Chicago Style

15 December 2008



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Illinois Governor Blagojevich Faces Ouster

Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois found himself under arrest last week for trying to sell the senate seat from which President-Elect Obama resigned after his election. He was out of jail in a jiffy or two, and he has pretended that it's all business as usual in Illinois. That is part of the problem; however, the attempt to tarnish the next president with this scandal is likely to fail. The removal of Mr. Blagojevich is as far as this will go.

Naturally if the vacant senate seat had come from an untimely death or even the criminal conviction of the sitting legislator, this incident would be serious but hardly earth shaking. The tremors one feels now stem from the rump of the hard right in America that believes it can tarnish Mr. Obama's administration before it is sworn in. It won't work, but it doesn't mean they won't try.

Since the McCarthy era, the right has believed passionately in guilt by association. Naturally, they overlook their ties to various militias and racist groups while complaining about people at the center and on the left who happened to have attended a fund raiser with an accused criminal. Bill Sammon of Fox News, for instance, reported on its “America's News HQ, regarding the conference call that got the governor into such trouble,

It raises the question about whether somebody from the Obama team might have been on that, because as soon as the conference call ended, it was a two-hour conference call, and in that conference call, Blagojevich basically said — OK, well, if, you know, Valerie Jarrett, if, you know, I'm going to appoint Obama's favorite person, Valerie Jarrett, to that Senate seat and Obama's not going to pay me off for it, the heck with her, I'm not going to do it . . . . If the Obama campaign is affiliated with that, it's politically sort of, you know, the stink of scandal then clings to the Obama people . . . . There's a lot of sort of interconnectivity here between the Obama camp and Blagojevich camp. Even though the press is starting to say, oh, these two guys didn't really get along and there's much of a connection, I'm a little skeptical. We heard that with Reverend Wright. We heard that Bill Ayers. We heard that with any number of people and that excuse is starting to wear a little thin.”
The fact is that the suggestion that two guys in Chicago politics are automatically pals his laughable. The governor essentially said the president-elect could screw himself and that he would make sure the Obama-favored candidate wouldn't get the job. Given the hostility there, when Mr. Blagojevich ceases to govern Illinois, this story ceases to matter.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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