This is especially telling right after finishing Alterman and Zornick's piece mentioned in the last post: Eric Boehlert's round up of the MSM's attempts to hype an Obama connection to Blagojevich.
Followup posts on the same theme on County Fair here, here, and here.
[Added] Eric Alterman had some thoughts on the same matter, too, the day before. And also, the day before that.
7 comments:
You are aware of my long-term support for the Obama Presidential bid, so I say this with no sense of happiness. Someone from the Obama camp will end up falling on his sword vis-a-vis a Blagojevich contact regarding the Senatorial replacement decision. It is simply illogical to assume no such contact occurred, and similarly unlikely that the Governor would not have taken the opportunity to make a sordid pitch for a reward. Misprision of a felonious Hobbs Act violation is serious business.
And the Obama organization's response has been too measured and lawyerly to not conclude that some bad news is not soon coming.
This is the playground he has chosen to play in.
That's a plausible scenario, Don, especially when one looks at politics with a healthy skepticism, and I wouldn't bet the house against its happening, but I still think the odds are against it.
There's a clear history of Obama shunning contact with Blagojevich during the campaign. As others have noted, he was about the only Democratic governor whom the Obama campaign did not have stumping on their behalf. There weren't any joint appearances, and so on.
The response from the Obama team about the current kerfuffle does bug me. I wish Obama would have said in the first press conference where he was asked about it, "Of course I talked to him from time to time. He's the governor of the state where I was a senator, and we're in the same party. Be serious. But as far as talking about who would assume my seat, the only thing I ever said to him was that I thought there were a lot of worthy candidates. End of story."
This is not the first time I've felt that Obama should have been more blunt about something, but that's just not his way. And so far, doing things his way has just about always worked out in the long run.
In any case, it's hard for me to imagine that Obama and his team would have much of a vested interest in any particular candidate, to the extent that they would have been rolling around in the gutter with Blagojevich. Cui bono, you know? All Obama cares about as president is that the new Senator vote for his proposals, and that's not anything they would have had to worry about no matter who was picked.
Finally, when you add in all the stuff the Bagojevich was recorded saying about Obama and his unwillingness to pay to play, it's hard to imagine any way Obama and his team could more clearly be exonerated. This is just a matter of waiting out the storm until the media and the wingnuts find the next shiny object.
I don't expect you'll be seeing Rahm Emanuel making the Sunday morning bloviating circuit tomorrow. Why? Just because.
Looks like you're right about his non-appearance, but that doesn't mean much to me. Seems more like smart politics -- let 'em yap, they got nothing. At this point, with the MSM having decided to dump everything into making this The Story, he'd only risk looking bad by going on.
I don't see anything wrong with Obama and team coming up with a short list, in and of itself. Do you?
Oh, not at all. He'd be remiss if he didn't express some sort of ownership of who takes his place after campaigning for the position.
That's not the issue. Whoever talked to Blagojevich had a responsibility to report any criminal solicitation. Was the pitch made? Was it reported?
I'm not up on the details, but isn't a likely explanation for what happened between Emanuel and Blagojevich something like the following?
RB: Hi, Rahm. What's that?
RE: It's a list of candidates the President-Elect would be happy with as replacements for his Senate seat.
RB: Oh, yeah? What's in it for me if I pick from this list?
RE: The gratitude of the next President.
RB: I was hoping for a little something more.
RE: I don't doubt that, but that's what I have to offer. Gotta go.
I'm sure Emanuel knows perfectly well what a corrupt little prick Blagojevich is, and I'm sure he got some sort of hint like the one I gave above. But really, these sorts of feelers are put out every day in politics and business, and it's unrealistic to expect everyone who gets one directed at him to report it, especially if it's as vaguely phrased as that.
So, if Emanuel didn't get a direct criminal solicitation from Blagojevich, what exactly is the issue? That he didn't report that he didn't?
On a related note, here's an example of why it's sometimes best to play it cool, rather than trying to counterspin the spin in an MSM whirlwind.
Far as I can tell, Rendell said nothing not painfully obvious, yet it's causing great wailing and gnashing of teeth. Or happy flutterings of anticipation, depending on where one lives on the political spectrum.
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