Blair Hull, the Illinois Democratic senatorial candidate cokehead wifebeater with no qualifications for the job and a pocketful of cash, spent $29 million of his own money and wound up netting just under 11 percent of the vote.

The raw number is actually 133,274 votes. Hull spent $217.59 per vote! Talk about a poor return on your investment.

In a larger sense, though, I wonder what kind of ego a person must possess to believe that — knowing he has a shady past, no experience and no ideas — he could or should win his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate. What a disgusting waste of money. The principal issue Hull demagogued emphasized was the cost of prescription drugs. Many of his inescapable TV ads showed him taking a bus full of seniors into Canada to buy price-controlled medicine there.

Instead of wasting his money on an ego-trip — not to suggest that Illinoisans won’t cherish his campaign’s numerous flyers for years to come — Hull could have used that $30 million to seed a charitable foundation to help needy seniors to buy life-saving prescription drugs. Instead he wasted it trying to win power and glory for himself, so he could agitate to force everyone else to pay for seniors’ drugs whether they need the help or not.

I’m a little more sympathetic to career politicians with bad ideas. Most politicians’ ideas are bad but hey — gotta talk about somethin’, right? It’s not like they have the talent or inclination to do anything productive with their lives. It’s kind of a self-selecting process. We segregate the useless into the political class. What’s even more alarming is when people who’ve actually had successful careers in the private sector consciously decide to enter politics, especially if they’re looking to grow government power rather than shrink it.

Most politicians have some kind of congenital defect that forces them into the field. In that respect, they’re relatively blameless. We don’t blame jockeys for being short. But the mid-career political novices like Hull are more analogous to somebody who chops his legs in half to become a jockey — obviously deranged.