From the Associated Press

Blagojevich raised $4.9 million in first half of year

By JOHN O'CONNOR
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gov. Rod Blagojevich raised millions of dollars during the first half of the
year to amass $10.3 million in campaign funds even though he doesn1t face an
election for two years.
A campaign disclosure report filed Monday shows the Democrat hauled in $4.9
million despite a rough legislative session and accusations from critics
that he wanted a state budget that included reckless borrowing and spending.
Even after spending $877,000, he still has a staggering amount of campaign
money available.
A lot of people are happy with some of the work he1s doing; other people
are just interested in giving, campaign finance director Kelly Glynn said.
The threshold has kind of gone up. You try to top what you did the last
year.
In a year when medical malpractice reform became a key issue, Blagojevich
took money from both sides, including $50,000 from the Illinois Hospital
Association and $50,000 from the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association.
The report shows Blagojevich continues the common Illinois practice of
accepting contributions from businesses with major state contracts.
The consulting firm ACS State and Local Solutions, for instance, gave him
$10,000 and has a $17.8 million state contract this year. And the
engineering firm Bowman, Barrett and Associates, a $15,000 donor to
Blagojevich, has contracts worth $7.6 million.
Among Blagojevich1s expenditures was at least $140,000 for political
consultants as the governor faced off with lawmakers over how to close a
$2.3 billion budget deficit. The session dragged on for a record 54 overtime
days and ended with an accord July 24.
Nearly all the money Blagojevich took in was collected at a single
fund-raising event at Chicago's Field Museum in June, Glynn said.
We decided that the governor just didn1t have time to do the fund raising
that we had started during the campaign, where it was sometimes six events a
day, Glynn said. Clearly, since he has to govern, we looked at the
schedule and said, let1s try to do one major event.
Whether the malpractice debate - which ended with no agreement but a promise
to keep working into the fall - had an impact on political giving is hard to
measure. Major players in the debate gave $826,000 mostly to lawmakers,
including $303,000 from the hospital association, $233,000 from the Illinois
State Medical Society and $156,000 from the trial lawyers.
But those organizations always are among the largest contributors as they
cultivate Springfield officeholders regardless of whether there1s an issue
on the table or a major election around the corner, said Kent Redfield, a
campaign finance expert at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Because they're very active in a variety of issues that come up, some of
it's defensive and some of it1s offensive, and it1s hard to say exactly how
much of that to attribute to malpractice? Redfield said.