Obama's blindness

Journalists must ask Barack tough questions about Chicago

Hatchet
By Lucas Roebuck

The media and U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald both hold a unique, important public trust as the not-so-shocking Illinois pay-for-play corruption scandal unfolds.

Fitzgerald must not turn the case against Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, into a witch hunt, where Fitzgerald is determined to get a conviction on something — anything — to save face. This wouldn't be unprecedented for the high profile lawman. Fitzgerald, a hero of many liberals for his dog and pony show in the Valerie Plame CIA "leak" case, must make sure he gets the governor for a relevant crime.

In the Valerie Plame case, Fitzgerald knew who the leaker was (Richard Armitage) before the grand jury testimony began and never charged anyone with leaking the name of a covert CIA agent. Instead, he tagged the vice president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for having a bad memory. Ken Starr did the same thing to President Clinton, setting him up to lie under oath about something totally unrelated to the Whitewater land deal. Both Libby and Clinton were decent lawyers in their own right, so it must have taken a special blend of prosecutorial abuse to trip them up.

While public opinion on the Libby/Plame case was split mostly along partisan lines, Fitzgerald has the advantage that Blagojevich has already been tried in the court of public opinion. Even if a court exonerates Blagojevich of wrong doing, his political career is over. The tapes are hard to argue with. Even Nixon knew that.

Fitzgerald's public trust then is to convict Blagojevich on a corruption charge and not a technicality.

The news media also have a public trust. They should not take President-Elect Barack Obama at his word that he had no idea of what was going on.

"I had no contact with the governor or his office and so I was not aware of what was happening," Obama told reporters, which was dutifully noted and repeated in papers from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times. Fine for the official statement. But this generation of journalists, weaned on stories of Woodward and Bernstien taking down Nixon, should turn over every pizza in Chicago verifying Obama's story.

They already have a few leads. First was that fact senior Obama adviser David Axelrod said on Nov. 23, "I know he's talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them."

Axelrod said he misspoke, which means he was ill informed, incompetent or a liar. We have no idea of knowing which it is, which is why a healthy, fair news corps will have reporters digging around to find out. Plenty of Nixon aides covered for their boss.

Another lead: Illinois-based KHQA news director Carol Sowers filed a report on the station's Web site on Nov. 5 that Obama was going to meet with Blagojevich to discuss who would succeed Obama in the Senate. The article that reported this was removed from the Web site this afternoon. I sent an e-mail to Sowers asking why the article was down and if she stood by her story, but I haven't heard back from her. Did Sowers have the story wrong? Or did they meet? Journalists should be finding the answer to these questions.

I am not trying to say that Obama is lying, or that somehow he is corrupt. But good journalists should always question the powers that be, even politicians they voted for and idolize — especially those people. That is their public trust.

I wonder if Woodword and Bernstien (and the editors at the Washington Post who supported them) would have worked so hard to take down Nixon if he were a Democrat? The idealist in me would like to think so. What if those scrappy reporters worked hard and came up with nothing on Nixon? They certainly wouldn't enjoy the celebrity status they do today.

The journalist's public trust isn't to assume that corruption exists, but its job is to check anyway, even if everything looks good on the surface. Hundreds, if not thousands of reporters, have done the sort of work that Woodword and Bernstien did — and came up with nothing. They are heroes, albeit unsung, of journalism, too.

If Obama is innocent of this affair — and I have no reason to believe that he is not — the one thing the stench from Chicago has proven is that Obama is blind. Only an idiot could have served in the statehouse and not known about the sort of corruption that has made the Windy City and Springfield famous. Obama was deep into the machine, and if he didn't know about the dirty game, he was incredibly naive. If he did know about it, then he did nothing to stop it.

I have called Obama many things over the 2008 election cycle, but a naive idiot is not one of them.

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