Where is the wisdom of Mike Royko when you need it?

Royko was by far Chicago’s most beloved political columnist. His scathingly brilliant, uproariously funny writings on the Chicago political machine not only shone a light in the dark corners of corruption, favoritism, and mobbed up businesses of Richard J. Daley’s City Hall, he had fun doing it.

A small sample:

Several theories have arisen as to what Mayor Daley really meant a few days ago when he said:

“If they don’t like it, they can kiss my ass.”

On the surface, it appeared that the mayor was merely admonishing those who would dare question the royal favors he has bestowed upon his sons, Prince Curly, Prince Larry, and Prince Moe.

But it can be a mistake to accept the superficial meaning of anything the mayor says.

The mayor can be a subtle man. And as Earl Bush, his press secretary, once put it after the mayor was quoted correctly:

“Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”

So many observers believe the true meaning of the mayor’s remarkable kissing invitation may be more than skin deep.

One theory is that he would like to become sort of the Blarney Stone of Chicago.

As the stone’s legend goes, if a person kisses Ireland’s famous Blarney Stone, which actually exists, he will be endowed with the gift of oratory.

And City Hall insiders have long known that the kind of kiss Daley suggested can result in the gift of wealth.

People from all over the world visit Blarney Castle so they can kiss the chunk of old limestone and thus become glib, convincing talkers.

So, too, might people flock to Chicago in hopes that kissing “The Daley” might bring them unearned wealth. Daley, or at least his bottom, might become one of the great tourist attractions of the nation.

Royko thrived during a time when Chicago had two daily newspapers; the rather staid and conservative morning Tribune and the afternoon liberal Daily News where Royko would hold forth much to the delight of homeward bound train commuters. He was fearless, honest, and disdainful of politicians.

And he would have ripped Barack Obama to shreds over stuff like this:

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama’s fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.

The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama’s bagman Antoin “Tony” Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city’s South Side while Mr Rezko’s wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.

Mr Obama says he never used Mrs Rezko’s still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn.

It should be mentioned that Obama got around a $300,000 discount on the $2 million plus house. The sellers deny there was any quid pro quo with the two buyers – that there is no connection between Mrs. Rezko paying full price for the lot next door and the bargain they gave the Obamas.

That may be so but the question is, where did Mrs. Rezko get the money?

It is unclear how Mrs Rezko could have afforded the downpayment of $125,000 and a $500,000 mortgage for the original $625,000 purchase of the garden plot at 5050 South Greenwood Ave.

In a sworn statement a year later, Mrs Rezko said she got by on a salary of $37,000 and had $35,000 assets. Mr Rezko told a court he had “no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations.”

Auchi is emerging as a key figure in the corruption trial of Rezko and also played a part in one of Rezko’s attempts to exploit his relationship with Obama. Obama denies he ever did any favors for Rezko or his associates but the crooked Obama fundraiser told prosecutors that after Auchi gave him another “loan,” he asked Obama to intervene with the State Department in order to get a visa for Auchi who was being denied entry into the US:

Prosecutors say that, after Mr Auchi was unable to enter the United States in 2005, Mr Rezko approached the US State Department to get him a visa and apparently asked “certain Illinois government officials to do the same.” Mr Obama denies he was approached. Mr Auchi’s lawyer has emphasised to The Times that it would be entirely false to imply that money had been lent by GMH to Mr Rezko in return for Mr Rezko seeking to assist Mr Auchi to obtain a visa. The two men’s relationship, the lawyer stressed, was a busines s one.

Just who is this guy Auchi?

Allow me to introduce you to Nadhmi Auchi. He was charged in the 1950s with being an accomplice of Saddam Hussein, when the future tyrant was acquiring his taste for blood. He was investigated in the 1980s for his part in alleged bribes to the fabulously corrupt leaders of post-war Italy. In the 1990s, the Belgium Ambassador to Luxembourg claimed that Auchi’s bank held money Saddam and Colonel Gadaffi had stolen from their luckless peoples. In 2002, officers from the Serious Fraud Squad raided the offices of one of Auchi’s drug companies as part of an investigation of what is alleged to be the biggest swindle ever of the NHS. With allegations, albeit unproven, like these hanging over him, wouldn’t you think that British MPs would have the sense to stay away?

Perhaps you would, but I forgot to add a final fact about Mr Auchi: he is the thirteenth-richest man in Britain, and he has been able to collect British politicians the way other people collect stamps.

First of all, his business dealings make Rezko’s kickback schemes for political contributions look like the minor leagues of sleaze. Auchi had a hand in the biggest political and corporate scandal in post war Europe, the so-called “Elf Affair” where $2 billion francs up and disappeared from the French state oil company Elf.

In a fantastically complex scheme, oil company execs used the state owned company as their own piggy bank, loading up on goodies:

The Auchi case confirms that the political class is attracted to the sleaziest characters in capitalism. Auchi’s conviction was a part of the gigantic investigation into the corruption of the Elf oil company, the biggest fraud inquiry in Europe since the Second World War. Elf became a private bank for its executives who spent £200 million on political favours, mistresses, jewellery, fine art, villas and apartments. By any definition, this was news.

It was only due to the persistence of the French investigating magistrates that Auchi got to Paris. They issued an international arrest warrant in 2000. For three years, the Home Office refused to deport him. Two MPs, Vaz and an unnamed politician, made inquiries. Renaud van Ruymbeke, the French magistrate leading the investigation into the Elf scandal, all but accused Britain of sheltering fugitives. Only after his protests, and pressure from this newspaper did the Home Office relent. Then there were Auchi’s relations with Iraq which have a certain topicality.

What are those connections to Iraq? Nothing less than being an early and enthusiastic supporter of Saddam Hussein. He has admitted to taking part in the assassination attempt on former Iraqi prime minister Qasim which Saddam also took part. He must have realized the nature of Saddam because he left Iraq but kept doing business with the regime:

Auchi’s brother was among the many Baathists killed by Saddam, but the execution did not inhibit Auchi’s business dealings with Iraq which, he says, didn’t stop until the Gulf war of 1991. His first coup in the West was to broker a deal to sell Italian frigates to the Iraqi Defence Ministry, for which he received $17m in commission. Italian investigators claimed that a Panamanian company owned by Auchi was used to funnel allegedly illegal payments. Auchi denied he had done anything wrong.

In the mid-1980s he got to know Pierfrancesco Pacini Battaglia, a man whose role in directing money to politicians led Italians to call him ‘the one below God’. Saddam Hussein had ordered the construction of a pipeline from Iraq to Saudi Arabia. Battaglia and Auchi secured the contract for a Franco-Italian consortium. In a statement to New York lawyers Battaglia alleged he knew how. ‘To acquire the contract it was necessary, as is usual, especially in Middle Eastern countries, to pay commission to characters close to the Iraqi government… In this case, the international intermediary who dealt with this matter was the Iraqi, Nadhmi Auchi.’ Auchi has denied any wrong-doing.

Truly. Elegant. Sleaze.

Rezko was into Auchi for upwards of $27 million – monies that curiously never got paid back. But what Rezko had was a stake in a big land development project that he was only too happy to give Auchi a piece:

According to court documents, Mr Rezko’s lawyer said his client had “longstanding indebtedness” to Mr Auchi’s GMH. By June 2007 he owed it $27.9 million.

Under a Loan Forgiveness Agreement described in court, Mr Auchi lent Mr Rezko $3.5 million in April 2005 and $11 million in September 2005, as well as the $3.5 million transferred in April 2007.

That agreement provided for the outstanding loans to be “forgiven” in return for a stake in the 62-acre Riverside Park development.

