Out of power for a dozen years and hobbled even before that by anti-patronage court rulings, Illinois' Republican-party infrastructure has all but collapsed.

So part of GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Rauner's task is to try to somehow rebuild a grassroots infrastructure.

It won't be an easy job. Republicans have never, in the modern age, been able to match the Democrats' ability to dispatch patronage armies to the state's distant corners because of the Democrats' Chicago and Cook County patronage bases. The Republicans' local organizations are essentially hollow these days, and they have no troops to speak of.

Before the primary, Rauner's campaign had ambitious hopes of opening as many as 50 field offices throughout Illinois. Those plans were scaled back as reality sank in. Finding enough experienced people to staff those offices would be next to impossible.

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.

Way back in 1992, I did a story about Dan Rutherford's first run for the Illinois House of Representatives.

The House Democrats back then were quietly spreading rumors about Rutherford's private life, hoping that his conservative, rural district would refuse to support someone who they said seemed to be gay. It was a classic "barber shop" play: Go where people hang out and start spreading a rumor. Spread that rumor in enough places and lots of folks will hear it and spread it themselves.

I wrote all those years ago that the Democrats were deluding themselves. Those voters weren't just conservatives; they were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. They'd take a Republican over a Democrat any day of the week, pretty much no matter what the grapevine was saying. All the Democrats were doing was embarrassing themselves, I wrote, and they ought to cut it out. Rutherford won, of course. The Democrats' tactic failed.

I remembered that story when the Sun-Times and the Tribune started publishing "exposés" about how gubernatorial candidate and state Treasurer Rutherford had a habit of staying in the same hotel room or apartment with his male travel aide on some government and political trips. These stories served little purpose outside of trying to gin up that very same rumor mill about the candidate. The pieces were almost adolescently prurient in nature.

As with the Democrats 22 years ago, the newspapers never should've done that and should've instead risen above such nonsense.