Obama and the ethics reform con

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David Freddoso continues to carefully lay out the facts behind the myth that is Obama.  Today, he takes a look at the carefully constructed myth that Obama is some sort of ethics reformer.  He looks at the situation in Illinois and finds the law there “weak, toothless, easy to bend, and impossible to break”:

• Monday we explored how Senator Obama and his staff helped obtain $320,000 in state grants for Robert Blackwell Jr. — a political donor and client of Obama’s private law practice. Blackwell had just paid Obama $112,000 in retainer fees when the grant money started coming in, and he went on to be a large Obama donor. Somehow, When Obama wrote a letter for his private law client to receive a grant, he was not violating Illinois ethics laws.
• When Obama tried to hide the obvious conflict of interest by burying Blackwell’s companies on his senate disclosure forms, amid a list of hundreds of his firm’s law clients, he was not violating Illinois ethics laws.
• When Obama failed to mention in those forms that Blackwell had paid a majority of his income in 2001, and was not just any old client, Obama was not breaking Illinois ethics laws.
• Obama’s aide, Dan Shomon was working part-time for Obama and part-time for Blackwell, the beneficiary of the grants he helped obtain. Apparently, that did not violate Illinois ethics laws, either.
• When [Emil] Jones leaves office, he will be allowed to take with him $577,605.04 from his campaign fund, which he can roll into his own bank account. That doesn’t violate Illinois ethics laws, either.

I could keep on quoting, but you should read the whole article.

You can’t really blame Obama for all this.  After all, despite his claims, he really had next to nothing to do with it

When the 1998 law passed the state senate on May 22, 1998, it set off a mad dash for incumbent legislators to fill their coffers as quickly as possible, so as to maximize the amount in their accounts on the grandfather date. According to the Chicago Tribune, State Rep. Monique Davis (D.) went so far as to lend her campaign $33,000 five days before the deadline. The campaign of state Sen. George Shadid (D.) borrowed $50,000.

Obama cannot be blamed for any of this because he did not write this 1998 ethics law. In fact, he had very little to do with it until the day it passed. He was not the one to propose the ethics bill in the Illinois senate. He was not even a cosponsor until the day it passed. Five months after the ethics bill was introduced, and more than one month after it reached the senate, Obama was invited by Emil Jones to become its chief Democratic cosponsor. As David Mendell writes in Obama: From Promise to Power, former Rep. Abner Mikva convinced Jones to let Obama handle the legislation. Sen. Dick Klemm (D.) was removed as chief cosponsor and replaced by Obama on May 22, 1998 — the very day the bill passed.

This is how you pad a thin resume without offending anyone in the Chicago Machine.  This is how you please your mentor and distract the media with claims of passing important legisaltion.

But it is a con.  The question is whether enough voters will find out about the truth before November.  Freddoso is doing his part, but something tells me the mainstream media won’t be helping out.