The Obama way: a Chicago pol's special brand of insincerity

POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds--this is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, double-talk, systematic deception, and lies presented as metaphorical "truths" are the order of the day.

So of course Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a very limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq War, when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging. He engages in double-talk when, on NAFTA and Iraq, he tells the rubes one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists. He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" attacks on peaceful civil-rights protesters in Selma, Ala., that inspired his parents to marry (they had been married for years already).

All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes Obama different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles-this would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient. Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotif of his political career. In New York, politicians (Reverend Al excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government. But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks, and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.

Blacks adapted to both the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with Richard Daley the elder, the mayor--impervious to the universalism of the civil-rights movement in its glory--offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted. In Chicago, racial reform has meant that today's Mayor Daley has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, and Barack Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.

For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described thus: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (i.e., the mob's) jewelry-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley.... That's the Chicago Way." At no point did Obama, the would-be savior of American politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard Law way, a product of it.

Why, you might ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then-boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey. When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson--a man, like Obama, more famous for speeches than for accomplishments--his party's gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he needed to "perfume the ticket."

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine--made president of the senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones's district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied, "Some call it pork; I call it steak."

Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back "clean" Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is now under federal investigation, in part because of his relationship with Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his current house.

The Chicago Way has delivered politically for Obama even this year. Ninety percent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 percent comes just from Cook County. Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers," is an Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church, and a strong supporter of Jesse Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign.