Barack The Untouchable

Barack Obama, even by his own account, is no angel either. He admitted in his biography to doing "blow" as a young man, and I expect it's only a matter of time before we learn that he's "fallen off the wagon" again and sneaked a smoke or two in the White House, despite his promise to give up cigarettes. But when it comes to public integrity, Obama's early experience in rising through the seemingly irremediable corruption of Illinois politics offers some interesting parallels to Truman's record. According to former Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell, his biographer, Obama has consistently gone out of his way to steer clear of the Illinois taint he knew was all around him. When his wife Michelle wanted to go to work for Jarrett in City Hall, "Obama looked at her and said 'Let's slow down here.' He's heard what goes on in Chicago City Hall," Mendell told me. Eventually Obama relented after meeting Jarrett and getting her reassurances that she would look out for Michelle—they soon became good friends, and she'll be at his side in the White House—but "initially he was very hesitant about her taking that job."

Obama was so keen on escaping the miasma of corruption that surrounded him, Mendell says, that he wouldn't even joke about it. During one campaign trip, Obama bought pizza and asked his entourage of reporters to chip in five dollars apiece, Mendell recalls. "I said, as kind of joke, 'That'll be 20 bucks on my expense account.' He chuckled and said, 'You only gave me five dollars.' He didn't get it. It was like, 'How could you even think of doing that?' … The guy does have a moral streak."

So, yes, there will be questions about Obama, and there should be. "There's something on everybody. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption," Willie Stark declared memorably in Robert Penn Warren's classic novel of political corruption, "All the King's Men" (inspired by Louisiana's Huey Long, of course). Obama may never entirely free himself of his association with the appalling Blagojevich and the state's culture of corruption. As the Politico pointed out Thursday, "Obama endorsed Blagojevich in his two gubernatorial runs and was among his key advisors during his first bid, in 2002. During the governor's re-election campaign in 2006—with press reports swirling about a grand jury investigation into Blagojevich's alleged jobs-for-contributions scheme—Obama praised the governor as a leader 'who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.'" And Obama's restless political ambition—his rather ruthless willingness to drop former allies to make the next step up—still riles many of his early supporters in Illinois politics. No doubt that too will come back to haunt him at some point during his presidency.

But it's also clear that Obama came out of the presidential election intent on thoroughly burying these questions—on proving that, like Harry Truman, he could out-ethics everybody else. Hence, at the beginning of the transition, when questions arose about his relations with lobbyists, his campaign announced the strictest and most comprehensive ethics rules ever applied to an incoming administration. As initially drafted, they prohibited anyone who had lobbied or registered as a lobbyist in the previous 12 months even from working for the transition team in the policy areas on which they lobbied. They were so strict, in fact, that even some reform types complained they were excluding advisors who had lobbied Congress on not-for-profit issues like human rights, environment and labor. The incoming administration was eliminating not just K Street corporate lobbyists but "even folks at interest groups who aren't typically part of the what's-wrong-with-Washington story," Scott Thomas, a former head of the federal election commission, complained to me.

The endemic corruption of Chicago politics has a storied history going back at least to the days of Al Capone, when local law enforcement was so compromised that the Feds brought in Eliot Ness and his Untouchables to break the mob. The available evidence suggests that Barack Obama will likely prove to be more of an Untouchable than a president whose ethics are questioned. Let's hope so.

© 2008