The Obama-Rezko relationship must be understood in the context of the influence peddling, the casual corruption, the cronysm, the favoritism shown in less than open bidding – all part of a city and state political culture where the politician, the businessman, and the crook frequently rub elbows and sometimes wear each other’s hats. Obama hiring the daughter of a Rezko associate to work in his office (after Rezko had helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for his campaign) is no big deal. But this kind of “favor” done for Rezko is a different story:

The Chicago Tribune: “On June 13, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that as a state senator, Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens. The Sun-Times said the deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.

Obama now regrets his association with Rezko and has given $150,000 to charity in order to atone for his sins.

Sorry Barry but it don’t work that way.

In the course of a 17 year relationship with Rezko, it is impossible to quantify the amount in contributions funnelled to Obama by Rezko using his ill gotten gains. Nor can it be ascertained at this time if the favors done by Obama for Rezko – large and small – involve him in illegal activities. It certainly has him enmeshed with some extremely shady characters in Rezko and Auchi.

At this point, unless there is a deliberate, concerted effort by the large media outlets to allow this story to die once Rezko is convicted, I find it probable that other revelations are yet to come that will show Obama to be just another machine politician, skirting the edge of ethics and the law – perhaps even going over the line and engaging in criminal activities.

Obama is not the Agent of Change. He is a calculating politician who plays the game the same way politicians have been playing it for hundreds of years – receiving money in exchange for favors from government for his friends and cronies. And if Mike Royko were alive, one has to believe that despite agreeing with his politics, Royko would have been relentless in taking Obama down, hammering away in his own inimitable style at the influence selling, the sweetheart deals, the pay for favors, and all the rest of this sleazy mess.

No Royko today. But we have an army of bloggers who can push this story into the mainstream and force the media to expend the resources necessary to get to the bottom of the Rezko-Obama enterprise. True, like Whitewater it is a very complex story and there is very little ease in the telling. But given the stakes, an effort should be made nonetheless.

I have waxed both seriously and clownishly on this site about Barack Obama’s “Cotton Candy Candidacy” and the fact that his nebulously formed ideas make him something of an empty suit when it comes to trying to figure out where he stands on many issues.

I have also pointed out that this is deliberate obfuscation on his part, done in order to hide his liberal past. Indeed, there is no candidate in recent memory who has taken such pains to see that his political philosophy remains a cipher – a razor thin record in the Illinois Senate along with almost as invisible US Senate votes are carefully hidden away in the campaign’s attic, gone and mostly forgotten in the rush to proclaim the candidate The Agent of Change.

A slippery fish, this fellow Obama. Controversial votes when he was a state senator were avoided by voting “present” or claiming later that he erred by pressing the wrong button and didn’t really mean to take that position. Seen in the context of the “Great Game” the left plays with the American people in trying to mask their liberalism for fear of rejection by the voter, Obama, it turns out, is a master of “post partisan problem solving” – hiding his liberalism under an avalanche of platitudes and feel-good bromides that have his supporters swooning and the media eating out of his hand.

But the closet Obama may be in the process of being revealed. This is the Obama that voted to make a criminal out of a homeowner who was forced to use a gun in his own defense in his own home. This is the Obama that voted against making it a criminal offense for convicts on probation or on bail to have contact with a street gang. Indeed, Obama’s record on anti-gang legislation is simple; because gang members are more often people of color, they shouldn’t be singled out for increased attention or special penalties by the law.

But beyond his clearly liberal voting record in the state senate and his being named the most liberal senator in the US Senate by National Journal there is an issue just starting to bubble and froth below the media radar that may or may not become a huge issue depending on how protective the national media wants to be of Obama.

