Connections

Bekkieann wondered (in the comments to my first post on this subject) why the picture of President Elect Obama with Governor Blagojevich if I was not trying to tie the two together. Mostly because I suspected/feared that the other Chicago shoe (concrete?) was yet to drop and dropped they have. First came the revelation that Rahm Emmanuel (the soon to be President's Chief of Staff) spoke REPEATEDLY to Governor Blagojevich about who would inherit the Obama Senate Seat.



I paid very close attention to President elect Obama's press conference when he stressed that HE had not had discussions with the Governor's office. Although I have to admit one thing. In a conversation with my good friend Gary Gross, Rahm Emmanuel's name came up and I stated that I thought he was too smart to get caught up in something this stupid. It appears I was woefully wrong.

Then came the this post by my good friend (and fellow Chicago escapee) Rick Moran who dug up an old interview with David Axelrod (the man behind the Obama campaign). The subject of the interview was the Fitzgerald investigation into Chicago political corruption.

Then in 2005, the Chicago Sun Times broke a fairly routine scandal involving the use of (or, in this case, the non-use) of city trucks – contracts to politically connected (and sometimes mobbed up) trucking firms that paid millions of dollars for little or no work. The city was entertained for weeks with stories of bribes being paid by city employees to steer truck contracts to specific firms, ghost payrolling, lolligagging truckers drawing taxpayer monies for going golfing, and other examples of extraordinary venality on the part of city politicians.

Once Fitzy got involved, the investigation expanded to include the entire patronage system in Chicago. And what prosecutors found was simply astonishing; 30 city pols who routinely violated the patronage law by doctoring documents to show interviews with candidates that never happened, resume tampering, and other fraudulent actions all to get loyal campaign workers city jobs. Fitzy’s investigation eventually reached deep into Daley’s office as two of his closest aides – including his patronage chief Robert Sorich – were convicted in the case.

Here’s how it worked:

In February 2005 a grand jury indicted Sorich for devising a scheme to “provide financial benefits, in the form of city jobs and promotions, in exchange for campaign work.” As part of this scheme, it charged, Sorich and other officials “corrupted the city’s personnel process” by awarding “jobs and promotions” to preselected candidates “through sham and rigged interviews.”

At the Sorich trial Kozicki, then in the buildings department, testified that as managing deputy commissioner he had altered 19-year-old Andrew Ryan’s interview rating to ensure that Ryan scored high enough to get a building inspector’s job for which other applicants were more qualified. Andrew Ryan is the son of Tom Ryan, secretary-treasurer of Carpenters Local 13, a union that was a major financial contributor to Daley’s 2003 reelection campaign.

And Axelrod? Here’s what the new Senior Advisor to the President had to say about it: back in 2006:

As Axelrod has said, a too-zealous prosecutor can look at normal political behavior and suspect impropriety. In a 2006 Vanity Fair interview, the Obama aide complained about Fitzgerald’s scrutiny of Chicago politics.

“He goes after fleas and elephants with the same bazooka,” Axelrod said. “At some point there’s a line … where you begin criminalizing politics in its most innocent form.”

Emphasis mine. Graft in Chicago has long been a practiced art form. Those that are good at it (the first Mayor Daley comes to mind) never put themselves in a place where they could get caught. Oh sure you could see that there was "something" going on there, but there was never enough there to warrant prosecution. Take a look at Paul Powell. There were multiple investigations into his corruption but nothing stuck and it was not until he died that we learned the depths of his corruption

That is, to me, the thing that makes this whole thing with Governor Blagojevich so laughable. It was the ham-handed nature with which he did business. It was the brazen nature of his corruption that gives pause. It was almost as if Governor Blagojevich wanted to get caught.

I still don't know what impact this will have on Team Obama, but if there are many more ties to this scandal in his transition team it may make his first hundred days in office very uncomfortable.