Roland Burris in the Round

If I were still teaching journalism, Jeffrey Toobin's profile of Obama's Senate replacement in the New Yorker would be an example of what magazines do best--tell readers what they don't know they want to know until they read it.

In the furor about the blatant Rod Blagojevich, the new senator he appointed has been a stick figure, contradicting himself about pre-appointment contacts and stubbornly refusing calls for his resignation.

Toobin's piece gives him dimension:

"According to the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson, a longtime student of Chicago politics, Burris 'was a soldier, part of the machine. He’s not a distinguished politician. He’s not a powerful political thinker.' Of course, this description hardly distinguishes Burris from many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. In his very ordinariness, Burris may represent a triumph of sorts for the civil-rights movement, which was, at least in part, a struggle for black people to be seen as just like everybody else."

In the story of a poor kid from southern Illinois who as a teenager helped integrate a public swimming pool but was no radical reformer to the ambitious pol who couldn't get anywhere until he joined the Daley Machine to the straight-laced attorney general who was apparently willing to let an innocent man die rather stir up a commotion, we get a rounded picture of the man who, as he now goes about his Senate rounds, cheerfully tries to engage his colleagues but for the most part gets averted faces.

"In recent weeks," Toobin concludes, "a consensus seems to be forming that Burris will serve out Obama’s term, but will not run for another in 2010. Burris probably couldn’t win anyway, and he has now attained the goal that appears to mean most to him--adding United States senator to his list of achievements."

Those are on the now-famous mausoleum that has his "firsts" inscribed on granite, a few yards away from the modest marker on the grave of Jesse Owens, who made history in the 1930s as an African-American track star winning four Olympic medals in Hitler's Germany.

Burris Brinksnmanship

A test for political peer pressure is shaping up in Washington around the tenure of Roland Burris in the Senate.

With little legal prospect of expelling him for misleading affidavits to the Illinois Legislature and Supreme Court about pre-appointment discussions of fundraising for ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Obama's replacement is under heavy fire from politicians and editorial writers to step aside.

But so far, he refuses to budge. "I've done nothing wrong, and I have absolutely nothing to hide," Burris said in a Chicago speech this week. "You know the real Roland...Stop the rush to judgment."

But calls for his resignation continue, his spokesman has resigned and the pressure mounts. A Chicago Tribune editorial today goads national and local Democrats: "Do you think it's acceptable for someone to take a Senate seat by lies of commission and of omission? That is, by saying what isn't true—and by declining to say what is?"

All this is complicated by the fact that Burris is the only African-American in the Senate, which moves the debate into what Clarence Thomas called "high-tech lynching" territory during his Supreme Court nomination hearings.

In the same Tribune calling for his resignation, a columnist notes: "Watching the Chicago media pack take chunks out of Roland Burris this week—and after taking a few bites out of the lying weasel myself—I couldn't help but wonder: When it comes to covering corruption, is there a media double standard, one for weak black politicians and another for powerful white guys?"

When Barack Obama vacated his Senate seat to bring Change to American politics, it's safe to say this was not what he had in mind.

Update: Sen. Burris should resign at once for the good of the state of Illinois, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn said today. “This should not be a matter that takes weeks."