I am talking about the extent of the candidate’s ties to domestic terrorists from the 1960’s and how the American people might feel about their future president paling around with someone who set off bombs as a member of the group Weather Underground and to this day refuses to apologize for it. William Ayers told his followers back then:

“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” This earns Ayers at least some spiritual kinship to Osama Bin Laden. (In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, which of course went to press before Sept. 11, Ayers maintains that this was “a joke.” In a more serious vein, Ayers was quoted by another Times interviewer as saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

The earliest known contact between Obama and Ayers was a “meet and greet” at Ayers house in Hyde Park – an upper middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Ben Smith at Politico gives an overview of the time and circumstance of the meeting:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

In fact, Ayers – unrepentant about bombing his own country as he claims – is an establishment figure in the unreconstructed liberal circles in Hyde Park – a hero to many of the University of Chicago faculty and other leftists who reside there. This is the district Obama ran successfully for state senate.

Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters who propelled Barack Obama’s early political career. The woman who touted Obama at the Ayers meeting, Alice Palmer, was herself a far left activist who was into community organizing like Obama. There was Dr. Quentin Young, a radical physician who was quoted in USA Today in 2005 saying “”national health insurance is no longer the best solution, it’s the only solution: All other alternatives have been proven disastrous failures.” According to Ben Smith, Dr. Young describes Ayers and Obama as “friends:”

Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.

But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.

There were other “encounters” with Ayers over the years, including the fact that both men served on a far left foundation as board members:

Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation. It is a fact that they have. Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama have appeared together at a number of gatherings and academic events.

In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled Should a child ever be called a “super predator?” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system”.

In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis” panel.

Ayers, “who in the 1960s was a member of the terrorist group Weatherman and a wanted fugitive for over a decade as a result of the group’s bombing campaign,” is currently the Board Chairman of the Woods Fund of Chicago and Obama is a former Board member.

Just what does the Woods Fund seek to do with its $68 million in assets?

This new Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty. The Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the redistribution of wealth via taxes.

“Unreconstructed” liberals indeed.

There have been many articles written the last few weeks asking just how liberal Obama truly is? How far to the left are his true politics? Since his record is so unrevealing of where he stands, one must go to his life, his associates, and his supporters to fill in the blanks.

And what comes to the fore is clear evidence that Barack Obama isn’t just an ordinary liberal like a Kennedy or a Clinton. Obama’s associations and associates reveal someone who has courted far left activists, participated in far left forums, and belonged to far left organizations.

On top of that, his stint as a community organizer was marked by his training in radical organizing. My colleague at American Thinker Kyle-Anne Shriver delved into this aspect of Obama’s early adulthood:

Barack Obama had just graduated from Columbia and was looking for a job. Some white leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago.

Obama answered a help-wanted ad for a position as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. Obama was 24 years old, unmarried, very accustomed to a vagabond existence, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine African-American community.

Both the CCRC and the DCP were built on the Alinsky model of community agitation, wherein paid organizers learned how to “rub raw the sores of discontent,” in Alinsky’s words.

And Alinsky’s writings on radicalism and social change should chill the bones of not only conservatives, but more moderate liberals:

Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971].”

If this doesn’t sound like the way Obama is running his stealth campaign, I don’t know what does.

I should add that I don’t believe Obama is a dangerous man in the sense he would overturn the government and turn the US into some gigantic gulag. But if the voters knew the half of it, Obama would have been marginalized as a far left liberal as surely as Dennis Kucinich. Instead, Obama has successfully used his oratorical skills to say very little about what he plans to do if elected while inspiring people with a message of hope and change.

Will the media expose Obama? Will they criticize Senator McCain if he tries to paint Obama as a radical? Will they dig deep into Obama’s associations and associates to discover the truth?

Taylor Marsh is perplexed:

This is the vein in the Democratic party I will never understand, cannot accept on any level. What is it about some people who just don’t get the problems with our Democratic nominee being friendly, even taking a contribution (however small), as well as having a meeting as recently as 1995 with an unrepentant domestic terrorist like William Ayers? It reveals a lack of seriousness about the issue of terrorism and the dangerously immature judgment of anyone who is going to associate with a man, at the very least, that Republicans will use to beat us over the head with, having the bonus of hitting a spot the public loves to drink up, which is that our party is not serious about the dangers we face in this world.

