Obama’s friends also his enemies

Politics is a game played with associations and agendas, the latter driving the former. No candidate who has ascended to his party’s pinnacle has failed to play the game well, but while definitions are relative, outcomes are less so. Barack Obama is a case in point.
His rise has been the sort measured in G-force. In 1986, when Republican John McCain was first elected to the U.S. Senate, Obama was an even fresher faced 25, toiling as a community organizer for a church group in Chicago. In 2000, when McCain took his first stab at the presidency, Obama had moved from baby political steps to an unsuccessful run for a House seat. Now, the junior senator from Illinois is a hair’s breadth from the world’s most cherished political throne.
To get there, he has relied on the kindness of some friends from whom he now is estranged. The latest is James Johnson, the former Fannie Mae CEO whom Obama selected to vet vice presidential candidates. Johnson’s name, of course, carried an asterisk unseen to the masses and, presumably, Obama earlier in the campaign when, amid housing’s slide, he waxed sanctimonious about the lending practices of Countrywide Financial. Obama applied one shoe to Johnson’s backside after the other dropped: Johnson was the beneficiary of more than $5 million in questionable loans from Countrywide.
Oops.
After dithering over what to do about the political hazards of a connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his accompanying bombast, Obama made haste to dispatch Johnson to a place well beyond arm’s length. The Wall Street Journal disclosed the loans to Johnson last weekend, and Obama sent Johnson to the hinterlands Wednesday. Obama was similarly speedy in giving the shove to the Rev. Michael Pfleger after his pantomime of a weeping Hillary Clinton.
Now The Journal warns of a new figure of dubious distinction emerging from Obama’s inner sanctum. Another member of Obama’s running mate search team, Eric Holder, while working as deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, helped secure the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.
That sparked a controversy and impeachment talk (again) in the waning days of the Clinton administration, some people being put off by the fact that Rich was being prosecuted on charges that he illegally negotiated oil deals with Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis. To prove his innocence, Rich fled the country. Damnable skeptics insist on a link between his pardon and the large financial contributions Rich’s former wife made to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Library.
Rich was ably represented by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, unimpeachable except for his conviction of perjury and obstructing justice for his part in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
All this demonstrates two things, both of them more relevant than Obama’s supporters in politics and big media care to acknowledge. First, while Obama is fond of playing the fresh-thinking outsider’s role, some of his associations carry a pungent Beltway odor. He holds his nose to this in rhetoric but inhales deeply in practice. Second, he has demonstrated a want of care in the selection of some of his closest allies.
As the campaign intensifies, we are sure to learn more on this subject. Obama’s associations have helped bring him this far. They might also prevent his advancing farther still.