It looks like the fate of ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, the bad-haired boy of Illinois, will soon be in a jury’s hands. Excuse me if I fail to be shocked at his decision not to take the stand in his own defense. Did anyone seriously expect him to do what he said he’d do? 

In the nearly two years since he was indicted, Blago, as the tabs have tagged him, has shown himself to be a potty-mouthed, highly self-regarding pol – a seeming political throwback to the kind of big-city machine politicians who made this country and its cities what they are today, for better or worse. To paraphrase the immortal words of another, far more successful pol from the bygone days of unbridled municipal thievery, poor Blago appears to have merely been caught in the act of seeing his opportunities and failing to take them.

That other pol belongs to a long-gone (but not completely extinct) tradition whose Boswell was a former Democratic New York State Senator named George Washington Plunkitt, a proud -- and wealthy -- son of Tammany Hall whose words of wisdom bear remembering at times like these.

Plunkitt's wealth came from his political connections. But, as he insisted throughout his life, he made his money honestly:

"It was honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin': 'I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

Plunkitt described to a biographer more than a century ago how, for example, knowing where a new bridge was scheduled to be built might be a valuable bit of information when the bids went out and the once-worthless land that he'd bought up for peanuts just the day before could be sold at a handsome profit when the proper time and opportunity rolled around.

"Ain't it perfectly honest to charge a good price and make a profit on my investment and foresight?" he wanted to know.

To agree with Plunkitt's question might seem like I'm endorsing political chicanery.  And that's what I'm doing, for two reasons: I have yet to find a living, breathing victim of Blago's alleged malfeasance, and I have a particular fondness for political chicanery in the classical mode.

The only victim of the Blago allegations is political naiveté, someone's idea of political propriety. The prosecution – and, I’d wager, a goodly number of voters -- seem to think that a seat in the Senate shouldn't be put up for sale like a something at a yard sale. Putting a million-dollar price tag on it, as Blago stands accused of doing, is so . . . unseemly. So tasteless. Yet it’s a commonplace that millionaires are the only people in the country who can even countenance a run for the Senate.

My love of the classical notwithstanding, I still think Blago is a bum. It’s not his alleged greed but his utter lack of style that makes him such a tiresome disappointment to aficionados of political gamesmanship.

Here’s a short list of some of his post-indictment activities, according to a story by David Mendell in the July 26 edition of The New Yorker: he’s gotten fired by Donald Trump on “Celebrity Apprentice.” He’s proclaimed his innocence on Letterman. He’s posed as an Elvis impersonator at a Chicago street festival. And this:

“His wife Patti ate a tarantula in a contest with the actor Lou Diamond Phillips in Costa Rica for the reality how “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” The couple later explained they needed the money.”

The story doesn’t say what Lou Diamond Phillips’s excuse was.

Imagine for a minute what a pol like Plunkitt would have done if he’d been caught with his hand in the municipal cookie jar. Or imagine what The Kingfish, Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana, would have done, or what he would have said. Or James Michael Curley, a chunk of whose fourth term as mayor of Boston was spent in a federal penitentiary.

These men were political masterminds of the first water, men who gave the people what they wanted by manipulating the levers of political machines they had conquered and controlled. Yes, they were greedy and corrupt, and reformers of their day thought of them as the devil’s very spawn. But the names of the upstanding moralists Plunkitt called "goo-goos --" good-government types -- are lost to history, while characters like Long and Curley are still remembered as friends of the working people they fleeced but who also delivered whatever goods or services those folks needed or wanted.

The results are great cities, built by charismatic thieves whose peculiar strengths and weaknesses are the stuff of legend. (And Pulitzer Prizes. Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” based on Long’s legend, won in 1947 and Edwin O’Connor’s “”The Last Hurrah,” which drew on Curley’s career, won in 1962.)

Blago is the unworthy inheritor of that colorful tradition. His alleged chicanery was all about him. His constituents hardly have seemed to have entered his mind, let alone his political agenda. His greatest achievement as governor? Funding free bus rides for senior citizens.

Perhaps worst of all, he talked nakedly about his self-enrichment plans on a telephone he suspected was tapped. That's plain stupid, and whatever you want to say about the Plunkitts and the Longs and Curleys of the world, they weren't stupid.

The indictments claim he’s a corrupt politician. But, by the measures set down by the big-city machine pols of the old days, Blago’s worst crime is that he is a dull and inept politician, someone who couldn't play the game by rules that have been in effect since before the days of the Roman Senate, rules that have nothing to do with propriety and everything to do with making things happen, sometimes for the good of the public, sometimes for the good of Caesar and sometimes for the good of all.