Despite the fact that the criminal complaint filed against Rod Blagojevich has a wiretap transcript where Blago calls President-Elect Barack Obama a “motherfucker” for being willing to give “nothing but appreciation” for the senate seat Blago wasn’t going to “give away for nothing,” Republicans are already attempting to argue that Obama is indirectly responsible for Blago because he didn’t singlehandedly end corruption in Illinois politics. (And liberals are the ones who think he’s the messiah.) David Freddoso explains:

I had just finished a piece on former Republican Gov. George Ryan‘s crimes and his unworthiness of a pardon, and now Gov. Blagojevich (D.) gets himself arrested. Blagojevich’s crimes, if proven true, appear to be much, much worse. There will be tons to say later about Chicago’s extreme corruption, to which Barack Obama was always willing to turn a blind eye. We will learn quite a bit more about Chicago and Springfield from Blagojevich’s downfall in the next few months.

Of course, it turns out that part of the reason Blagojevich was scrambling for paper, and ultimately part of the reason he got caught, was he was trying to avoid a state ethics law going into effect that would have curtailed influence peddling in the state. It turns out that Obama had exerted pressure over state legislator Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois state senate, in an attempt to get the bill passed. Jones had previously opposed the bill. All of this is hardly “turning a blind eye”. Still the way the New York Times tells it, Obama’s attempt to fight corruption in Illinois proves how corrupt he is.

Beyond the irony of its outcome, Mr. Obama’s unusual decision to inject himself into a statewide issue during the height of his presidential campaign was a reminder that despite his historic ascendancy to the White House, he has never quite escaped the murky and insular world of Illinois politics.It is a world he has long navigated, to the consternation of his critics, by engaging in a kind of realpolitik, Chicago-style, which allowed him to draw strength from his relationships with important players without becoming compromised by their many weaknesses.

Will Bunch reacts:

Did it occur to them that maybe Obama was elected 44th president of the United States exactly because he HAS escaped “the murky and insular world of Illinois politics”? When people ask why would someone like Obama involve himself in Chicago politics, the bottom line is Chicago is where he lived — he moved there to organize laid-off steelworkers, got a job there and then even married a Windy City native.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, commenting on Obama’s apparent refusal to play ball with Blagojevich, quips that Obama “saw his ghetto ass coming.” Well, yeah: Obama’s instinct for picking certain fights evokes that kid who’s trying to stay out of trouble, who knows enough not to get involved with what’s happening on the corner but also not to put himself at risk trying to be a hero or a snitch.  It’s an instinct honed in the absence of a legitimate authority, and if there’s anything we’ve learned about Illinois politics recently it’s that there is a serious absence of legitimate authority. There’s no one to call, no one to complain to, because the whole world is dirty. Ben Smith suggests that ultimately the corrupt Chicago establishment saw Obama’s promise and let him slide.

A liberal would react to the world of Illinois politics with a conclusion that there is something wrong with the system, that it’s not just a matter of individual people witholding themselves from unethical dealings, but that a system that rewards unethical behavior needs to change. Barack Obama has said time and time again he wants to change the game, but conservatives ran against him in part on the basis that he hadn’t destroyed himself by making an enemy of everyone in Illinois. For these conservatives, morality is an individual thing, it’s not about reforming the system, because the system is never to blame. It’s about one’s individual moral purity, which cannot be sacrificed for any reason, let alone overlooking instances of individual bad behavior in order to reach a greater goal. Obama’s success, and subsequent focus on ethics reform in Illinois or in Congress is just proof of greater ambition. If Obama was in any way sincere about fighting corruption, he would have destroyed his own career years ago. Conservatives might call this righteousness, I call it vanity.

John McCain was the crusader. Obama was the compromiser. Throughout the campaign, the most consistent critique of Obama was that when placed in a room with fools and rogues he didn’t tear them down the way a crusader would. This was, in part, the instinct of the community organizer. You work with the people you have, not the people you wish you had. But to conservatives, Obama’s mere presence in this world makes him guilty, much the same way that some cops can’t tell the difference between a kid who’s trying to avoid trouble and the kid who’s making it, because to the cop they both look and dress the same and they live in the same neighborhood. But the cops are at least partially motivated by self-preservation, while conservatives are merely concerned with finding a way to derail a Democratic agenda by any means necessary.

In the meantime, Obama needs work on jettisoning some of those Chicago instincts. The goal is no longer just keeping his own nose clean. He’s going to be the boss, and that doesn’t just mean he has the authority to intervene in ways he previously hasn’t, it means he’s responsible in a way he has never been. 

— A. Serwer