Tag: Barack Obama

Did Rahm blow the whistle? Did Blago break the law?

To acknowledge the obvious: the Obama team would naturally be in touch with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich about whom it would like to see replace President-elect Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate.

The Chicago Tribune has now confirmed the liaison was incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who, the Politico reports, is not a target of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation.

It’s interesting that Obama aide Valerie Jarrett suddenly went from Senate candidate to high-level White House staffer. Which raises the question of whether Emanuel blew the whistle on Blago — or, having learned that Blago was up to no good, failed to alert Fitzgerald.

Assuming Blago even did anything illegal, that is. It is possible to be a complete slimeball and not break the law. Does anyone believe that horsetrading over a Senate seat wouldn’t get rough? I’ve been following this story pretty closely, and I have to confess I’m not sure where the line is.

A Senate seat in return for a large grocery bag filled with $100 bills? OK, illegal. A Senate seat in return for Obama’s “appreciation,” as Blago sneeringly put it? Legal. But how about a Senate seat in return for an ambassadorship, which is one of the goodies Blagojevich was supposedly interested in?

Sounds like politics to me.

Questions raised in the passive voice (III)

While the New York Times offers lazy speculation, the Washington Post’s Eli Saslow reports facts:

Long before federal prosecutors charged Blagojevich with bribery this week, Obama had worked to distance himself from his home-state governor. The two men have not talked for more than a year, colleagues said, save for a requisite handshake at a funeral or public event. Blagojevich rarely campaigned for Obama and never stumped with him. The governor arrived late at the Democratic convention and skipped Obama’s victory-night celebration at Chicago’s Grant Park.

Obama’s political mentor, Abner Mikva: “You don’t get through Chicago like Barack Obama did unless you know how to avoid people like that.”

Questions raised in the passive voice (II)

Michael Tomasky nails it in the Guardian:

So there are still some things that we legitimately have a right to know the answers to. To me, they boil down to these three:

  1. What were the contacts between the Obama camp and the Blago camp on the senate seat issue?
  2. Did the Blago camp say anything that sounded potentially illegal?
  3. If “yes” on 2, did the Obama people go to law enforcement?

That’s it. Everything else is mush — the kind of nonsense journalism too often gets into about “perceptions” and “a culture” that just tar people with broad brushes. Journalism often operates only at the level of ridiculously simplistic extremes. If something isn’t completely “put behind” a person, then by cracky it must be a “scandal.” But there are a lot of things that are neither and occupy the gray space in between the poles.

In Salon, Joe Conason warns of a possible return to the Clinton era, when “the right-wing propaganda machine and their enablers in the mainstream media” spent years trying to bring down Bill Clinton. Their efforts would have fizzled entirely if Monica Lewinsky hadn’t come along late in the game.

Questions raised in the passive voice

I’d expect this crap from Michael Graham. But what’s with the New York Times?

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich called President-elect Barack Obama “this motherfucker,” and whined that the Obama operation wasn’t willing to play along with his corrupt plans to sell off Obama’s vacant Senate seat — that is, Obama and company would only offer their “appreciation,” when what Blago really wanted was cash. And here’s what Jack Healy writes in the New York Times:

Although prosecutors said Mr. Obama was not implicated in their investigation, the accusations of naked greed and brazen influence-peddling have raised questions from some about the political culture in which the President-elect began his career.

Thus does Healy follow two crucial rules in cranking out garbage like this: use the passive voice, and darkly allude to the raising of questions.

William Ayers reconsidered

In my latest for the Guardian, I argue that the McCain-Palin campaign’s careless, ugly lies about Barack Obama and William Ayers did not merely smear Obama — they also smeared Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground movement in the 1960s.

There is no evidence that the Weather Underground ever killed or injured anyone other than themselves. For instance, despite what you may have heard, Katherine Ann Power and Susan Saxe, the radicals who were responsible for the 1970 death of Boston police officer Walter Schroeder, were not affiliated with the group.

Now, despite his McCarthyite tactics, John McCain has been welcomed back into polite society, while the Ayers family must content with death threats that Ayers himself says have only escalated since Election Day.

Obama job-seekers beware

Ari Herzog, who’d like to work for the Obama administration, is put off by the 63-question, privacy-invading survey that all applicants must fill out.

That, at least, you might have already heard about. But Herzog also discovers that the data you provide to Team Obama’s Change.gov site is stored not on a government server, but with a private contractor, Cluen Corp.

Here we go again

Doesn’t President-elect Obama have a problem on his hands if Sen. Hillary Clinton turns him down for the secretary of state’s post? Wouldn’t anyone else now be seen as second-best?

Obama got lucky with Rahm Emanuel. But the name-floating that’s going on right now strikes me as a significant breakdown in discipline on the part of the Obama camp.

Emanuel’s forced Hamlet act

Am I missing something? Or has the vaunted Obama team suffered a breakdown in discipline regarding U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., who’s been offered the job of White House chief of staff? Why is Emanuel publicly pondering whether to take it or not? What does this do to the eventual chief of staff if Emanuel turns it down?

I know there’s a lot of speculation out there about many of the positions President-elect Obama will be filling, including the possibility that John Kerry will be given the secretary of state’s job. But the way the Emanuel appointment is being handled is clunky, to say the least. If he turns it down, whoever winds up in the job will be seen as second-rate.