After weeks of dribs and drabs of revelations that his stumbling upon the Illinois senate seat wasn’t so innocuous after all, the question was starting to become whether Roland Burris would survive the end of the month, not whether he’d be able to win re-election. Today, Burris will announce that he’s splitting the difference: he won’t resign, but he won’t run for re-election either.
This may not change the 2010 calculus that much; Jan Schakowsky and Alexi Giannoulis were probably going to run in the Democratic primary whether or not Burris was there; the main question was whether Burris could sneak through the primary based on African-American support and a split liberal vote. At any rate, it gives Burris a graceful (or at least less graceless) way to ride off into the sunset and carve another line on his mausoleum.
Also, Pat Quinn, who took over as governor in the wake of Rod Blagojevich and who was one of the first to call for Burris to resign, announced that he will be running for re-election in 2010.
“I have no reason not to run,” Quinn told me when I asked him about the 2010 election. “I think I am doing a good job today. I anticipate I will continue to do that. Stabilizing the ship of Illinois is vitally necessary. I think even in the first three-and-a-half weeks we’ve done a decent job of turning a page in an unhappy chapter in the state’s history.”
By getting out in front of the Blago blowback, Quinn seems to have stabilized his situation and there doesn’t seem to be any discussion of primary competition for him (yet).
UPDATE by Jimmy Hell: Now Camp Burris is denying everything, saying that no 2010 decisions have been made.