Blago’s Approval Rating Back Up

January 28th, 2008 at 10:22am Aaron Chambers

Gov. Blago’s approval rating has bounced back to 42 percent, according to a poll commissioned by the St. Louis Post Dispatch. An associated story is here.

Forty-two percent is not pretty for the second-term Democratic chief executive of an increasingly Democratic state. Still, Blago is now nearly twice as popular as he was three months ago, when his approval rating was in the tank at 23 percent.

No doubt much of the bounce in popularity is due to Blago’s free-rides-for-seniors plan, which he inserted into a mass transit bailout plan via an amendatory veto. He and his taxpayer-funded staff practically beat this plan into the heads of Illinoisans with a full-scale promotional blitz around Illinois.

I’m guessing another factor is at play here, too: Blagojevich and lawmakers have officially left Springfield for the first in a year. Yes, there have been occasional breaks over the last year. But each of those breaks occurred amid gridlock and posturing at the Capitol. Blago spent those breaks parading in front of TV cameras and threatening to call lawmakers back into special session.

The current break, now in its second week, is truly that: A break from the acrimony. It follows closure on a significant matter — how to help Chicago-area mass transit agencies, which for the better part of a year had begged for more state money.

In short, folks appear to be much more fond of their government leaders when they actually accomplish something and then disappear.

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