It’s the same impulse among those Democrats who think Castro is cool and Chavez is a hero. And in Obama’s case, if the American voter ever gets the full story, the party could be facing a defeat in a year where all the stars were aligned in their favor.

The Sleeper has awakened?

Well, maybe not as dramatic as that. After all, we’re talking about the mild mannered professor and senator for a quaint Midwestern state – hardly Superman material although he would probably look pretty good in tights.

But make no mistake, the times they are a-changin’. Finding himself trailing in the national polls by 2-1 against the Queen of Darkness, Senator Barack Obama – he of the “different kind of politics” school of electoral vapidity – has, not surprisingly, taken a page from the playbook of old school, bare knuckled political brawlers and begun sliming Hillary Clinton for all that she’s worth.

Well…that’s not entirely accurate. The page he’s reading is, in keeping with his citizen/scholar/politician image, the endnotes. And as for sliming Hillary, perhaps it would be more accurate to say his gums have a grip around her leg and he’s trying not to let go:

When conservative columnist Robert Novak reported on Saturday that the Clinton campaign might be sitting on “scandalous information” about Obama, close readers might have been inclined to yawn. The only sourcing was unidentified “agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton” and “word of mouth among Democrats.”

The column said the nature of the supposed scandal was unknown.

But Obama’s campaign responded as if Bob Woodward had splashed all the details on the front page, issuing a “Statement on Reports of Clinton Campaign Tactics” at 11:46 a.m., a “Response to Clinton Campaign Evasion” at 1:52 p.m., after her aides said they had “no idea” what the column was talking about, and a 4:20 p.m. broadside, “Obama Will Fight Back Fears.”

Obama’s response accused Clinton of “Swift Boat politics” — a reference to the 2004 attacks on Kerry’s military record by a group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Kerry stayed quiet, a decision that some advisers fought at the time and that in retrospect turned out to have devastating consequences for his image in some swing states.

In Iowa on Sunday, Obama told reporters: “In the era of the blogosphere, we have seen what happened with John McCain in 2000, what happened with John Kerry in 2004. If you don’t get on this stuff quickly, then it starts drifting around, and that is not something I am going to accept.”

So there, Hillary. And there. AND THERE!

The only problem was that the “leak” almost certainly didn’t come from the Clinton camp and as John Fund revealed in the WSJ, the “scandal” appears to be nothing more than warmed over Rezko – a minor blip of a scandal here in Chicago where such sweetheart deals between developers and politicians are simply a way to “grease the wheels” and allow for poorly paid legislators to get a little extra cash. It barely raised an eyebrow in this, a city awash in graft and corruption.

As for the Clinton camp, they seemed bemused by the spectacle presented by their timid opponent trying to take the gloves off but unable to figure out how to untie them.

Give Obama an “A” for effort anyway.

But before Obama runs home and show his mother that report card with the excellent grade for trying to fight, he better look at the grade he got for this idiocy:

Barack Obama has unveiled a new line of criticism against Hillary: In speeches he’s started to point to the allegation made in Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta’s Hillary book that the Clintons secretly formulated a 20-year-plan to deliver the presidency first to Bill, and then to Hillary.

“I’m not in this race to fulfill some long-held plan or because it was owed to me,” Obama said the other day.

Asked if that were a reference to the Gerth allegation, an Obama spokesperson left virtually no doubt that it was, telling Newsday: “Barack Obama has not been mapping out his run for president from Washington for the last 20 years like some of his opponents.”

But the source that Gerth and Van Natta cited with supposed first-hand knowledge of this plan—historian Taylor Branch—has since vehemently denied that any such pact existed. “The story is preposterous,” Branch told The Washington Post, adding: “I never heard either Clinton talk about a ‘plan’ for them both to become president.”

If you are going to take a swing at someone, make sure you don’t miss and have the punch come all the way around and smack you in your own face. This, unfortunately, is what happened to Obama here. Good thing he dropped that line of attack immediately. After all, most Americans admire someone who plans out their life so far in advance. At any rate, it’s hardly a detriment to Hillary’s campaign to remind Democrats who she’s married to.

