So maybe we can foist a retrial upon a different community and lessen the impact on our psyche, if not our national image for skulduggery.  For instance, there’s Louisiana, fabled for corruption more notorious and theatrical than ours.  A friend in New Orleans reminded me that the cliché there was that crooked officials were harder to convict because so many were such endearing rogues. Like convicted former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, who before a successful 1983 election declared, “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.”  Blago is a minor leaguer in comparison to Mr. Edwards, who was sentenced to prison for racketeering in 2001. A New Orleans jury would either acquit Blago, after wondering how he could talk for so long about stealing yet come up so dry, or convict him of being an incompetent goof at public corruption and demeaning it as high art.  I’ve mulled other potential venues for a retrial, like Salt Lake City and San Francisco.  Given the homogeneous makeup of Salt Lake, I can imagine that even if acquitted, Blago would be deported as an alien ethnic from faraway Chicago. As for San Francisco, there’s his hair. Given the city’s strong gay constituency, he might be found guilty of a style that could not even be repaired by those on television’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”  In reality, any venue change would take the circus closer to home, to a place like Rockford, or conceivably to Wisconsin or Indiana since, along with Illinois, they’re part of the relevant federal appeals court jurisdiction.  Daniel Wolfe, a Chicago jury consultant with law and psychology degrees, suggests that as you move away from Chicago in the region, people are likely to be more conservative and less tolerant of Blago’s shenanigans.  We still need to know more about what happened within the real jury. But if some members were perplexed by a lack of a quid pro quo, that might not be true for a less demographically diverse jury pool you’d find elsewhere in the region, Mr. Wolfe said.  Valerie Hans, a jury expert at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, N.Y., was genuinely intrigued by accounts of an 11-to-1 split on some of the counts. That’s unusual for hung juries, Ms. Hans said, and suggests a stronger split earlier in the deliberations.  There are community differences among jurors, she said, including their views on what constitutes criminal behavior, even on defining burglary or robbery. But most studies suggest that those differences don’t play a big part when evidence is inherently strong or weak, meaning that most juries will wind up in the same place.  The discrepancies come into play when the evidence is equivocal. Is that the situation here? I didn’t think so.  I disagree with my friend Larry Miller, a Los Angeles writer-comedian-actor, who has said he has “no faith in the virtue and decency of a shattering majority of local or state or federal prosecutors.” But even a Blago sympathizer like Mr. Miller has an admonition for the ex-governor:  “Enjoy the next couple of news conferences, because there’s a wrecking ball being loaded up right now, and it’s aimed for your perfectly coiffed hair.”  A version of this article appears in print on August 22, 2010, on Page A23A of the National edition with the headline: Blagojevich Fatigue? Get Used to It. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The ambiguity of the verdict, a guaranteed retrial and Rod R. Blagojevich’s post-trial faux victory media tour verges on a flood of bad news for those in need of a Blago respite.