Mark Guarino at the Christian Science Monitor has a good piece on the trial of Rod Blagojevich, which begins today. Guarino floats a theory that hadn’t occurred to me: All of Blago’s recent publicity-seeking behavior — including a stint on NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice — has been part of an attempt to sell himself to potential jurors as “a loose cannon, as a guy who says what’s on his mind”:

Blagojevich’s defense team will be counting on their client’s shoot-from-the-hip charm. It is how they are expected to try to dissuade jurors from taking seriously the 100 hours of telephone wiretaps the prosecution plans to play in court. The argument: Blagojevich was just a foul-mouthed politician engaged in verbal sparring in a world of pay-to-play politics.
“They’re going to say what he was saying on those tapes was a verbal, stream-of-conscious thinking, and that he never did pull the trigger [on the schemes],” says Chicago securities attorney Andrew Stoltmann. “That’s where the publicity tour … helps him. He’s seen as a loose cannon, as a guy who says what’s on his mind. There are going to be some jurors who say that doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal offense.”

And here I thought he was laying the groundwork for an insanity plea.