{"id":14357,"date":"2008-01-25T12:48:47","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:48:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/14357.html"},"modified":"2008-01-25T12:48:47","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:48:47","slug":"the-rezko-controversy-a-non-scandal-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-rezko-controversy-a-non-scandal-revisited\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rezko controversy — a non-scandal revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, at that very contentious debate<\/a> for the Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton falsely insisted that Barack Obama had said he “really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years.” Obama responded that he was fighting Republican ideas when Clinton was “a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart.” Clinton, not amused, responded, “I was fighting against those ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.”<\/p>\n

And with that, the name Antoin “Tony” Rezko became interesting to campaign watchers again.<\/p>\n

As regular readers know, the story has been around for a while<\/a>, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to it. The LA Times went digging, and ran a front-page piece<\/a> on the “controversy” on Wednesday, but if there’s anything seriously damaging about Obama and Rezko, the LAT couldn’t find it.<\/p>\n

As Matt Yglesias noted<\/a> today:<\/p>\n

The essence of the matter is that there doesn’t seem to have been any quid<\/i> to go with the pro quo<\/i> here. Rezko tried to curry favor with politicians in order to get stuff from them, and Obama was no exception…. It’s possible that had Obama remained in the Senate and had Rezko not gotten indicted, that he would have found occasion to do some more serious favors but in the real world there’s nothing there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, we can all move on now? Unfortunately, no. Now there’s an apparent effort to connect Rezko to Hillary Clinton<\/em>. Matt Lauer confronted<\/a> the senator this morning with a picture, which appears to be from the 1990s, of Bill and Hillary Clinton standing alongside Rezko, in what was almost certainly a grip-and-grin moment.<\/p>\n

Clinton said she didn’t remember meeting Rezko — and there’s no reason in the world to doubt her on this — but the story is nevertheless getting big play<\/a> from Drudge.<\/p>\n

This is all pretty silly.
\n
\nAs Jason Zengerle noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the Rezko thing is a very big deal for either candidate. So far as I can tell, Obama didn’t do any favors for him — other than giving the son of a Rezko friend an internship. And, just because Drudge has a photo of the Clintons with Rezko doesn’t mean they did anything untoward, either. But, of course, Hillary was the one who brought up Rezko (in response, to be fair, to Obama’s shot about her serving on Wal-Mart’s board), so she left herself open to this sort of thing. I wonder if the Clinton team is furiously searching for a photo of Obama with Sam Walton.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If there’s any evidence of serious wrongdoing by either Obama or<\/em> Clinton in relation to Rezko, it’s hiding well.<\/p>\n

As for the internship angle, apparently one out of about 100 internships Obama’s office offered in 2005 went to the son of one of Rezko’s friends. (The kid spent five weeks in Washington, answering Obama\u2019s front office phone and logging constituent mail.) As scandals go, it’s pretty laughable — as Tom Bevan, a conservative Republican, said<\/a>, \u201cPlease. If we went and made a federal case over every Congressional internship that\u2019s been doled out over the years to the child of a friend or political contributor we\u2019d run out of trees and ink by next Thursday.\u201d<\/p>\n

I’m afraid there’s very little smoke and no fire. Move along; nothing to see here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, at that very contentious debate for the Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton falsely insisted that Barack Obama had said he “really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years.” Obama responded that he was fighting Republican ideas when Clinton was “a corporate lawyer sitting on the board […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}