[1]I’ve been watching the events and reax from the arrest and indictment of Rod Blagojevich,-(D) (The owner of what is possbly the worst rug I’ve ever seen… and given Sam Donaldson, that’s saying something…) I have begun to wonder just what it is we have here, in a larger sense.
This Ain’t Hell suggests: [2]
Do I blame Obama? Nope. I’m sure he’s not poltically inept enough to know anything about it.
Frankly, I’m far from convinced on this. Under the usual standard of “What did Obama know and when did he know it”, it strikes me as nearly impossible that Obama didn’t know what this guy was doing, on several levels. At it’s most basic, we have the process of elimination argument…. “How can one dance around that issue so exactly without knowing it exists?”. However, the argument that Obama knew full well what was happening goes deeper yet, something which ABC News, acknowledged, today [3]:
Asked what contact he’d had with the governor’s office about his replacement in the Senate, President-elect Obama today said “I had no contact with the governor or his office and so we were not, I was not aware of what was happening.”
But on November 23, 2008, his senior adviser David Axelrod appeared on Fox News Chicago and said something quite different.
While insisting that the President-elect had not expressed a favorite to replace him, and his inclination was to avoid being a “kingmaker,” Axelrod said, “I know he’s talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them.”
Now of course Axlerod’s been backtracking, saying he mis-spoke. I don’t think so. As an example, from the same ABC article:
But there remain questions about how Blagojevich knew that Mr. Obama was not willing to give him anything in exchange for the Senate seat — with whom was Blagojevich speaking? Did that person report the governor to the authorities?
And, it should be pointed out, Mr. Obama has a relationship with Mr. Blagojevich, having not only endorsed Blagojevich in 2002 and 2006, but having served as a top adviser to the Illinois governor in his first 2002 run for the state house.
In the Democratic gubernatorial primary that year, then-state sen. Obama endorsed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris. But after Blagojevich won, Obama came around enthusiastically. At the same time, meanwhile, Axelrod had such serious concerns about whether Blagojevich was ready for governing he refused to work for his one-time client.
According to Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., Mr. Obama’s incoming White House chief of staff, Emanuel, then-state senator Obama, a third Blagojevich aide, and Blagojevich’s campaign co-chair, David Wilhelm, were the top strategists of Blagojevich’s 2002 gubernatorial victory.
Emanuel told the New Yorker earlier this year that he and Obama “participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor. We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two.”
[4]Denials that there was a relationship between Blago and Obama are thus exposed. Yeah, OK, the picture helps, too. They show us, at the least, the type of people Obama’s been filling his smallest circles, with, as if the Ayers and Dorn Bomb Show wasn’t bad enough.
This goes deeper though, and into, I think, questions of criminality. Why did Axlerod refuse to work with Blago in his campaign? (Which given Obama’s relationship with Alxerod would seem to go to the question of how he seemingly so neatly avoided the issue for all appearances. He must have known, and publicly turned a blind eye to it. ) Obama’s denials and Axlerod’s backtracking not withstanding, there’s an awful lot of smoke here for their not being any fire. A lot of crossed career paths, a lot of parallel ideologies, etc.. and in Chicago politics, well you get the idea. Just the kind of thing where Fitz will do well.
Oh, that’s another thing; The timing of the indictment.
The investigation is open, now, before Obama becomes President.. and since it was opened thus, Obama can’t shut it down legally once he becomes President. Which means, of course, that all these questions will in fact be answered. However that falls out, it cannot be good for Obama. I suspect we will see some of his inner circle doing the frog march in the next couple years… yes, I said years. Fitz may not be fast, but as Scooter Libby will tell you, he’s thorough. As such a second term for Obama ay already be in jeopardy. Interestingly, Fitz is in the position of having been praised by the moonbat left for the work done in that case. They’ll have a hard time, I suspect raising hell about his conduct here, particularly if they don’t want to be seen as applying their usual double standards.
And I’m going to point out something here, which occurred to us when we heard Hillary Clinton got State and solidified when we heard Blago had been arrested…; As I’ve said elsewhere Her getting State was an expedient move… under the heading of ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” That said, though, and given the long period of back and forth, between the time we heard she was going to get it, and a small flurry of meetings between Clinton’s people and Obama’s… we pretty well know each side there got something they wanted, for her to be in that position. State came to Hillary Clinton at a price…not a price of money so far as we know, but a price, just the same. How much of a stretch is it, though, from what Obama did in that case, to the outright selling of a Senate Seat as Blago did?
Frankly, not much.
Indeed, it seems all of a piece, in terms of operating style. Very Chicago. That’s a style that a Chicago girl like Hillary Clinton (Born and bred there) would have understood very well indeed. The lines of discussion for the next four years would seem to have been drawn by these events.
Oh… and remember, gang, these are the people we’re told can handle our healthcare, our money, our lives.
Addendum:
McPhillips, [5] pipes up over at Q&O in the comments [6]ether and raises a great point on a slightly different topic, which I think I need to bounce off of, here.
Obama spent twenty years — most of his adult life — as a congregant at a church (Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago) where the teaching is explicitly based on “black theology.” For those unfamiliar with the discussion hereabouts, “black theology” is both racist and black supremacist.
A white politician who belonged to an equivalent white racist church would have been justly hooted off the national stage in a heartbeat.
All true. But here’s where I bounce off Martin’s point and to the topic of this post; If the idea that Obama was unaware of what was going on in the church he’s spent his entire adult life in, and what their teaching was stretches credulity, how are we to take his claims of innocence here, when clearly, he’s up to his eyeballs in the Chicago political scene, and has been so since the day his career was launched in Bill Ayers’ living room??