Illinois Democrats can be excused for feeling more than a little spooked these days.

And there's probably no greater example about why they are so worried than the stunning announcement earlier this month that longtime Democratic Congressman Jerry Costello won't run for re-election.

Shock combined with fear was in almost every Democratic voice the day of Costello's announcement. If Costello was bailing on them, then things must be even worse than they thought. It didn't help that there appeared to be no "reason" for his decision. His son, state Representative Jerry Costello II, immediately defied all expectations by saying he wasn't interested in the seat, so Costello wasn't stepping aside for the kid. The congressman wasn't ill. He didn't have a job offer. He isn't under investigation. The widespread conclusion was that it must be the worsening political environment.

Earlier this year, when it was disclosed that Governor Pat Quinn's budget director had handed out two pay raises to top staffers on the same day that the governor signed the income-tax increase into law, Illinois Republican Party Chair Pat Brady said the move was evidence of a "void in leadership."

I tend to ignore or downplay most pay-raise stories unless they're particularly egregious. Unlike the government-haters, I try to understand that the benefits of employee morale and retention are as important in government as they are in the private sector, where raises for mid- to high-level executives are the norm, not the exception.

There's definitely a market for these sorts of stories, however. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported September 15 that real average weekly earnings are in a national deflationary slide and suffered a 2.5-percent drop over the previous year. So, it's easy to see how taxpayers would be susceptible to reporting that purports to show that their government isn't acting responsibly during a crisis.

Governor Pat Quinn recently vetoed a "Smart Grid" bill that was pushed through the General Assembly this past spring by ComEd and Ameren, the two biggest electric utilities in the state.

Politically, this veto was a no-brainer for the populist Quinn. The governor never tires of recounting how he helped start the Citizens Utility Board, and that dovetails nicely with his repeated claims that the utility proposal "locks in" corporate profits.

ComEd's weather-related outage problems in the Chicago area this summer seriously hurt the company's already damaged image, both in its territory and at the Illinois Statehouse. Add those outages to the possibility of legislature-approved rate hikes and then mix that in with an electorate already inflamed by the income-tax hike and the seeming inability of the state government to get its act together, and it's obvious why this thing never had a chance with Quinn.

Last year, state Senate Republicans tested anti-tax messages in their campaigns without much success. While almost all Senate Democrats had voted for a large income-tax hike along with an expansion of the sales tax to services, the Republican message just didn't work because the tax bill the Democrats backed never became the law of the land.

But now that a tax increase has actually been approved, with all the resulting hype surrounding it, there could very well be a different outcome next year. The tax increase has become a part of the public consciousness, and not in a good way, either.