Creepy Pete: How Gigolo Can You Go?

Eric Krol of the Daily Herald lays out some history on Creepy Pete Roskam, a man he describes as "a politician who sometimes comes across as poured from the old 'Leave It to Beaver,' Eddie Haskell mold."

The first plot was The Sir Thomas More Justice League:

[A] campaign fund-raising scheme devised by Salvi and Roskam in the mid-’90s to capitalize on their planned votes against limits on pain-and-suffering damages in civil lawsuits. ***

To some, promising to vote a certain way while simultaneously soliciting campaign checks looked an awful lot like selling your vote.

But that piece of legislative entrepreneurship paled in comparison to this:

The other Roskam wheeler-dealer example comes courtesy of Salvi’s failed 1998 bid for secretary of state.

Roskam asked the Illinois comptroller’s office for a list of the names and addresses of more than 3,600 secretary of state employees. “I just wanted to look at the list to find out about the nature of the office,” Roskam claimed to the Chicago Tribune in 1998.

But Roskam also admitted he gave the list to the Salvi campaign, of which he was chairman. Team Salvi used the list to send numbered $50 campaign fund-raising tickets to secretary of state employees. The numbering made it easy for Salvi to track which employees ponied up and which employees didn’t. One ethics watchdog at the time blasted the move as “classic Illinois political prostitution with a twist.”

And so the choice for the 6th District is clear: An Iraq war veteran or a George Ryan-style political wheeler-dealer.