From former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s trial we have learned that the governor, during a conversation with his chief of staff, John Harris, that was being recorded, worried that their conversation might be recorded. Harris dismissed his concerns. “So what if you’re on a recording,” Harris told him. “You could be ordering a cheese and mushroom pizza.” As everyone now knows, they were not ordering pizza, but trying to leverage the governor’s ability to appoint a U.S. Senator into a lucrative position for Blagojevich after his term ended. We have also learned that the day before the November 4, 2008 presidential election, then Senator Obama personally called SEIU leader Tom Balanoff and told him that Valerie Jarrett wanted to be Senator. Balanoff told the President that he would bring this to Blagojevich’s attention.
Thus, we have an example, even before the President had been elected, of his familiarity with the cavalier trade of political offices. And we discover the modus operandi of these kinds of operations: the approach through an intermediary, to keep Obama’s hands clean. Thus, it is Obama ally Tom Balanoff who approaches Governor Blagojevich. Later it was former President Clinton who met with Rep. Joe Sestak and offered him a job in order to get him to drop out of the Pennsylvania Senate race. And, similarly, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina was dispatched with job offers to entice Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff not to enter his state’s Senate primary.
The White House has at least attempted to justify the Sestak and Romanoff incidents, but had no comment on the Balanoff story. This comes as no surprise since the key players of the Obama political operation cut their teeth in Chicago politics, where dealing in Senate seats is like ordering cheese and mushroom pizza.
Correction: The original draft stated that the mushroom and cheese pizza quote was used by Gov. Blagojevich to placate John Harris’ worry about being recorded. It was, in fact, the other way around and the text has been changed to reflect this.
