A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I love and adore my home city, but let us face it: Clean politics has never quite been a Chicago forte. That's why it is valuable to have John Kass ask how precisely it came to be that Barack Obama was seen as a cleaner, fresher product of Chicago politics when, in fact, he has done nothing to challenge the traditional nature of politics in my beloved hometown. The following passage is a key one:

As a candidate, Obama will do what he has to do to win. My argument is not with him--but with the national political media pack that refuses to look closely at what Chicago is. They're fixated on what it was, and they think it's clean now.

And they've spent years crafting, then cleaving to their eager and trembling Obama narrative, a tale of great yearning, almost mythic and ardently adolescent, a tale in which Obama is portrayed as a reformer, a dynamic change agent about to do away with the old thuggish politics.

It's as if Axelrod channeled it, wearing a peaked Merlin hat. Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia.

I've joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments.

So why the disconnect? Why is Obama allowed to campaign as a reformer, virtually unchallenged by the media, though he's a product of Chicago politics and has never condemned the wholesale political corruption in his home town the way he condemns those darn Washington lobbyists.

For an answer as to when pundits will ever put Illinois corruption in context, I called on Tom Bevan, executive director of the popular political Web site Real Clear Politics (which directs readers to my column on occasion) and a Chicagoan.

"To a large degree, the media has accepted much of the Obama narrative thus far," Bevan told me. "He's risen so quickly, but his history hasn't been bogged down with an association of Chicago politics and I can't tell you why exactly, except perhaps that some may have bought into the established narrative and can't separate themselves from it."

"And I don't know if the country understands just how corrupt the system is in Illinois. People don't see it. They're flying over us, cruising at 30,000 feet," Bevan said.

Treating any part of America as flyover country constitutes a lack of respect to that part of America. Treating Chicago--a significant metropolitan center--like a political flyover zone is especially bizarre, so I invite pundits and observers to stop cruising at 30,000 feet and touch down to examine Chicago in careful and exacting fashion.

They'll find that you come and stay in my hometown for a whole host of perfectly wonderful reasons, but while the political system is interesting and amusing from an anthropological perspective, it's not exactly something to admire.

And Barack Obama has done nothing--nothing whatsoever--to change that. I think that's an important issue to cover in this Presidential election. Don't you?

(Thanks to Mark Hemingway for the link.)