Michael Sneed reported last week that the White House is trying to get Gov. George Ryan to resign, fearing that the stink from the license-for-bribes scandal will drag down Attorney General Jim Ryan’s gubernatorial chances against Rod Blagojevich.

“Gov. Ryan is a party guy and may see the need to step aside in an effort to help Jim Ryan win the race,” a top GOP source told Sneed.

First, I don’t see any evidence that Ryan is a party guy. He has consistently double-crossed his party to make deals with both Madigan and Daley. For goodness’ sake, he ran in ’98 on a pork-barrel spending platform. Second, if Ryan were to resign, wouldn’t that make things tougher and not easier on the attorney general? It would be an admission of guilt on the guv’s part which would only reflect badly on Jim Ryan. It’s clear that Rod plans to make Ryan’s lack of initiative in investigating the licenses-for-bribes scandal a major part of his attack strategy.

To have the guv resign, especially so close to the election, would only help the Democrats. Now the attack becomes, “Why didn’t you do anything to investigate the governor who would be forced by the pressures surrounding the scandal to resign?”

But there’s a larger point of silliness here, which is the apparent belief on the part of Dubya and others at the White House that who’s in the governor’s office will make a difference in ’04. Illinois has gone big for Democrats three elections in a row. Certainly, a liberal Republican like Ryan didn’t make a difference in 2000, and I don’t see any reason to think that Jim Ryan would do much better. And, gee, didn’t Dubya also lose Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where his gubernatorial pals John Engler, Tommy Thompson and Tom Ridge were supposed to help him out?

And his own brother left Dubya’s chad hanging for more than a month before the Supreme Court stepped in and settled things. In other words, Dubya needs to focus on winning over the voters in the suburban areas of these states if he wants to win. Republican governors won’t do it. Voters are very well able to distinguish between Republicans and Democrats at the state and national levels.