Forget about the budget, forget about Governor Bruce Rauner's "Turnaround Agenda," forget about the almost unprecedented animosity during the spring legislative session between Democrats and Republicans.

The most talked-about issue under the Illinois Statehouse dome last week was a directive from one of the governor's top staffers to all state-agency directors.

The agency directors received an order from the Rauner administration Wednesday demanding that they and their staffs not meet or talk with any lobbyists unless the governor's Policy Office had first okayed the communications. The directors were also told to inform agency "stakeholders" that they didn't really need to hire lobbyists anyway.

Buried deep within Governor Bruce Rauner's proposed budget plan for next fiscal year is yet another claimed "savings" that might not actually save any money, and could easily wind up costing the state more.

The governor proposes to save $108 million by discontinuing child-care services provided by relatives in the child's or relative's home.

At first glance, that cut might look prudent. Why should the state pay grandma to babysit her own grandkid? Is that some sort of scam? Go to any right-wing blog, and you'll occasionally see stories bashing this whole idea.

But those payments are designed to help low-income parents go to school and work their way out of poverty. So by pulling those payments, "grandma" could lose her income and may very well have to find a different part-time job, meaning the parent then has to search for another provider and the state saves no money.

More than a few Statehouse types have been wondering aloud for weeks what Governor Bruce Rauner is up to with his almost daily attacks on organized labor.

His people say that the governor feels "liberated" since the election to speak his mind about a topic that stirs great personal passion in him. He played up the issue during the Republican primary, then all but ran away from it in the general-election campaign, including just a few weeks before Election Day when he flatly denied that "right to work" or anything like that would be among his top priorities.

Yet there he is day after day, pounding away at unions, demanding right-to-work laws, vilifying public-employee unions as corrupt to the point of issuing an executive order barring the distribution of state-deducted employee "fair share" dues to public-worker unions such as AFSCME. The dues are paid by people who don't want to pay full union dues.

Bruce Rauner out-performed fellow Republican Bill Brady's 2010 gubernatorial-election performance in every region of the state last week. As I write this, with less than half a percent of the vote yet to be counted, Rauner has a 5-point margin over Governor Pat Quinn and appears to have won a majority vote in a three-way election.

The national headwinds against the Democratic Party surely played a role in the Quinn loss. But Rauner did better than other Republicans on the ticket. Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka is widely considered one of the most popular Republicans in Illinois, and yet she under-performed Rauner. At this writing, GOP state Representative Tom Cross and Democratic state Senator Michael Frerichs are just about tied in the treasurer's race. And Republican Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeier appears to have narrowly survived an attempt to oust him.

Rauner scored just above the magic 20-percent number in Chicago, a point at which - with a significant advantage in the rest of the state - a Republican can win a statewide election.

But he didn't really need it. He out-performed Brady's 2010 campaign in suburban Cook County by 6 points, outdid the Downstater in his own region by a point, and dwarfed Brady's 2010 numbers throughout the collar counties.