Obama in Windy City as Charges of 'Chicago-style' Pollitics Step Up

[Geee]

The Hill:

Obama in Windy City as charges of 'Chicago-style' politics step up
By Sam Youngman - 05/29/10 06:00 AM ET

President Barack Obama returned to Chicago this week, but Republicans repeatedly accusing him of bringing "Chicago-style" politics to the White House say Obama has no reason to be homesick.

Now that the White House has admitted that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel used former President Bill Clinton to try to persuade Rep. Joe Sestak (D) not to run in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, Republicans have more ammunition with which to accuse Obama of abandoning change for politics as usual.

But the charge that Obama, who is spending the weekend in Illinois on his first trip back since February 2009, and his Chicago team have brought the notorious hardball tactics of the Windy City to Washington are nothing new for the minority party.

The Republican National Committee (RNC), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, have been accusing Obama of "arm-twisting, Chicago-style" politics since not long after he took office.

Back then, Issa's office began accusing the White House of "injecting Chicago-style politics" into the Census process, accusing Obama of moving the Census Bureau from the Commerce Department to the White House.

Emanuel draws more than his share of the attacks because of his background as a Chicago congressman and his reputation for bare-knuckle political brawling.

In August 2009, Issa accused Emanuel of engaging in such tactics after it was reported that the chief of staff was pushing back on lawmakers who questioned the effectiveness of Obama's $787 billion stimulus package.

Issa, a perennial thorn in the side of the Obama administration, accused Emanuel of practicing "Chicago-style" politics in a letter he sent to the White House.

Throughout the long and fever-pitched healthcare debate, the RNC repeatedly bashed the tactics of Obama and his aides as bullying and "arm-twisting" techniques more apropos in an old gangster movie.

The Sestak saga, which the White House was tight-lipped about for months, is perhaps the best opportunity Republicans have had yet to tarnish Obama's desired reformer image.

Republican strategist Kevin Madden, former spokesman for ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, said "the reform facade has quickly eroded and revealed a president and a White House steeped in the practice of business-as-usual politics."

"Candidate Obama faked his way through the campaign as a centrist and a reformer, but President Obama is neither," Madden said Friday. "He's revealed himself to be a partisan, conventional politician.

"But we really shouldn't be surprised. The very idea that a product of the Chicago political machine would be able to deliver as a reformer was pure fantasy. Big speeches, flowery rhetoric, but it's all been a big game of make-believe."

[NCTexan]

Their philosophy and influence hover ever stronger over this administration:

 

 

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• America Hating Black Liberation Theology
  
• Chicago DEM Machine Thug Politics Empowered by the Unions
  
• One World New Age Socialism