff, from Kwame Kilpatrick to Ted Stevens to John Edwards to AIG to the Big Three carmakers, a common thread emerges. It's one of greed, entitlement, stupidity, and cluelessness. And even these stories scratch the surface of what the nation must address, and fix. It can't be fixed simply by electing the nation's first black president and looking to him to wave a magic wand.

Fact is, America's soul is damaged, and too many of us either refuse to admit it or don't recognize what has happened.

This blog is certainly not the first place to speak to this malaise. My man Steven Ivory has written eloquently in eurweb.com about the need to mend our damaged fabric. The purpose here is to build on what others have recognized, and throw down a gauntlet to a specific group to take the lead in addressing the problem.

What needs fixing in this country is our moral compass, our sense of ourselves, and our resolve to leave a better world for our children than what we inherited. And what group needs to take the lead in remolding the American spirit? It is the responsibility of my generation, the so-called baby boomers.



As our eldest creep toward retirement, an honest assessment of our stewardship of the nation would leave quite a bit to be desired.

It is that generation of men and women born between 1946 and 1964 that benefitted from an enormous expansion of the US economy, and at the same time changes in the nation's moral fiber brought on in large measure by the civil rights movement.



It was also our generation that saw the need 40 years ago to change America's direction. We were young then, and the ethos of the counterculture was at the same time well intentioned and unfocused. It is now almost two generations later. Many of us have grown children and grandchildren. It's time for us to dig deep, and start asking questions that may be painful, but are certainly necessary.

We can start by asking ourselves whether what we say we want in the life of this country is actually what we end up paying for. Put simply, many of us decry the cultural excesses that we ourselves consume.

Whether it's the endless diet of "reality television" we watch, or the banal, self aggrandizing music we listen to, we need to ask ourselves whether this is the best we can do. This isn't about censorship but about discriminating consumption.

Most of us don't realize that as we encourage the production of shows like "The Real Housewives of Whatever" we know less and less about the rest of the world because our media has closed foreign news bureaus because they aren't profit centers.

Whether we want to admit it or not, our consumption speaks to our values, to what we hold dear, to what is important to us. If spending $100,000 on a sweet sixteen birthday party appears normal to our youth, will spending time with family and friends ever suffice? If over the top behavior is rewarded with media exposure, how do we reward what is normal, caring, and nurturing?

If a half-hearted effort gets you a passing grade in school, why bother striving for excellence? I believe if these fundamental issues aren't addressed, we can expect more, not less of the behavior we say we abhor.

And why, you may ask, does the baby boom generation have a special responsibility to join the struggle for the nation's future?



It's not simply that which we were given, although that would be reason enough. It is our numbers that mandate the work we must do. Those numbers represented the hope of our parents for the future we'd inherit.

That we've been imperfect vessels is inarguable. Yet if our time as young people taught us anything, it should have been the notion that yes, we can change the nation, and the world.

Baby boomers and children of baby boomers, your comments please?