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I’ve heard a lot of this kind of thing over the last few months, and it seems to have intensified here in Chicago since Barack Obama took a lead in the polls. The argument basically says that Obama hasn’t spoken out strongly enough against Mayor Daley and the system of insider trading and back-room deal making this city specializes in–and then suggests that this reveals Obama’s true colors as a weak-kneed amateur, if not an outright fraud.
Forget for a minute that until the last couple of years, when he became an international political figure, Obama never “worked closely” with the machine–and even then I’d argue that he made a peace pact rather than a close-knit alliance. That’s not to say he’s pure–his association with Tony Rezko was stupid, even if he was hardly alone in it (even among some of the area’s revered independents–check the campaign finance records). But I don’t think it rises to the level of evidence that he’s been persistently involved in the Chicago muck.
