reform. Ordinarily, requests like that were filed away with proposals to create a unicameral legislature or move the state capital to Metropolis. Illinois hadn’t changed its ethics law since the mid-1970s, when it enacted a campaign disclosure system in response to Watergate. It was one of the few states with no limits on campaign contributions or gifts to politicians. One promiscuous lobbyist stood in the capitol rotunda with a stack of checks, which he dealt out to departing senators. Some legislators began their day by trying to figure out who would take them to lunch.
But 1997 was different. The state’s most powerful officeholders had been caught in scandals. Governor Jim Edgar’s largest campaign contributor, Management Services of Illinois, had received several no-bid contracts from the state and then bilked taxpayers out of $7 million. In Secretary of State George Ryan’s office, clerks were selling trucker’s licenses in exchange for bribes, which ended up in Ryan’s campaign fund. One of the illegal truckers caused an accident that killed six children. Illinois politicians reform themselves as often as a mountain man bathes: only when the stench becomes unbearable. This was one of those times.
Also, Paul Simon was asking. Illinois’s most popular politician, and its most honest, he hadn’t inspired the term “simon-pure,” but it certainly applied to him. In the 1950s, Simon had made his name as a muckraking small-town newspaper editor, exposing gambling and prostitution in small towns across the river from St. Louis. After winning a seat in the legislature, he furthered his goody-goody image by writing an expose on his colleagues for Harper’s. In the U.S. Senate, he reported every gift, right down to a five-dollar box of cookies. Simon’s scrupulous accounting won him the “Straight Arrow Award” in a poll of congressional staffers. Upon leaving the Senate in 1997, his retirement project was a public policy institute at Southern Illinois University. The ethics bill was its first undertaking.
Illinois’s sleazy political culture was largely a product of the Chicago Machine, which lived on long after Tammany Hall and other big-city boss operations were put out of business. But even Illinoisans grow tired of kickbacks and insider contracts, which means that the state also provides a unique platform for reformers. You can’t have Eliot Ness without Al Capone. Goo-goos and grafters, as a popular book about Chicago politics put it. Paul Simon was a goo-goo. So was Abner Mikva. Both recommended Obama to Emil Jones, who eagerly appointed him to the reform panel. Let a freshman from Hyde Park tell the guys they can’t have dinner at the Sangamo Club anymore. Denny Jacobs sure wouldn’t do it. As Jacobs liked to put it, “The public doesn’t care about ethics. I think ethics comes next to athlete’s feet when it comes to tripping the public’s trigger. What it does trigger is the media.”
Working with Simon and his institute, the panel came up with a bill that prohibited lobbyists from handing out donations on state property and banned fund-raisers within fifty miles of Springfield. If a lobbyist took a legislator or a state employee out to eat, he couldn’t spend more than $75. Legislators could no longer accept sports tickets or vacations. Obama wanted to limit campaign contributions, too, but that would have struck at the power of the house and senate leaders. They collected huge sums of money from lobbyists, then doled it out to grateful members. Finally, the bill required that contributions be posted on the Internet, which in 1997 was still a novelty to most politicians.
The Gift Ban Act passed the Republican-controlled senate with no trouble. George Ryan was running for governor, and he didn’t want the newspapers harping on ethics. (Ryan won the election and served four years as governor, followed by six years in a federal prison for corruption.) It was a sensitive subject for the secretary of state, who had vacationed in Jamaica on a lobbyist’s dime. In the house, members worried that they’d be fined or jailed for niggling violations. One representative complained about the ban on using campaign funds for personal use. Would he be breaking the law by buying a patriotic shirt for a Fourth of July parade, then wearing it to a family picnic? Another wanted to know whether a contribution was “face-to-face” if he turned his back to receive it.
The bill impressed editorial boards and made Obama a go-to guy for ethical reform groups, but inside the capitol, it reinforced his image as a self-righteous goo-goo.