“At first blush, Barack Obama comes out of the Rod Blagojevich scandal smelling like a rose,” said Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin in Politico. The Illinois governor himself cursed the president-elect on surveillance for refusing to play along with his crooked schemes. But Obama and Blagojevich, both Democrats, are products of the same Chicago political culture, so for the president-elect, “the Blagojevich scandal is a stink bomb tossed at close range.”
The media has been all too happy to ignore Obama’s ties to “the swamp” of Chicago’s machine politics, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Daily News. But with Blagojevich’s arrest on charges of corruption—including trying to sell Obama’s vacant Senate seat—it’s time for some honest talk about the president-elect’s connections to the players in his hometown. Some of us won’t rest “until we know how much the next president knew about the crime spree in his own backyard.”
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