JUST AS IT WOULD BE STRANGE IF THEY'D HAD NO CONTACT...:

Emanuel Had Contact With Governor’s Office on Senate Seat (HELENE COOPER and JACKIE CALMES, 12/14/08, NY Times)

President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, communicated with the office of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois about potential candidates for Mr. Obama’s Senate seat and provided a list of names, according to two Obama associates briefed on the matter.

The Obama associates said the interactions concerned several people who might fill the seat. Such contacts are common among party officials when a political vacancy is to be filled. It was not clear whether the communication was via direct telephone calls.

The Chicago Tribune reported that communications between Mr. Emanuel and the governor, both Democrats, had been captured on court-approved wiretaps, but Obama associates gave conflicting accounts of the interactions.

Pressure builds on Obama to release his Blagojevich contacts (Andrew Malcolm, 12/14/08, LA Times)

That does not mean, of course, that Emanuel was involved in any wrongdoing. He's a close political friend of Blagojevich's in the clan-filled world of Chicago machine politics and inherited his 5th District House seat from Blagojevich when he became governor in 2002 on a reform platform.

As a representative of the outgoing senator and president-elect and a member of the same party, it would be hard to believe Emanuel or someone did not communicate somehow with Blagojevich or his staff.

What's puzzled some people and raised suspicions among others is Emanuel's refusal to talk about it (reportedly physically pushing one reporter's tape recorder away and having a verbal altercation with another) and the delay on Obama's part in releasing the promised diary of contacts.

From a practical point of view, if everything is above board, what's to hide?

From a political communications and PR point of view, the atypically clumsy silence and delay creates doubts among even some Democrats, an information vacuum that opponents seek to fill with items like this video below and that has turned what could have been a one- or two-day state scandal story into nearly a week-long saga now involving a new national leader who promised to change the way the people's business is done.

...it's strange that they don't feel comfortable simply revealing what those contacts were.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2008 11:20 AM