In a very large way, Obama is a victim of his own success as a “uniter not a divider.” One can hardly claim the moral high ground while accusing your opponent of all sorts of nasty things. So the Illinois Senator has been forced to temper his attacks, to pull his punches lest he turn off his younger voters who pine for his “new politics” (which is really just the old politics all gussied up and with a little makeup on).

Having now pulled even in Iowa, Obama has a chance to go for the jugular and really hurt Hillary Clinton by questioning her trustworthiness, her commitment to ending the war, her wishy-washyness, and her scandal-plagued money raising operation. This latest round of polling will renew focus on his candidacy. He is no longer the longshot. He has a credible chance to win in Iowa. And since the media likes nothing more than a horse race in an election, these next few weeks are going to be crucial.

This is why Obama must drop this pretense of being above the fray and get into the mud where he belongs. There are ways to savage an opponent without sounding mean or nasty. Hillary hasn’t quite mastered that art as yet but you could look no further than The Gipper for inspiration in that regard.

Reagan was usually pretty good natured in his criticism – jokes with an edge. Obama doesn’t have to be funny nor does he have to stray far from his own issues to highlight the stark differences between himself and Clinton. And while he’s at it, he can question her integrity and trust – attributes she has given ample evidence that they should be questioned.

What he needs is the will to carry out such attacks. And to date, I haven’t seen it. His candidacy now depends on whether he can begin to give people a reason to not only vote for him but vote against Clinton. He’s taken his positive campaign just about as far as it can go. Now he is going to have to start peeling Clinton voters away from her in order to fashion a majority of Democrats who will support his efforts to become the Democratic nominee. And he’s not going to be able to do that by talking sweetness and light.

In what I hope will be a regular feature on this site, I will be following the progress of Illinois favorite son, Barak Obama, as he seeks to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

There really is no other way to describe the fawning, goo-goo eyed coverage of Mr. Obama in the press except “Obamania.” More has been written about his pecs than about his thoughts on Iraq. One would think his first name is “Rock Star” given how many times that appellation has appeared as a descriptive of his impact on a crowd. His books have rocketed to the top of the bestseller charts – thanks to millions of dollars in free publicity given by the media.

Every move he makes is doted on. Every sound he utters has reporters swooning. Every step he takes toward declaring his candidacy for President starts a new wave of hagiography about his life story; his humble, mixed race upbringing, his bootstrapping college and law school, and his political career (necessarily the shortest and least informative of what’s written about him).

Here in Illinois where Obama was something of a known quantity prior to his being anointed a rock star cum savior, local reporters have jumped on the Obama bandwagon with gusto, being even more explosively enthusiastic about his candidacy than out of town scribes:

Call me nuts again, but here are the eight reasons why 65 percent of more than 13,000 click voters at chicagotribune.com this week were right when they said that Obama will win the Democratic nomination:

Columnist Eric Zorn then goes on to list reasons such as his likability, his race, his “rock star” status attracting the young, – and on and on. He even opines that Obama will win because “his team is tough:”

The snarks in the water have tried to stick Obama with the schoolyard nickname “Obambi” to suggest that he’s weak and naive. But he has assembled a seasoned campaign crew that will not shy from political street fights.

I pointed out before that “a Democratic corpse plucked from a Chicago graveyard could have won the race for Illinois Senator in 2004.” The Republicans self destructed six months before election day. And their choosing Alan Keyes – an extremely conservative, out of state politician – to replace the scandal damaged Jack Ryun barely 10 weeks prior to the voting was such a clear act of desperation that Obama outpolled Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry by more than 20 points on election day.

Obama as tough campaigner? Ridiculous. The man has yet to be tested. And given the team of cutthroats in Hillary’s shop (blooded in two national campaigns) who are sharpening their knives in eager anticipation of shredding the rookie from cheek to groin, I daresay that there is a very good chance that much of the luster applied to Obama’s personae is bound to be sheared off in the process.

