Blagojevich, Fitzgerald--and Obama

As the President-Elect vacations in Hawaii and the besieged governor hunkers down back home, the relentless prosecutor keeps chipping away at their state's institutionalized corruption.

Today there is a leaked backgrounder in the Washington Post, headlined "Secret Tapes Helped Build Graft Cases In Illinois," detailing five years of what Fitzgerald calls "wide-ranging schemes where people are seeking to make people pay contributions to get contracts or appointments or do other stuff."

In the interconnected stories of this threesome, there are clues to the nature of 21st century political life and the human beings who struggle with its temptations and contradictions.

Fitzgerald and Blagojevich are stereotypical--the crusader who never sleeps and the corkscrew pol who never stops stealing--but their collision is moving beyond clichés into a more complicated picture of people and power in a new century and raising questions about how Barack Obama managed to navigate that world without being tainted by it.

The Obama organization wants to take Rahm Emanuel off the hook by insisting the prospective chief of staff had "only had one phone call with Gov. Blagojevich. It wasn’t even really about the Senate seat.” But the governor's new phone friend, Willie Brown of California, is saying "there were some pretty heated conversations between Blagojevich and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, which I understand will burn your ears off."

Be that as it may, the melodrama of New Politics vs. Old is likely to go on for some time now, at the cost of an empty Illinois Senate seat, while the Obama administration struggles with the high-profile problems that are plaguing the country.

As Fitzgerald keeps plodding forward, nagging questions involving the new president will center on convicted fixer Tony Rezko, described by the Post as the "gatekeeper to Blagojevich, advising him on appointments to boards and commissions."

During the campaign, Obama returned Rezko's contributions, stressing he had not been accused of any wrongdoing in his association with him while admitting that Rezko's involvement in the buying of the Obamas' Chicago home was a "boneheaded" mistake.

The Fitzgerald-Blagojevich confrontation is a high-wire media circus of good vs. evil, but the peripheral role of the new president who is shouldering the burdens of America's future is a reminder that what human beings do when the stakes are high is never that simple.

An incident from 40 years ago keeps coming back to mind. As a delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, I found myself alone in a hotel elevator with political boss Stanley Steingut, a decent man, after his egregious power play had cut off an antiwar resolution in the state caucus meeting.

Enraged, I asked him, "Does your mother know what you do for a living?"

He gave me the kindliest of smiles, took my elbow and said sadly, "Politics, kid."

Will Glib Be Good Enough?

Sooner rather than later (see below), Barack Obama has had to confront his twin albatrosses, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the decidedly secular Tony Rezko. In his rounds of the cable news shows last night, Obama was articulate, as always, but for the first time, glib bordering on shifty.

On Countdown with a deferential Keith Olbermann, he distanced himself from Wright's racist rants but asked voters to believe that, in 17 years of churchgoing, he did not hear any of the venom or he would have condemned it.

Even more tenuous was Obama's attempt to paint Wright as a spiritual leader caught up in the anger of his generation at racial injustice, a pissed-off Martin Luther King, if you will. That won't wash with those who remember how King stressed rejection of such attitudes at a time when Black Power advocates were promoting them. Senator, Wright is no Martin Luther King. Not even close.

In his attempt to "disgorge" Rezko, along with his campaign contributions, Obama stressed that he has not been accused of any wrongdoing or connected to any of the issues involved in the current federal corruption trial, but his opponents won't be deterred from harping on their long, close association, including the buying of the Obamas' Chicago home.

Obama's most fervent admirers will be tempted to pass off these iffy relationships as part of a misguided search for substitute fathers by a man who lost his own at an early age, and there may be truth in that. But Obama is now attempting to become the national father figure, and just asking him to show better judgment than George W. Bush would be setting the bar very low.

Democrats' Standup Demagoguery

They should have been sitting down for the first hour. The civility Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama showed in their Las Vegas round table last week and in the second hour of the Myrtle Beach debate tonight bracketed a standup slugfest that did neither of them credit.

Particularly ugly was Clinton's attempt to tar Obama with Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko and particularly slippery was Obama's trying to pass him off as a client for whom he had worked for a few hours. His relationship with the man who is under indictment in a federal corruption case is much more complicated than that (more about this here later).

But the lowlight was the pummeling Obama took from both Clinton and John Edwards for voting "present" on many occasions in the Illinois Legislature. This attempt to make him look indecisive was coming from people who did not hesitate in October 2001 to cast votes that allowed George Bush to invade Iraq.

Perhaps standing on their feet makes the candidates testy. The organizers of the next debate might consider a format that encourages them to chill out by reclining on chaise longues.