Pat Quinn has been trying to get rid of Illinois Power Agency (IPA) Director Mark Pruitt almost since the day the governor was sworn into office. He finally did it, but the move is backfiring.

The governor is a big cheerleader for alternative power sources such as wind and solar. But Pruitt, whose main job is negotiating contracts with electricity generators on behalf of consumers, refused to sign some alt-energy contracts because they’d cost consumers too much money.

Pruitt’s IPA was created after mega utility ComEd announced that it intended to buy electricity via a weird reverse auction system that was roundly slammed by Attorney General Lisa Madigan and every other reasonable political leader in Illinois. As a result, Pruitt claims to have saved Illinois electricity consumers $1.6 billion since 2007, and he has the numbers to back him up.

Earlier this year, when it was disclosed that Governor Pat Quinn’s budget director had handed out two pay raises to top staffers on the same day that the governor signed the income-tax increase into law, Illinois Republican Party Chair Pat Brady said the move was evidence of a “void in leadership.”

I tend to ignore or downplay most pay-raise stories unless they’re particularly egregious. Unlike the government-haters, I try to understand that the benefits of employee morale and retention are as important in government as they are in the private sector, where raises for mid- to high-level executives are the norm, not the exception.

There’s definitely a market for these sorts of stories, however. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported September 15 that real average weekly earnings are in a national deflationary slide and suffered a 2.5-percent drop over the previous year. So, it’s easy to see how taxpayers would be susceptible to reporting that purports to show that their government isn’t acting responsibly during a crisis.

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: Legislators don’t lose elections over what happens at the Statehouse; they lose because they don’t take care of business back home.

There’s a lot of truth to that. Visible, accessible legislators with topnotch constituent services usually don’t lose elections. If you look at the roster of losing Democrats in 2010, you’ll see a bunch of incumbents who became invisible in their districts, or let things slide. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, of course. Nothing approaches universality in the political business. Some districts change, some people are elected as onetime flukes. But constituent services are all-important. Period. End of story.

In most parts of the state, however, taking care of the home front means making sure that local political and business powers are constantly stroked. And this is where members have often gone too far, particularly with the legislative scholarship program. The number of city, Downstate, and suburban party chairs, precinct captains, fundraisers, and other honchos who have “absolutely brilliant children totally deserving of these scholarships” has been a constant refrain. It is probably the most abused program in all of state government.

Governor Pat Quinn recently vetoed a “Smart Grid” bill that was pushed through the General Assembly this past spring by ComEd and Ameren, the two biggest electric utilities in the state.

Politically, this veto was a no-brainer for the populist Quinn. The governor never tires of recounting how he helped start the Citizens Utility Board, and that dovetails nicely with his repeated claims that the utility proposal “locks in” corporate profits.

ComEd’s weather-related outage problems in the Chicago area this summer seriously hurt the company’s already damaged image, both in its territory and at the Illinois Statehouse. Add those outages to the possibility of legislature-approved rate hikes and then mix that in with an electorate already inflamed by the income-tax hike and the seeming inability of the state government to get its act together, and it’s obvious why this thing never had a chance with Quinn.

I began to reminisce during Governor Pat Quinn’s Chicago press conference last week. Quinn had called the media together to announce he was closing seven state facilities and laying off almost 2,000 state employees because the General Assembly had passed an inadequate budget.

“Wait,” I thought. “Haven’t I already seen this movie?”