Last week, we discussed in some detail the media’s interest in Barack Obama’s real-estate “controversy” with Antoin “Tony” Rezko and why it’s entirely misplaced. It’s a bit of a convoluted story, but the bottom line remains the same: for all of the buzz about Obama’s so-called “shady” deal, no one, anywhere, has actually accused the senator of doing anything wrong. There’s just nothing there.
But, says the Chicago Tribune, there’s a new wrinkle. There may not have been any influence peddling, or pay-to-play instances, or votes Obama cast on legislation to benefit Rezko (in fact Obama did the opposite), but a son of one of Rezko’s associates was one of 99 interns who helped out at Obama’s office for a few weeks in 2005.
Political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko made a modest pitch to Sen. Barack Obama last year. Rezko recommended a 20-year-old student from Glenview for one of the coveted summer internships in Obama’s Capitol Hill office.
The student got the job and spent five weeks in Washington, answering Obama’s front office phone and logging constituent mail. The student was paid an $804 stipend — about $160 a week — for a position valued mostly for the experience it provides.
But now that otherwise unremarkable internship — one of nearly 100 Obama’s office awarded in 2005 — raises new questions for the senator, who says he has never done any favors for Rezko.
I can appreciate the notion that the Trib is anxious to rough Obama up a bit in advance of the 2008 race, but this is pretty weak. It wasn’t even Rezko’s kid.
As RCP’s Tom Bevan — who, as a conservative Republican, is not exactly an Obama supporter — wrote, “Please. If we went and made a federal case over every Congressional internship that’s been doled out over the years to the child of a friend or political contributor we’d run out of trees and ink by next Thursday.”
They’ll have to do better than this.
And yet, the rest of the media quickly picked up on these new “revelations” anyway, whether the facts warranted it or not. As Conor Clarke wrote in a recent TNR piece:
[S]ure, appearances can actually be useful, insofar as the appearance of impropriety is sometimes evidence of a real-live, slam-dunk, actual impropriety (if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, et cetera). And, of course, presidential candidates should be held to a higher level of scrutiny. But a higher level of scrutiny does not mean a different standard of guilt: In this case, journalists have followed the smoke and haven’t found the fire. At that point, accusing someone of something that looks wrong stops making sense.
So when Obama apologizes for having created the appearance of wrongdoing, he isn’t apologizing for anything meaningful — and rightly so. He’s apologizing for a public misperception. The same holds true for the way in which the events “raise questions” about Obama’s judgment: Without pundits there to misinterpret them, Obama’s actions are trivial. By itself, the Rezko deal couldn’t have been a “boneheaded” lapse (Obama’s word), because the wrongdoing depends on circularity: The Rezko deal was stupid only to the extent that observers arrive at the mistaken conclusion that Obama was doing something wrong. As Michel Kinsley once pointed out, that makes the appearance-of-impropriety charge self-fulfilling — the accusation helps create the perception it complains about.
The role of the press in all this should be to put perceptions in line with the facts as they stand, not inflate the perceptions and raise the distant possibility that the facts might line up behind them.
If this is how the media is going to cover the 2008 race, it’s already pretty discouraging.