Tuesday marks the six-year anniversary of the day Gov. Rod Blagojevich took office.

Given everything that's happened in between then and now, he arguably could be considered the worst governor in Illinois history.

Sure, the disgraced chief executive could somehow, miraculously emerge from the mess he's created, but no governor before him has ever been impeached.

By that measure alone, Blagojevich stands at the bottom, ready to be kicked to the curb by the Illinois Senate, which will take up his ouster Jan. 26.

While it's easy to point to his Dec. 9 arrest as the tipping point for his downfall, the governor's behavior has been vexing to most observers since he took office in 2003.

Rather than smoothly trying to build consensus after 26 years of Republican rule, the governor employed an in-your-face policy on nearly every action he's taken.

His sometimes bizarre style of governing, which has now put him in the history books, started at the very beginning.

On his first day in office, he walked into the Capitol and fired a number of Republican holdovers from George Ryan's administration. That wasn't a shock.

What was a surprise was the way it was handled. Among those on the chopping block was the governor's own advance man, who provides logistical support during gubernatorial appearances.

It was interesting to see the look on his face when the governor's new press aides handed out the list of people who were being fired that day. The man who had helped set up the news conference had just gotten the ax.

Blagojevich never looked at the man. Blagojevich never looked back.

Soon after, the governor's office would become a bunker. He installed locks on the doors of his Capitol offices as if he was hiding something. He began sneaking in the Capitol through basement tunnels. He refused to live in the Executive Mansion, instead commuting between Chicago and Springfield at taxpayer's expense.

Among his first major acts in office was to tap into the state's employee pension funds in order to cover state operating costs. It should be noted that lawmakers, most of whom are now lined up against him, went along with the scheme.

Yet, even after that multi-billion-dollar arbitrage scheme went through, the state's money problems didn't improve. The state now faces a horrific backlog of bills and the possibility of ending the year with a record-setting deficit.

Observers agree his whole administration has been shaky from the start. Some people noticed this right away. Among them was House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, who Blagojevich has tried to blame for numerous pitfalls the state has endured since he took office.

As early as 2004, Blagojevich thought it might be a good idea to try and smooth over differences with his fellow Democrats by meeting with more than 50 of them in a private, three-hour question-and-answer session.

Among items on the agenda was a tape of a radio interview in which Blagojevich called state Rep. John Bradley, D-Marion, a "wallflower of Madigan" for supporting the speaker in that year's budget standoff.

Suffice to say, fences went unmended even at that early juncture.

In 2007, Blagojevich tried his magic on state Sen. Mike Jacobs, an East Moline Democrat.

Hoping to muster enough votes to get a massive expansion of health insurance programs on track, he called Jacobs into his office for some horse-trading.

Jacobs emerged from the meeting in a rage, saying "bring it on."

"If this governor would have been in East Moline at one of my local taverns, I would have kicked his tail end," Jacobs said.

In the end, the health insurance proposal went down in flames. In fact, most of the governor's initiatives have fallen apart. Now, his administration and his future are in tatters.

For those who believe his downfall is more about his governing style than anything criminal, here's this:

In his first term, he tried to take over the state's Board of Education. He demonized it as a Soviet-style bureaucracy at the very same time he was centralizing the state's press offices so his taxpayer-paid public information officers would speak on his behalf with one voice.

Perhaps Blagojevich didn't realize that by trying to gather up all the power in his hands he would be blamed for everything that went wrong.

Kurt Erickson can be reached at kurt.erickson@lee.net or (217) 789-0865