Barack Obama and Chicago Machine Politics

Back in July, when the New Yorker published its satirical cover portrait of Barack and Michelle Obama decked out in Muslim garb and militant fatigues, the political backlash tended to overlook Ryan Lizza's accompanying feature story, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama."

That's too bad, because Lizza's portrait of Barack Obama as a Chicago machine politician deserved just as much attention as Obama's radical ties.

Now comes John Kass, however, at the Chicago Tribune, with a needed update exposing the essential graft in Obama's Chicago machine politics pedigree. Kass suggests that John McCain - at Tuesday's debate - may find a road paved with damaging materials from Obama's connections to the Cook County Democratic establishment, it's "the Chicago Way":

Obama definitely does not want to go there. It would be a forced march for him. Obama's gauzy references to Chicago involve baseball and where he met Michelle and those blissful hours he spent as a community organizer. What he doesn't want discussed is his evolution from independent Democrat to potential White House enabler of the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine.

The Chicago Way is a road the Beltway media establishment dare not travel. It must frighten them. It conflicts with their fairy tale about Obama as reformer, and they're much too busy rummaging through garbage cans in Alaska to bother about Chicago's political alleys.

But any child in Illinois knows the Chicago Way leads through the most politically corrupt city in America, in a politically corrupt state, where muscle trumps reason, where Democratic warlords brazenly promote their offspring into public office, where even souls are offered up for sale.

The national media have never wanted to understand, much less expose, political corruption here, or examine how Obama prospered under the Daley machine's guidance. A trip down the Chicago Way would force them to re-examine their ridiculous narrative that sets Obama as a political reformer riding a white horse, or is that a winged unicorn?

Not only does the press not want to understand, it has systematically abandoned any pretense of objectivity to fully engage in the most explicitly pro-Democratic media campaign in modern journalistic history.