Barack Obama's Glass House

Politics: Barack Obama accuses John McCain of corruption as his partner in a Chicago real estate deal goes on trial. In both Illinois and Washington, D.C., Obama is no stranger to those trying to buy influence.

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Campaigning in Ohio last Saturday, Obama accused presumptive GOP presidential nominee McCain of having lobbyists as top aides and said "many of them have been running their businesses on the campaign bus while they've been helping him."

Obama's charge against the man who co-authored the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill with Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold because he thought there was too much money in politics comes on the heels of a flimsily concocted story on the front page of the New York Times suggesting without facts that McCain had an affair with an attractive female lobbyist for whom he did political favors.

This pure coincidence, of course, delineates a line of attack that both Obama and the media that fawn over him are likely to use this year — a revival of the "culture of corruption" strategy to replace the "failed Iraq policy" strategy that died after the surge succeeded and political reconciliation became a reality in that country.

It also suggests how unwilling the mainstream media are to examine the record of the former Illinois state senator who says, among other things, that McCain's health care plans reflect "the agenda of the drug and insurance lobbyists who back his campaign and use money and influence to block real health care reform."

Obama knows insurance lobbyists all too well. Back in 2003, Illinois lawmakers, including Obama, tried to expand health care coverage with the "Health Care Justice Act." As Scott Helman of the Boston Globe reported last September, insurers and their lobbyists, fearing a government-run system, "found a sympathetic ear in Obama, who amended the bill more to their liking." During debate on the bill on May 19, 2004, Helman notes, Obama acknowledged he had "worked diligently with the insurance industry."

Meanwhile, Obama was willing to accept campaign contributions from insurers, including $1,000 to his state Senate campaign committee from the Professional Independent Insurance Agents PAC in June 2003 and $1,000 from the Illinois Insurance PAC in December of the same year. According to Helman, "Obama also collected money from the insurance industry and its lobbyists for his successful U.S. Senate campaign in 2004."

The Washington Times reports that while Sen. Obama has said he won't accept money from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), he has accepted "tens of thousands" from partners at Covington & Burling LLP, which was paid nearly a half-million dollars to lobby for PhRMA last year.

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that partners at Covington & Burling have given Obama $25,000 in contributions and $10,560 since October. Covington & Burling lawyer Eric Holder, a former top deputy in the Clinton Justice Department, gave $4,600.

Obama might claim they gave as private individuals, not as lobbyists or as representatives of lobbying firms. But that's splitting hairs too fine. Partners at the Chicago law firm of Kirkland Ellis LLP gave Obama more than $70,000 in contributions last year. The firm represented a pharmaceutical company.

As Obama questions McCain's ethics, the corruption trial of Tony Rezko began on Monday. When Hillary Clinton blasted Obama's cozy relationship with Rezko in a recent debate, she wasn't far off the mark.

Rezko and Obama go back at least to 1995, when Obama ran for a seat in the Illinois Senate. Among his earliest supporters was Rezko, who through two of his companies gave Obama $2,000. Obama won election in 1996 in a district that contained 11 of Rezko's 30 low-income housing projects, the Chicago Sun Times reports. In 2003, when Obama said he would run for the U.S. Senate, Rezko held a lavish fundraiser at his Wilmette, Ill., mansion.

They would do business yet again. In 2005, at a time Rezko was under federal investigation of influence peddling in the administration of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Sen. Obama and Rezko's wife Rita bought adjacent pieces of property from a Chicago doctor.

The doctor sold one parcel to Obama for $1.65 million, $300,000 below the asking price, while Rezko's wife paid full price, $625.000, for the adjacent vacant lot. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko's wife $104,500 for a 10-foot wide strip of her land, allegedly so he could have a bigger yard. But it rendered the Rezko parcel too small to build on, thereby increasing the value of Obama's property.

Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows. Obama has engaged in sweetheart land deals with contributors accused of influence peddling while accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from firms that peddle influence.

Somehow the New York Times doesn't think all this is Page 1 material. But we bet John McCain will mention it really soon.