Quick, grab your high school yearbook. Turn to the section about the football team and look up the name of the starting quarterback. Then, find the club section and find out who the president of the chess club was.

If you could find these two people now, chances are the president of the chess club has fared better in life than the quarterback - unless of course the quarterback for your high school team was Peyton Manning.

I bring this up because I think it relates to the current state of affairs in Illinois government. Also tied into this is my belief that a lot of adults act as if they are still in middle school. Everything is a competition, every word is judged and every slight is noted. No retreat; no surrender.

Now compare state comptroller Dan Hynes and Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Who do you think is the quarterback and who is the president of the chess club? I have no proof the governor played football or the comptroller played chess, but the contrast is obvious.

Hynes is smart, knows a lot about government finance and has a handle on the true state of Illinois' finances. He also seems to have a propensity to tell the truth.

Blagojevich is street smart, glosses over the truth and is seriously self-delusional when it comes to the health of Illinois' checkbook.

Based on that assessment, who should be the governor? Judging only the argument over Illinois' financial health, there is a strong case for Hynes. But, most elections boil down to being a popularity contest and the quarterback has the top job.

The most popular guy in my high school class was also the quarterback. All of the girls loved him and the guys would have followed him through a wall of fire. But, as Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson once said of Terry Bradshaw, he couldn't spell "cat" if you spotted him the "c" and the "a."

The quarterback could have been elected anything at our high school, but would have been incapable of running it. He would have needed the president of the chess club to bail him out.

Sad to say, Illinois' quarterback doesn't think much of the chess club president's advice. I would not argue that the governor is a dummy, but if we rank government officials in Illinois by smarts, I'm saying he doesn't make the top 10. Hynes, on the other hand, would make the list.

So why is the smart guy not the governor? Because the kids in the cool clique - also known as Chicago - decided the quarterback should be governor. While the smart kid is president of the chess club, he is still, after all, in the chess club.

Maybe the old-time politicians in smoke-filled rooms had the right idea. They wanted someone who could run an organization and it didn't matter what they looked like. Seen a picture of Richard J. Daley? The father of Richard M. Daley, the current mayor of Chicago, wouldn't win many beauty contests. But he governed Chicago, rightly or wrongly, into prosperity.

The popular kid at the controls of the state of Illinois is running the place into the ground. If he weren't also the playground bully, we might be able to find someone to bloody his nose and run him into Indiana, where coincidentally he is quite popular.

What Illinois needs now is a kid who was president of the chess club.

Managing Editor Dave Dawson can't play chess or throw a decent spiral. He can be reached at ddawson@herald-review.com or 421-7980.