Jan. 25--Practically speaking, it's no big deal that Gov. Bruce Rauner is putting on the state payroll a new $100,000-a-year chief of staff for his wife, Diana.
One-hundred grand isn't even a rounding error in the Illinois budget. Saving it wouldn't make a noticeable dent in the billions we are currently in arrears.
Other gubernatorial spouses have had paid help: A year ago, after Rauner hired Sara Wojcicki Jimenez to help the first lady in her unofficial duties, The Associated Press reported that the job was not unprecedented; that, for example, in the early 2000s, Gov. George Ryan's wife had a staff of two, each making an inflation-adjusted annual salary of $108,000.
And Diana Rauner, who was already quite busy as president of Ounce of Prevention, a not-for-profit organization that promotes early childhood education, was taking on the task of overseeing the restoration of the dilapidated executive mansion in Springfield.
But still, it was a clumsy move and looked like a rookie mistake.
Illinois had gone without a first lady since early 2009 -- Pat Quinn, Rauner's predecessor, was unmarried -- and a week before the appointment, Rauner, in one of his first acts as governor, had signed an executive order freezing nonessential state spending.
Hiring a public employee to help coordinate the activities of a private citizen struck many of us at the time as the very definition of nonessential, just the sort of business as usual Rauner had campaigned against.
And it was a tone-deaf allocation of public funds given that the ultra-wealthy governor could easily have paid Jimenez by instead tapping into one of his multimillion-dollar political funds or, heck, by scrounging in the cracks between sofa cushions at his numerous posh homes.
In mid-November, then, Rauner named Jimenez to the state House seat left vacant when Raymond Poe, R-Springfield, resigned to become director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture. And when Rauner did not immediately hire a new chief of staff for his wife, some of us quietly considered it a small but good sign that he was learning on the job.
Then Friday came the announcement that the governor had appointed Emily Bastedo, an associate legal counsel in his office, to be Diana Rauner's new chief of staff.
The governor's press office defended the move by noting that Bastedo will act as Mrs. Rauner's surrogate in meetings dealing with changes in how the state provides human services, a passion of hers, and will help oversee the next phase of the mansion restoration project.
