Obama's Chicago Style

My hometown of Chicago awoke this morning to a frosting of snow and a blizzard of sleaze.

After I finished absorbing the [expletive deleted] criminal complaint [1] against Governor Blagojevich, I reached for the teachings of my rabbi on the subject of Illinois corruption: the late great columnist Mike Royko [2]. Found this 1973 lesson [3] from the master on the definition of "clout," a concept as vital to Chicago machine politics as uranium is to nuclear fission. It goes a little something like this:

And what "clout" is in Chicago is political influence, as exercised through patronage, fixing, money, favors, and other traditional City Hall methods.

The easiest way to explain clout is through examples of the way it might be used in conversation.

"Nah, I don't need a building permit—I got clout in City Hall."

"Hey, Charlie, I see you made foreman. Who's clouting for you?"

"Lady, just tell your kid not to spit on the floor during the trial and he'll get probation. I talked to my clout and he talked to the judge."

"My tax bill this year is $1.50. Not bad for a three-flat, huh? I got clout in the assessor's office."

"Ever since my clout died, they've been making me work a full eight hours. I've never worked an eight hour week before."

"My clout sent a letter to the mayor recommending me for a judgeship. Maybe I'll enroll in law school."

Get the idea? Clout is used to circumvent the law, not to enforce it. It is used to bend rules, not follow them.

Whatta town.

Only problem: that town no longer really exists any more. And the best evidence is, paradoxically, the governor's recent shenanigans. Here's Royko again, this time from 1975, describing an exceptionally inebriated attorney he met at a party "attended by a lot of politicians, lawyers, judges, and other Chicago folk creatures":

I asked him what kind of law he practiced.

"I fix," he said.

At first I wasn't sure if I heard him correctly.

"You what?"

"I fix."

He said it so casually—the way a lawyer might have said he specialized in probate, personal injury, or patent law—that I still wasn't sure what he meant.

"You fix cases?" I asked. "Judges?"

He nodded. When he saw the look of surprise on my face, he looked amused. And he said if I quoted him by name, he would naturally deny it and sue the pants off me. Naturally.

Now, I wasn't surprised that a lawyer would be a fixer. I've known several, and suspected a lot of others. Everybody knows that the city has fixers.... But this man was the first one who ever came right out and admitted it.

There were, in short, standards. Benchmarks of craftsmanship, you might say. For instance, only verbalize such things when you're very, very drunk. In fact, there used to be a Chicago saying, of universal application in the game of politics: Never say something when you can mumble it. Never mumbled something when you can grunt it. Never grunt something when you can wink it. Never wink something when you can nod it."

Royko again:

He got into it in the most natural way. His father was a fixer of judges before him. So he grew up knowing which judges were fixable, how much various levels of the fix cost, how one went about putting in the fix with proper style.

Style, he explained, is important because even when a judge if being fixed for a sum of money, he wants to maintain his judicial dignity. You can't walk in and slap a wad of bills on the desk. Envelopes must be used, the contents never opened in the presence of both person,, and the transfer of the envelop must be done so casually that it could be a cigarette or a stick of chewing gum.

Now compare that to our sad little Blago. There is this whole business in the criminal complaint [1] (pages 9-13) about a $25,000 check and a businessman named Ali Ata. But there is no mention of an envelop. And there is no casualness—none. Instead, Blago is reported to have said to his new benefactor (he didn't even grunt!!!) "it had better be a job where you can make some money."

Then, well, there is the whole business of Blagojevich verbalizing every count in the conspiracy as he commits it. As Lawrence O'Donnell put it last night on MSNBC, if he had submitted this as script pages on the "West Wing" he would have been laughed out of the writers' room: it simply is not credible behavior for a professional grifter.

No, this is not the Chicago Way of the sort Royko was discussing. I'm not saying such a world no longer exists; I'm sure that kind of silky smooth brazenness still goes on in Chicago courthouses. Even more so, once something called the Shakman Decrees made it much harder to fire and hire someone in Chicago on the basis of politics, the name of the game has been "pinstripe patronage" [4]—a more corporate-style form of corruption often involving the control alderman have over zoning in their districts.

What's the lesson of Rod Blagojevich? That the traditional style of Chicago political corruption is glaring in its absence from this week's events.

The sheer cluelessness of Blagojevich's performance goes to show that the kind of natural connection conservatives [5] are desperate to draw between these alleged crimes and some sort of generic "Chicago style" that must also implicate Barack Obama merely shows, once more, their abiding ignorance. In fact, there's always been a doppleganger to the kind of corruption Royko so poetically depicted in Chicago—a tradition, often rooted in Barack Obama (and Rick Perlstein's) neighborhood of Hyde Park, that draws its identity from fighting Chicago graft. Its heroes are people like Leon Despres [6], Paul Douglas, Thomas Geoghegan [7]—and, yes, Mike Royko.

This is the world Barack Obama comes from. The Blagojevich criminal complaint could serve as its manifesto—you know, the part where Blagojevich complains that he'd like Obama to play ball, but he "not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them."

Whenever you hear anyone trying to tie Obama to any "Chicago style" concerning corruption but this one, know this: they are parading their ignorance.