AND THE MATERIAL KEEPS ROLAND IN

5/27/09

At the request of the U.S. Senate (try not to laugh) Ethics Committee, Chief U.S. District Judge James Holderman released the transcript of a conversation between now Senator Roland Burris and Rob Blagojevich, the brother of and advisor to then governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich. Attorneys for neither Mr. Burris nor the former first brother objected to release of the tapes.

According to the transcript, Mr. Burris and the first brother discussed, without really discussing, Mr. Burris’s accession to Rod Blagojevich’s thinly veiled demands that Mr. Burris raise money for the governor if Mr. Burris wished to be considered for appointment to the Senate seat vacated by then President-Elect Barack Obama. While Mr. Burris did not come out and say “Okay, Rob, how much? I’ll have it for you in the morning.”, he did say:

“And, if I do that, I guarantee you that, that will get out and people said, oh, Burris is doing a fund-raiser, and then Rod and I both gonna catch hell.”

“And if I do get appointed that means I bought it.”

“If I don’t get appointed then my people who I’m trying to raise money form are gonna look at me, yeah, what, what’s that all about, Roland. I mean so, Rob, I’m in a, I’m in a, a dilemma right now wanting to help the governor.”

“I know I could give him a check. Myself.”

“And, and my law partner we were gonna try to do something at the law firm. I might be able to do this in the name of Tim Wright. (Mr. Wright is Mr. Burris’s former law partner and current lawyer.) Okay, ‘cause Tim is not looking for an appointment, okay.”

And the call ended with the following assurances from our well deserving, and deserved, Senator:

“I will personally do something okay? And it will come to you before the 15th of December.”

Several points are merited.

First, my (too) long awaited novel of Chicago politics is damn good, but even I would have a hard time coming up with material like this. Grist for a sequel or prequel grows more abundant with every passing day. As a reader of the Pontificator, you will be kept abreast of developments on the book front.

Second, while probably not provable in court, it is clear to anyone that Burris was trying to buy the Senate seat, as were a host of other Chicago politicians, from a guy who they knew was willing to sell it. His only concerns were

--would he get caught?
--how would it look?
--given the greater financial resources of others vying for the seat (Jesse Jackson, Jr., J.B. Pritzker, et. al.), could he raise enough money to come up with the winning bid?

Third, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone other than those few denizens of the national media who, clearly not being readers of the Insightful Pontificator, have not been disabused of the notion, widely shared in Washington and New York when Mr. Burris was first selected by our former governor to serve out the President’s term, that Roland Burris was a man of impeccable integrity, a veritable man on a white horse. (See my now seminal 12/30/08 post, “ROLAND, ROLAND, ROLAND, KEEP THEM PUNDITS ROLLIN’…”)

Fourth, Mr. Burris immediately came out in the wake of the release of the transcript and stated that it exonerates him. People from out of town, or people from in town who don’t follow our deliciously intriguing brand of politics, might find this astonishing. But one who understands the mindset of the typical Chicago politician and the workings of the politics of this city completely understand Mr. Burris’s thinking. As I reported in the aforementioned 12/30/08 post, Roland Burris is a lifelong, garden variety Chicago politician. He understands the game and he plays it quite well, if a bit sloppily and solipsistically. As a Chicago politician, he understands that any pol from our fair city, or our state, who is reasonably confident of being able to beat a felony rap qualifies for the pantheon of the just and the righteous. (See my 5/23/09 post “ST. PATRICK’S DAY?”) It is quite clear that nothing on the tapes is indictable, and even more clear that the lily-livered Dick Durbin and Harry Reid wouldn’t dare do anything that stands even the slightest chance of offending a major constituency, like moving to unseat the nation’s only Black Senator, even if he did try to buy the office. Since he hasn’t done anything that would cause him to go to jail or lose the Senate seat he has coveted since it became clear, if it ever became clear, to him that he would never became president, Roland Burris, in his mind and in the minds of most of his colleagues back in Cook County and its environs, is about as clean as a politician can get.