Where will they find the ammunition?

With only a slim, two-year record in the U.S. Senate, Obama doesn’t have many controversial congressional votes which political opponents can frame into attack ads. But his eight years as an Illinois state senator are sprinkled with potentially explosive land mines, such as his abortion and gun control votes.

Obama who filed papers this week creating an exploratory committee to seek the 2008 Democratic nomination may also find himself fielding questions about his actions outside public office, from his acknowledgment of cocaine use in his youth to a more recent land purchase from a political supporter who is facing charges in an unrelated kickback scheme involving investment firms seeking state business.

That “land purchase” is a scandal waiting to happen. In June of 2005, Obama purchased a House on the South Side of Chicago for $1.65 million. On that same day, the wife of a top Democratic fundraiser (who was under suspicions for illegalities and influence peddling at the time) purchased the adjoining vacant lot for $625,000:

Obama and Rezko then engaged in a series of private transactions to redivide and improve their adjoining parcels, the Tribune disclosed in November.

These arrangements came after Rezko was widely reported to be under a federal grand jury investigation.

Obama said it was “boneheaded” to engage in those transactions when Rezko was “under a cloud of concern.” Obama further told Tribune editors and reporters Dec. 14: “In retrospect, it was stupid. So I’m happy to own up to that. And, I will also acknowledge that from his perspective, he no doubt believed that, by buying the piece of property next to me, that he would, if not be doing me a favor, that it would help strengthen our relationship.”

Obama added that he had never “done favors for [Rezko] of any sort. Most of the time, I’ve never been in a position to do favors for him. I don’t control jobs. I don’t control contracts. There were no bills that he was pushing when I was in the state legislature that I know of or that he talked to me about. And there were no bills in federal legislation that he was concerned about, so there was no sense of the betrayal of the public trust here.”

And as far as Obama never having done any favors for Rezko, the fact that he hired a young man as an intern who was the son of one of Rezko’s associates less than a week before the land deal makes one wonder if there are any other “favors” Obama may have done for the disgraced fundraiser or his cronies.

Such speculation has raised the hackles of the Obamaniacs. Eric Zorn again:

All I hear amid the noise is the thrum of resentment and fear:

Resentment that he’s not playing by the old rules—that he hasn’t acquired his political capital by spending years swapping favors and grandstanding in lesser offices or by climbing the coattails of his politically powerful father.

And fear that he’s going to be a hell of a good candidate—brilliant, telegenic, immensely likable and on the popular (negative) side of the war in Iraq from the git-go.

Not to say that he’ll be a perfect candidate

That last appeared to have been hastily added by Zorn lest anyone try and count the stars in his eyes whenever he talks about Obama.

I shouldn’t pick on Zorn. He’s not alone. Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet:

Obama’s physique is old news to Chicago Sun-Times readers. I’ve worked out several times next to Obama at the East Bank Club, but alas, could not follow him into the locker room. My colleague Neil Steinberg did and reported on Jan. 6, 2006, that the undressed Obama “doesn’t have enough fat on his body to make a butter pat.”

You be the judge in looking at the People photo whether anything has changed in a year. (My blog awaits your comments.)

“Telegenic” and sex appeal to boot! Now that’s what I call reporting!

Clearly, Obama has struck a chord with celebrity watchers, liberal Democrats, and even ordinary Joes who ache for someone to mount the White Horse and ride to the rescue; the shining knight saving us all from our partisan follies and rancorous politics. But is there anything inside the armor our savior is wearing? Or is it simply a matter of us filling that empty suit with whatever hopes and dreams we can stuff inside it?

Obama is not an everyman. He is an “anyman” – he’s anything you want him to be. Until he defines himself, he risks having his political opponents do it for him. And that’s an opportunity that Team Hillary is salivating for.