In a week that saw thousands of job losses, it was the popular one. The one that everybody saw coming and few seemed to mind.

The Illinois Senate fired Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Thursday, after he ignored years of warnings about his job performance. His fate had been sealed Dec. 9, when the FBI came calling with an arrest warrant and Blagojevich's bosses offered no pity.

Bosses? Who, exactly, are the governor's bosses, and how is he responsible to them?

Blagojevich's failure to understand this made him especially vulnerable to conviction by lawmakers without their waiting for the verdict of a jury in his corruption case.

The voters are the hiring boss. The contract lasts four years. After that, they may renew, or hire somebody else.

In the Illinois Constitution, the Legislature is the firing boss. The House impeaches, and the Senate holds the trial. It's so rare that in more than 190 years of statehood, Illinois never impeached a governor before, let alone fired one. Not even any of the three who later ended up in prison.

The two sets of bosses aren't entirely separate. The hiring bosses also hire the firing bosses. A governor popular with the people has leverage. Nobody I'm aware of ever suggested that four-term Gov. James "Big Jim" Thompson did anything criminal. But had he been charged with something, you could bet he still would have been in office when the case reached trial.

Blagojevich took the hiring bosses for granted. He crowed about the mandate of being elected and re-elected, but he let his popularity slide so far that a poll six weeks before his arrest showed that only 10 percent of Illinoisans wanted him to run again. Had he sought a third term in 2010, the hiring bosses would have let his contract expire.

And the firing bosses?

If there was a theme to Blagojevich's agenda, it was to govern unilaterally, ignoring the General Assembly whenever possible. He chose this knowing it meant war with Michael Madigan, speaker of the House for all but two of the past 26 years, a powerful and sometimes Machiavellian man who will not be ignored.

Some insiders say Blagojevich trusted mainly himself and his own ideas. He was said to be less eager than most officials to accept dissent or accede to compromise. And it showed. Has any other governor been taken to court by lawmakers to get a judge's order that the governor stop spending money they did not authorize?

If Blagojevich was down to 10 percent support among the hiring bosses (and less after his arrest), he fared even worse among the firing bosses. The House voted 114-1 to impeach him, and the Senate 59-0 to finish him off, even though both chambers are dominated by fellow Democrats.

It raises a fair question of whether Blagojevich was always just a political illusion — all hair, résumé and gall.

The common take on Blagojevich was that his ascent, from state representative to congressman to governor, was made possible by his father-in-law, Richard Mell, one of Chicago's most powerful aldermen. Down here we may have trouble appreciating Mell's big significance in what at this distance seems like a not very grand office.

Blagojevich got himself elected governor after Republican George Ryan, under gathering clouds of the scandal that would send him to prison, did not run again and the GOP nominated an unrelated Ryan. Re-election came against Judy Baar Topinka, who clinched the Republican nomination by being the only party member left in statewide office.

If things came easily for Blagojevich, FBI wiretap excerpts suggest that he expected them to be. His cavalier conversations sure made it sound like his authority — even his power to name a senator to replace Barack Obama — was for sale without much second thought.

So after his arrest and the public filing of a damning 76-page FBI affidavit of details, none of Blagojevich's bosses had any patience left.

No plea for reconsideration on the "Today" show or "Good Morning America" or "The View" would get it back. Neither would bizarre comparisons of himself to Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and the ships at Pearl Harbor. Nor his quotations from great poets such as Kipling and Tennyson.

The governor who had deliberately isolated himself from good advice and political convention, to grasp his power alone, had ignored at great peril the words of another giant of poetry and prose, John Donne:

"No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

Pat Gauen of the Post-Dispatch has written a weekly column for Illinois editions since 1990.

pgauen@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8154