As the President-Elect vacations in Hawaii and the besieged governor hunkers down back home, the relentless prosecutor keeps chipping away at their state’s institutionalized corruption.
Today there is a leaked backgrounder in the Washington Post, headlined “Secret Tapes Helped Build Graft Cases In Illinois,” detailing five years of what Fitzgerald calls “wide-ranging schemes where people are seeking to make people pay contributions to get contracts or appointments or do other stuff.”
In the interconnected stories of this threesome, there are clues to the nature of 21st century political life and the human beings who struggle with its temptations and contradictions.
Fitzgerald and Blagojevich are stereotypical–the crusader who never sleeps and the corkscrew pol who never stops stealing–but their collision is moving beyond clichés into a more complicated picture of people and power in a new century and raising questions about how Barack Obama managed to navigate that world without being tainted by it.
The Obama organization wants to take Rahm Emanuel off the hook by insisting the prospective chief of staff had “only had one phone call with Gov. Blagojevich. It wasn’t even really about the Senate seat.” But the governor’s new phone friend, Willie Brown of California, is saying “there were some pretty heated conversations between Blagojevich and Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, which I understand will burn your ears off.”