Whole World Is Watching: “A Scandal Straight From A Sopranos Script”

Dec 12, 2008 10 Comments ›› Angelia

F-in’ funny sh-t

Times Of London:

The foul-mouthed mumblings of the Governor of Illinois are not the background noise that Barack Obama was hoping for

No?

How often have you thought, as you watched some film about the Mob, or some television series about corruption in high places, that, as entertaining as it might be, it fails a basic plausibility test?

We know that people do bad things, stupid things. But there’s a clichéd theatricality about it all on the screen that leaves it looking more like entertaining parody than realism. Nobody actually tries to pull off that stuff, do they? The language is especially overdone. Nobody really speaks like that, surely?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic Governor of the great state of Illinois. Mr Blagojevich was indicted on Tuesday on corruption charges after federal investigators caught him on tape discussing ways in which he might personally profit from his authority to name someone to a vacant seat in the US Senate.

The official transcript captures the Governor’s deliberations with his aides in a language, and, it would seem, a tone, straight out of a Mob movie:

“I’ve got this thing and it’s f****** golden and uh, uh I’m just not giving it up for f****** nothing,” he says, referring to the Senate seat.

If he doesn’t get the price he’s looking for, he warns possible buyers, he might just take the seat in Washington himself.

“Unless I get something real good, sh-t, I’ll just send myself. You know what I’m saying?”

It’s not clear from the transcript whether he had cotton wool balls in his mouth as he spoke but it seems a reasonable bet.

It would be a terrific story in any circumstances, but, of course, what makes it tinglingly compelling is that the Senate seat in question is the one that was recently vacated by none other than Barack Obama, after he was elected president.

What might inflict damage on Mr. Obama is the familiar American torture of legal process that will now unfold.

The problem is this. Even if he’s done nothing wrong, Mr Obama and his aides will doubtless have said and done things in the past few weeks they don’t want made public: that’s the way government works. But now much of what they have done will be subjected to the blowtorch of prosecutorial scrutiny and suddenly more attentive media.

That will require a delicate dance around falsehood to preserve the obligatory confidences of politics. It will call for an exercise of tremendous balletic skills not to trip up. For example, when asked about any connection between himself and Mr Blagojevich this week, Mr Obama said: “I had no contact with the Governor or his office and so we were not… I was not aware of what was happening.”

Note the change from first person plural to first person singular midway through that sentence.

Then there was the correction issued this week by David Axelrod, his principal adviser, of something he said a few weeks ago. Mr Axelrod had previously stated that Mr Obama had discussed his Senate replacement with Mr Blagojevich. Now Mr Axelrod says he misspoke.

Again, there’s nothing necessarily suspicious about any of this. But it suggests a steadily increasing pressure on an already highly pressured political team. It risks prising out of them all kinds of information that they might not want to share.

The danger in all this is clear. Mr Obama would like to keep the focus in the next few weeks on his new Cabinet, his immediate legislative goals, his plans to pull America out of its current mess. Instead he will be spending time issuing denials, treading carefully through a legal minefield of prior statements, past associations, reported meetings and private conversations.

He wants the sound that greets his presidency to be an operatic overture of hope; not the foul-mouthed mumblings of a politician who sounds like he stepped out of The Sopranos.