Dick Durbin on Obama, Pfleger, race, George Ryan and Illinois corruption

The Chicago Tribune has an interview with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin:

[Tribune] With the Rezko trial, do you get any sense the state’s culture of corruption is changing?

I’ve spent most of my adult life in public service, and the overwhelming majority of people I’ve worked with are honest, hardworking people on both sides of the aisle. I mean, I really believe that. I was lucky enough to start off with Paul Douglas and Paul Simon who kind of set the standard that I try to live by. But there are always going to be people who disappoint you and do things that are just absolutely unacceptable. You name it – whether it’s in church, business or politics.

What happened here was fairly obvious to a lot of us on the outside. We could see from the start that there were people involved in the [Blagojevich] administration that I just didn’t want to do business with.

I just felt… you know, I remember when [Stuart] Levine came to my office. I knew him. I knew him because he was Jim Ryan’s friend, the gentleman had introduced me to him… I think Stuart had written me a check at some point, didn’t he? A $1,000 check at some point, I think he did.

And he came by my office one day in Washington and brought with him the dean of a medical school up near North Chicago. And he said, "this is a great medical school. It accepted Jewish students when no other school would. They have a great reputation and now they want to expand their campus. The VA [Veteran’s Administration] has a golf course it hasn’t used for years and we’d like to have that land to expand our campus."

And I said, "Well, we can work on that. So you want a provision where you would pay the VA fair market value for this land?" And he said, "no, we want you to do an earmark to give us the land." And I said, "no, how can I do that? The VA is struggling for money. I can’t do that."

And he became irate. And I said, "I’m just not going to do that." And he left my office and I called a couple friends and said, "you know, I’ve been around this business for a long time, but that was the most bold-faced, you know, request – greedy request – that I can remember."

So, some of those friends said, maybe he just had a bad day or something like that. Well, it turns out he had a lot of bad days. So when you dealt with people like that, and you saw they were higher up in making decisions, it really… it troubled me. And I’ve not had a close relationship obviously with him or people who were involved in this. They just… whatever party they belonged to, they’re just not accountable for what they do.

Senator Dick Durbin isn't a Chicago style Democrat.You might not like his politics,but you aren't reading about corruption swirling around him.