I realize he’s trying to sound like a man of the people here, but this from Broder is telling:
When and if Roland Burris claims the Senate seat from Illinois formerly occupied by Barack Obama, it will represent the greatest climb-down by an incoming president since Sam Nunn turned Bill Clinton around on the issue of gays in the military at the start of Clinton’s first term.
Fortunately for Obama, the voters are much more concerned with the economy and Obama’s effort to fix it than they are with the infighting over the Illinois Senate seat.
Do the words “fortunately” and “the economy” (given the shape the economy is in) really belong in the same sentence? And isn’t it a bit unseemly to lament (as Broder seems to) that the country is so focused on real problems that it can’t be bothered to impeach Obama for a scandal to which he has no real connection?
From the beginning of BlagoGate, or whatever they’re calling it, my feeling has been that unless the dude wanted $700 billion for the seat, it just wasn’t that big of a story. Not now. Throw the guy in jail if he broke the law. But unlike one recent high-profile governmental felon I could name, his corruption isn’t tied up with an effort to sell an unnecessary war that’s caused thousands of deaths, destroyed the country’s prestige abroad, and cost the treasury as much as 3.5 trillion dollars. (It goes without saying that the same applies to Larry Craig, Mark Foley, and even Duke Cunningham.)
So it’s fine what we can all have our fun joking about Burris’s mausoleum, Blago’s poor-man’s-Elvis haircut, and the like, but there is absolutely nothing fortunate about facing the worst financial crisis since World War II. Unless you’re David Broder.