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But Rudin had asked a trick question. The right answer was Arizona — where Evan Mecham was impeached and removed in 1988 and Fife Symington resigned in 1997 after he was convicted of bank fraud. Here in Illinois, Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, and George Ryan all served out their terms and went to prison later. Political corruption at the highest levels is a serious competition, and with Blagojevich we’ve finally got a dog in that fight.
Ignoring Arizona, Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate and a Chicago native, wore his heart on his sleeve when he posted a piece titled “Political Corruption Smackdown / Which state is the most crooked — Illinois or Louisiana?” Weisberg recognized that the “unmasking” of our governor “as a kleptocrat of Paraguayan proportion” finally gave Illinois “a real chance —its first in more than a generation — to defeat Louisiana in the NCAA finals of American political corruption.”
Over the past decade:
The Times refused to North Dakota seriously, despite the numbers. USA Today had been first out of the box with a state-by-state corruption survey, and when North Dakota wound up on top it refused to commit to its own numbers. “Illinois is not even close to the nation’s most-corrupt state,” said USA Today. “North Dakota, it turns out, may hold that distinction instead.”
