When Senator Hillary Clinton lobbed the slum-lord grenade at Sen. Barack Obama during the South Carolina debate last Tuesday most of us had never heard of this “Rezko” character.

What is instructive here was the way in which Senator Barack Obama parsed his official response the next day.

Sen. Obama distanced himself from Rezko by saying that he had actually been representing a church group that was benefiting from a donation from Rezko’s dubiously constructed real estate empire.

To listen to Sen. Obama you would think that only malice could forge a link between the two men when, obviously, they hardly knew each other if they’d ever met at all.

But then we read about the land deal.

 

Sen. Obama found a lot was available in the up-scale Hyde Park section of Chicago (where he and his family where then living in a condo) . It was attached to a sub-divided parcel which, miraculously enough was purchased by Rezko’s wife, Rita.

Of course, all this was a coincidence, or was it?

Sen. Obama neglected to mention that Rezko threw a big fundraiser for his Senate run in 2003, even as his low-income housing empire was beginning to crumble or that Rezko was a member of his Campaign finance committee.

When really caught my eye though was the fact that Sen. Obama acquired this lot in Hyde Park for $1.65 million , some $300,000 off the asking price. Rita Rezko purchased the adjoining vacant lot for $625,000 (the full, asking price) and in due course Sen. Obama purchased a strip of land off that property from Mrs. Rezko so he could extend his yard for another $100k and change.

To this date, Mrs. Rezko’s lot remains undeveloped.

 

I found this exchange in the Chicago Sun Times with Obama (from Nov 5, 2006) of some interest:

Q: Did you approach Rezko or his wife about the property, or did they approach you?

A: To the best of my recollection, I told him about the property, and he developed an interest, knowing both the location and, as I recall, the developer who had previously purchased it.

Clearly there is something disingenuous about Sen. Obama’s attempt to make his relationship with Rezko little more then an accidental overlap with a “Church group” he was representing. As far as I know, not many of us would go running to a complete stranger to dish about a piece of real estate we were hoping to acquire. And even fewer of us would then be lucky enough to have this stranger purchase an adjacent lot on which they appeared to have no intention of building at all.

On the face of it, if Mrs. Rezko only learned about this property because Sen. Obama told her husband about it, it can’t be characterized as a coincidence, can it?

I’m not saying that Senator Obama did anything wrong here – the Sun-Times didn’t think to ask more about his confiding in Rezko before closing the deal, so they must have judged it okay, even though Rezko himself was eventually brought down because of his corrupted ties to many of the Democratic Party’s leading figures in Chicago and the larger state of Illinois.larger state of Illinois.
To his credit, Senator Obama admitted the relationship was bone-headed and he even diverted $11,500 in donations from the Rezko empire over to charity .

Who dares speak of Whitewater?

All through the ‘90s the Clintons were hounded by allegations of corruption in the now legendary Whitewater deal. I say legendary because the lasting impression most Americans have from that news coverage still bears no resemblance to the mundane and somewhat pathetic reality that Whitewater was.

Not only is the circumstantial case here far more damning than Whitewater ever was, Senator’s Obama’s attempt to persuade us that his dealings with Rezko were because of legal work he was doing for a “Church group” strikes me as Clintonian parsing of the first water.

Remember that furor when Sen. Joe Biden described Sen. Obama as being ”clean”

I was going to say that this raises some questions about just how clean Senator Obama really is but suddenly remembered what happened to Senator Biden when he used that word to describe the junior Senator from Illinois about this time last year.
Scores of people suggested that Biden was talking about Senator Obama’s hygiene and that it constituted a slur on African-Americans. The idea that Senator Biden was out of line took hold and for a few days we were treated to a litany of articles about what a jerk Senator Biden was. (Jake Tapper at ABC headlined his contribution to the pile-on, “A Biden problem: Foot in Mouth”)
I’d forgot about that controversy, until just now. It echoes the current series of flaps that have tried to paint the Clintons as being racist. In each case, the obvious intent of the speaker was grossly distorted to give the charge weight. No one I knew thought for a moment that Biden was referring to Obama’s hygiene but rather that he was fresh, new, uncorrupted, innocent, untouched by scandal or financial impropriety.
But who was it that first twisted Senator Biden’s words to make him sound like a bigot? (This is also instructive for what’s going today in the phony contretemps between the Obama and Clinton campaigns)
“‘He is a clean African-American’? If Biden thinks that Obama is clean then he has to think that others are not clean.”
That observation was made by Rush Limbaugh and it was echoed throughout the conservative blogosphere before it was picked up by a host of liberal commentators.

Democrats should be more mindful of just where a lot of the smoke is coming from to encourage these spats.
Well, at least if they want to win in 2008 they should.
Just saying.
UPDATE: January 28 - Tony Rezko arrested in Chicago. Chicago Tribune has the details here
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