While discussing the sleaze that is formally known as Illinois politics, Obama told Chambers:
I can’t judge where there have been improprieties and where there haven’t been because I haven’t been intimately involved in what’s been happening in state and local politics over the past couple years.
In the next paragraph, Chambers writes:
Anybody following Illinois politics, even tangentially, knows what's up in Illinois: Pols and their pals are gorging themselves at the public trough, and those pals are in turn helping the pols.
Surely Obama knows this to be true. After all, for eight years he was an Illinois state senator.
As for Obama's self-claimed naivete about the political scene in the Land of Lincoln, I present evidence that may lead the reader to draw a diffferent conclusion:
About this time last year, Obama not only endorsed Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth in her Democratic primary fight in Illinois' sixth congressional district, but also gave his blessing--although the state party apparatus chose someone else--to ethically challenged Alexi Giannoulias in the state treasurer's race.
Obama even appeared in a Giannoulias television commercial during the primary campaign.
Last fall, amid great hoopla, Obama endorsed the Democratic nominee for Cook County Board President, Todd Stroger. A political hack who in my opinion was the wrong choice to fix a dysfunctional and bloated body of government, Stroger was put on the ballot to replace his father, who suffered a stroke shortly before he won his primary election last March.
That caught the attention of the Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn--no conservative, who wrote about Obama's endorsement letter touting Stroger:
The letter, which puffs lots of hot air into the saggy balloon of Stroger's legislative resume, refers to him as "a good progressive Democrat" who will "lead us into a new era of Cook County government."
Todd Stroger was a "strong voice" in Springfield, the letter says. He has "worked assiduously" for the poor as an alderman. Yet, of course, the record reveals that Stroger is an unimaginative legislative drone whose reform credentials are wholly imaginary--an unlikely trailblazer to a new era.
Last month, the man who says he is not "intimately involved in what’s been happening" in Illinois politics endorsed Mayor Richard M. Daley for re-election.
Daley's administration has been plagued by several scandals.
I believe that Obama spends most of his weekends not in Washington but in his home on Chicago's South Side. Besides, Congress isn't always in session, when he's not there, he's usually back in Illinois.
It's hard to believe that Obama doesn't know what's occuring in the state he represents in the Senate.
Big hat-tip to new blogroll addition GOP Partisan of Illinois for the Rockford Register-Star article.
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