Pat Quinn: Hey, he picked a tie! (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Gov. Pat Quinn and the Illinois legislature last week met expectations by agreeing on a $26 billion budget for the fiscal year that started July 1 — the agreement is every bit as bad as most folks thought it would be.

• It reduces spending (down $4 billion from last year’s budget) but not nearly enough to cover the state’s $9 billion deficit.
• It offsets most of those cuts by borrowing $3.5 billion more to pay state workers’ pensions, thus putting the state’s bond rating in jeopardy.
• It puts off difficult decisions about more spending cuts or tax increases until December, weeks before the Feb. 2 primary elections when politicians will be even leerier about making difficult decisions.
• It continues to postpone $3.2 billion in back payments owed to state vendors, many of them doctors, nursing homes and pharmacists. Suggested new license plate motto: The Deadbeat State.
• It may cost as many as 2,600 state employees their jobs, depending on how Mr. Quinn chooses to exercise an option to make $1 billion more in spending cuts or spend $1 billion held in reserve. Six hundred layoff notices already have been sent out, many of them for correctional officers in state prisons. Many other state employees will get unpaid furloughs.
• The budget continues funding for social services contracting agencies, but at lower rates. Agencies that provide alcohol and drug treatment, care for the developmentally disabled and many other services will see their budgets cut by anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent.

Mr. Quinn, since assuming office in January after Gov. Rod Blagojevich was ousted, has proved to be a man who can quickly make a decision — and just as quickly change his mind. He promised he would hold the legislators’ feet to the fire to get a tax increase passed, then backed away. He promised a “doomsday budget” unless he got his way, then backed away. He promised an all-out push for ethics reform, and then backed away. He held hostage a $31 billion capital construction bill full of pork-barrel projects for legislators, trying to get his budget passed, but caved in and signed it anyway.

It makes you wonder how he ever chooses which tie to wear.

To be sure, Mr. Quinn was dealing from a weak hand. He had no political capital, and Democratic legislative leaders, intent on preserving their own fortunes, joined many Republicans in balking at revenue increases. Democratic leaders wanted no part of serious ethics reforms. Democratic constituent groups, notably public workers unions, balked at pension reform.

Ironically, for all of his fecklessness, Mr. Quinn’s political fortunes blossomed; Attorney General Lisa Madigan, once viewed as the leading contender in February’s Democratic primary, has announced she’ll run for re-election instead. Comptroller Dan Hynes, who at least is hard-headed on fiscal matters, may challenge Mr. Quinn instead, but comptroller to governor would be a huge leap.

In January, with Mr. Blagojevich a national embarrassment, there was hope that Illinois might finally get serious about reforming its crony-and-corruption riddled government. Instead, Illinois has reverted to status quo ante — a weak Democratic governor intent on retaining office and Chicago Democrats with no real interest in reform firmly in control of the legislature.

It is a wonderful opportunity for that vanishing breed known as Illinois Republicans. U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, a moderate from Chicago’s northern suburbs, may well get into the governor’s race and would be a formidable challenger for either Mr. Quinn or Mr. Hynes.

Amazing. With an Illinois Democrat in the White House and a once-in-lifetime opportunity for genuine, positive reform, the state’s Democratic leadership has utterly blown it. They deserve whatever they get. The people of Illinois don’t.