It's been assumed all along that Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan's proposal to spend $100 million to help build Barack Obama's presidential library was designed to put the Republicans on the spot and perhaps provoke an over-the-top or maybe even racial response, which would help gin up Democratic turnout a bit this November.

Obama has put the library's location out to bid, so Madigan's proposal is ostensibly meant to help Chicago attract what will likely be a pretty big tourist destination.

But politics is just about everything in Springfield these days. Democrats are hoping to crowd the November ballot with enough measures to excite their party base and get them out to vote. A constitutional amendment to forbid any voter discrimination along racial, ethnic, gender, etc. grounds was already approved for the ballot. A non-binding referendum on whether voters want to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour is being prepared.

So this was mainly seen as another ploy to fire up the base.

A long time ago I asked Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan why he never golfed at his golf-outing fundraisers.

Madigan explained that he was a terrible golfer. (He's since improved, I'm told.) If people saw him embarrassing himself on the golf course, they might take a dimmer view of him as a leader.

He has applied this lesson to just about everything he does. He examines every angle before he acts. He hates mistakes and almost never acts impetuously.

For example, Madigan and his staff gather a few times a week to read through every bill and every amendment to those bills to look for flaws and hidden agendas or to discuss strategies. He always wants to be as prepared as possible.

As a result, he rarely fails.

But something else has been happening over the past year or so.

Madigan has become a media hound.

It turns out that Governor Pat Quinn and the two Democratic legislative leaders met privately for at least several days to negotiate details of the governor's budget address.

The highly unusual move means that most if not all aspects of Quinn's budget proposals last week have already been agreed to by the Democrats who run the Illinois Statehouse.

House Speaker Michael Madigan tipped his hand after the governor's address during Jak Tichenor's invaluable Illinois Lawmakers public-television program when he twice insisted that the governor's property-tax proposal was actually his idea.

The governor proposed eliminating the state's property-tax credit, which is currently worth 5 percent of property taxes paid, and replacing it with an automatic $500 tax refund.

That idea was apparently just one of Madigan's demands in exchange for supporting the governor's proposal to make the "temporary" income-tax hike permanent, which was the centerpiece of Quinn's speech.

I think a lot of people believed that if Bill Daley ran for governor, his campaign would be as bland and vanilla as his public persona has been over the decades.

Instead, he's turned into the most fiery candidate in the race so far. Daley is even "out-angering" wealthy Republican financier Bruce Rauner, who has tried to position himself as the "We're not gonna take it any more!" choice for 2014.

Daley has attacked Governor Pat Quinn's pathetic leadership, slammed the General Assembly for its ridiculous inaction, and made it clear that he's not afraid to go on the attack against the Madigan family by releasing unflattering poll results earlier this week that showed the House speaker could harm his daughter's potential gubernatorial bid.

Daley has been selectively releasing responses to a poll taken in April for his campaign - back when few thought he would actually run. All of the responses released so far have dealt with Attorney General Lisa Madigan and her father, House Speaker Michael Madigan. None of the numbers released so far has showed any actual Daley strength.