“I WANT YOU TO GO TO TATTAGLIA AND TELL HIM YOU’RE NOT SO HAPPY WITH OUR FAMILY…”

12/12/08

In yesterday’s comment on the travails of our esteemed governor and the naiveté of the national media concerning the politics practiced in these parts, I mentioned in passing that John Fund’s suggestion that President-elect Obama speak out against the corruption his adopted town “might not be a bad suggestion” and then I went on to make my major point. But now that I think of it, Mr. Obama’s speaking out against Chicago corruption would be a bad idea, certainly meaningless and potentially far more parlous.

If Mr. Obama were to get up on his high horse and denounce Chicago political corruption, the people who matter back in the great metropolis on the southern shores of Lake Michigan would, for public consumption, nod in agreement and piously proclaim the dawn of new, hopeful, kumbayaesque day of righteousness and rectitude in the Second City. In private, they’d be muttering, to themselves and among those whom they can trust, “Go (Blagojevich’s favorite expletive (“BFE” may now become an all purpose abbreviation in future issues of the Pontificator)) yourself, Junior. In eight years you’ll be making speeches, writing books, and pretending to save the world. We, or our kids, will still be conducting business back here at home.”

In other words, if Mr. Obama paraphrases Kay Corleone and says, in anger and exasperation, feigned or otherwise, “This ‘Chicago thing’ that has been going on for at least a century MUST ALL END,” the boys back home will smile, comment on what a nice, well meaning kid they raised, and go back to counting the cash.

So if Obama does denounce the Machine with which he cooperated (though not nearly as closely as the Right fervently hopes), such a denunciation will have zero impact at home and will hurt Obama by showing how impotent he really is, beyond sending money home, in matters of local politics in the greatest city on earth. Perhaps the latter is what the “conservative” punditocracy is hoping for when they urge such a denunciation; perhaps they are not as ingenuous about real politics as I suspect. But probably not.