Obama: Will the Blagojevich scandal hurt him?

Barack Obama has just lost his halo, said John Kass in the Chicago Tribune. Ever since he began running for the nation’s highest office two years ago, our president-elect has been depicted by the national media “as some pristine creature, perhaps a gentle faun of a magic forest, unstained by Illinois’ grubby politics.” But Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s arrest has finally shed some telling light on the seamy, ward-heeling culture in which Obama’s political skills were forged. “What—you didn’t know that Obama made his bones in the Chicago political machine?” said Michael Graham in the Boston Herald. Or that he and Blagojevich were both cultivated as protégés by crooked financier Tony Rezko, recently convicted on multiple counts of fraud and corruption? That’s because the media, and Obama’s dewy-eyed supporters, were too busy lionizing him to notice. Obama may not be directly involved in Blagojevich’s “scandalously stupid behavior”—attempting to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder. But you don’t launch a political career in Chicago without cutting backroom deals with sleazebags.

Here we go again, said Joe Conason in Salon.com. After months of deep mourning over Obama’s victory and global popularity, “the right-wing propaganda machine’’ has rediscovered its search-and-destroy mission. On Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and at the conservative websites WorldNetDaily and NewsMax, here’s how the Right is trying to connect the dots: “Obama and Blagojevich are both Chicago Democrats, and they know lots of other Chicago Democrats, some of whom gave money to both of them.” Ergo, Obama is guilty of something! It’s the same game the lunatic fringe played during the Clinton presidency, when “Whitewater” became an all-encompassing rubric for wild, unsubstantiated accusations of corruption, scandal, and even murder.

This smear job won’t stick, said Arianna Huffington in Huffingtonpost.com. Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has publicly stated that neither Obama nor his aides participated in Blagojevich’s alleged shakedowns. On the surveillance tapes, Blagojevich himself complains bitterly that the Obama people were “not willing to give me anything except appreciation.” The fact that Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s incoming chief of staff, apparently gave Blagojevich a list of preferred candidates for Obama’s Senate seat is neither illegal nor unusual. “Wouldn’t it have been weirder still if Obama had shown no interest in who his successor would be?”

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Still, Obama’s mere proximity to this scandal could damage him, said Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin in Politico.com. Some Democrats are worried that Illinois will now become the center of a series of “highly intrusive investigations” that’ll distract Obama’s administration from its ambitious goals. It doesn’t help that Obama has been “awfully coy” about who said what to whom, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. To date, he’s said only that neither he nor his staff took part in “inappropriate discussions with the governor,” and that he can’t discuss “details” during a pending investigation.

Still, in the long run, this is but a minor storm, said Sandy Grady in USA Today. In recent years, Obama has clearly chosen to keep his distance from Blagojevich, and he’s clearly innocent of any wrongdoing. It’s hardly uncommon for upstanding politicians such as Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman to emerge from local political cesspools. “So don’t tear up your inauguration tickets.” Obama’s inauguration speech on Jan. 20 “will be remembered long after loutish Gov. Blago is a forgotten flyspeck.”