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Old Friends

As I started reading Ryan Lizza’s interesting, long article on the rise of Obama, who should I come across on the first page but Alderman Toni Preckwinckle?  That makes sense, since she was one of Obama’s earliest supporters and an important patron in city politics, but the name rang a bell for a different reason.  Her name […]

As I started reading Ryan Lizza’s interesting, long article on the rise of Obama, who should I come across on the first page but Alderman Toni Preckwinckle?  That makes sense, since she was one of Obama’s earliest supporters and an important patron in city politics, but the name rang a bell for a different reason.  Her name had come up earlier in that Globe story about failed private development of public housing in Obama’s state senate district:

After Rezko’s assistance in Obama’s home purchase became a campaign issue, at a time when the developer was awaiting trial in an unrelated bribery case, Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times that the deterioration of Rezmar’s buildings never came to his attention. He said he would have distanced himself from Rezko if he had known.

Other local politicians say they knew of the problems.

“I started getting complaints from police officers about particular properties that turned out to be Rezko properties,” said Toni Preckwinkle, a Chicago alderman.

She had previously received campaign contributions from Rezmar and said she had regarded the company as a model, one of the city’s best affordable housing developers.

But in the early 2000s, she called Rezko to ask for an explanation for the declining conditions. He told her Rezmar was “getting out of the business,” she said – walking away from its responsibility for managing the developments.

“I didn’t see him nor have anything to do with him after that,” she said.

While she wouldn’t talk to the Globe about Obama and Rezko specifically, the article used Preckwinckle’s break with Rezko to imply that Obama’s claim of ignorance about the deterioration of Rezmar buildings was questionable, which made his continued association with Rezko prior to the latter’s indictment seem even worse than it already did. 

Now Lizza uses her as a representative of disenchanted Obama supporters, and in his article she does have some things to say about Obama and Rezko:

Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama’s and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: “Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles.” As we talked, it became increasingly clear that loyalty was the issue that drove Preckwinkle’s current view of her onetime protégé. “I don’t think you should forget who your friends are,” she said.

The general impression one gets from the two old Obama supporters quoted in the beginning of the article is that Obama has a bad habit of relying on constituents to propel him upwards and then ignoring them (or at the very least making them feel as if they have been ignored, which is usually just as bad for the pol).  This is true of many politicians, but it isn’t necessarily true of all of them, and it certainly isn’t a very attractive feature. 

Update: Regarding Obama’s much-celebrated 2002 antiwar speech, Lizza quotes the woman who organised the rally to make the obvious point:

The suggestion seems dubious; the politics were more in the framing of his opposition, not the decision itself. As Saltzman told me, “He was a Hyde Park state senator. He had to oppose the war!”

Second Update: Whatever else people take away from the article, it seems to me that its merits and revelations are going to be completely overshadowed by controversy over the cover of the issue in which it appears:

 

On the Roger Cohen scale of counterproductive, tone-deaf pro-Obama gestures, this is a 12.

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