“All Things To All People”
By SusanUnPC on May 10, 2008 at 7:16 PM in Barack Obama, Chicago, Chicago politics
Corrente Wire, a fine blog, has done us a service by breaking down one of those encyclopedic New York Times articles into bite-size chunks. The NYT piece you can read yourselves, but here are a couple snippets from what Corrente has gleaned (and which any rational being not addicted to the KoolKidAid can see plain as day):
That seems to be a familiar pattern with Obama – it’s “buddies for life” while he needs them, then he forgets about them when they are no longer useful, or tosses them under the bus when they become inconvenient. This doesn’t bode well for the OFB [...]
… this hotshot “civil rights” attorney has nothing to show for his experience. Most people who run on their record have a record to run on. Even Rudy Giuliani made his name going after organized crime. [...]
It seems everything Obama does benefits Obama. Every job, every friendship, is just part of the same pattern.
A similar theme runs through Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass’s latest column, “Obama Unstained by Chicago Way“:
“I know there are those like John Kass who would like me to decry Chicago politics more frequently, and I’ll leave that to his editorial commentary,” Obama said.
Not the politics, just the corruption, I said then, wishing silently that he had decried it all, that he’d stood up years ago and pointed to the list of sleazy deals, pointed an angry finger at the Duffs, the white, Outfit-connected drinking buddies of Daley who received $100 million in affirmative action contracts through City Hall.
That’s an easy political commercial for the Republicans: Mobbed-up white guys party at the old Como Inn with Daley, and they get $100 million in city affirmative action contracts and Daley doesn’t know how it happened and Obama endorses the mayor in the name of reform.
Obama had nothing to do with the Duff deal. But he kept mum. He has endorsed Daley, endorsed Daley’s hapless stooge Todd Stroger for president of the Cook County Board. These are not the acts of a reformer, but of a guy who, as we say in Chicago, won’t make no waves and won’t back no losers.
Kass points a finger at the media (as do we, often):
As a candidate, Obama will do what he has to do to win. My argument is not with him–but with the national political media pack that refuses to look closely at what Chicago is. They’re fixated on what it was, and they think it’s clean now.
And they’ve spent years crafting, then cleaving to their eager and trembling Obama narrative, a tale of great yearning, almost mythic and ardently adolescent, a tale in which Obama is portrayed as a reformer, a dynamic change agent about to do away with the old thuggish politics.
It’s as if Axelrod channeled it, wearing a peaked Merlin hat. Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia.
I’ve joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments.
So why the disconnect? Why is Obama allowed to campaign as a reformer, virtually unchallenged by the media, though he’s a product of Chicago politics and has never condemned the wholesale political corruption in his home town the way he condemns those darn Washington lobbyists….
Jeralyn at Talk Left also has plenty to say about the NYT piece.
by Ronald Scott
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