Rahm Emanuel, a congressman from Chicago and a friend of Obama's, told me that he, Obama, David Wilhelm, who was Blagojevich's campaign co-chair, and another Blagojevich aide were the top strategists of Blagojevich's victory. He and Obama "participated in a small group that met weekly when Rod was running for governor," Emanuel said. "We basically laid out the general election, Barack and I and these two." A spokesman for Blagojevich confirmed Emanuel's account, although David Wilhelm, who now works for Obama, said that Emanuel had overstated Obama's role. -- from Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama, by Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker, July 21, 2008.

In one of the more incisive indictments of the MSM I've witnessed, certainly by one of its own, Joe Scarborough tore into the media this morning for its failure to have investigated Barack Obama's political roots.  In particular, the Morning Joe host ripped the MSM for not testing the truth of Ryan Lizza's reporting, above, of Rahm Emanuel's claim that he and Obama were central figures in Blago's 2002 gubernatorial campaign.  Scarborough pointed out that already this summer, when the Lizza article appeared, it was known that Blago was under a deep ethical cloud. Yet the MSM charged off to Wasilla to investigate Sarah Palin's librarian, utterly uninterested in the report of Obama's intimate link with America's most corrupt governor. John Harwood of NYT/CNBC and Mike Barnicle played the perfect foils for Scarborough's impassioned tirade, Barnicle going so far as to claim that no investigation was necessary: his "instinct" told him that Emanuel had overstated Obama's involvement with Blago's campaign.

JOE SCARBOROUGH: How rich is it that we sit around and say "we don't know, we have to wait until Obama tells us.  We don't know what these connections, we don't know whether he really ran the 2002 [Blago] campaign or not"?  Again, I will guarantee you, if Sarah Palin had run the most corrupt--if Sarah Palin had run Ted Stevens's campaign in 2002, and somebody had bragged about it in the New Yorker, the press would have savaged her. But we sit here now, it's almost Christmas, and we don't know the truth about it. We don't know the truth about any of this, because we haven't done the investigative work.

SCARBOROUGH: I'm convicting the press because they didn't investigate this past summer, when they were sending all those people to Wasilla, a town of 9,000, they should have been going to Chicagoland.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: I think that's really fair.

SCARBOROUGH: The press never covered --

JOHN HARWOOD: To cover Blagojevich?

SCARBOROUGH [temperature rising]: To look at the background of a candidate who had only been in national politics for one year before he decided to run for president of the United States, and was born from the most corrupt political city in America.  Do you not think, do we not think, that warranted an investigation? Not to suggest he did anything wrong, but to see what his background was?

HARWOOD: Of course.  There was coverage of his background--Ryan Lizza's piece.

SCARBOROUGH: OK, then tell me this--yeah, Lizza's the only one that wrote about it and he got kicked off the campaign plane.  So here's my question for you: if we know so much about this, answer this question.  Did Barack Obama, was Barack Obama intimately involved in Blagojevich's 2002 campaign?

HARWOOD: He was involved, I don't know how intimately.

SCARBOROUGH: Why? Why don't you know that?

HARWOOD: I'm not sure how to factor out the BS quotient in that quote you were talking about.

SCARBOROUGH: Why can't you factor that out?

HARWOOD: Well, because it's not a story I personally covered.

SCARBOROUGH: I know, but why didn't somebody investigate this six months ago when Ryan Lizza wrote it?  It's pretty fascinating, because in 2008 we knew he was the most corrupt governor in America.

MIKE BARNICLE: Let me put my newspaper columnist/newspaper editor hat on for you to answer your question about Wasilla, Alaska as opposed to the Blagojevich administration.

SCARBOROUGH: Not Blagojevich--Barack Obama.

BARNICLE: Whatever.  She was the next, new face. No one had ever heard of her. So you're going to send as many people as you can afford up to Alaska to explain to the reading public who she is. You're sitting there, you know Obama, you know the governor of Illinois --

SCARBOROUGH: You don't know Obama.  You can't even tell me whether he ran the 2002 campaign of the most corrupt governor in America.

BARNICLE: I can tell you this much: he was a state senator then, and he ran that campaign about as much as I did.

SCARBOROUGH: Oh really?  How do you know that?

BARNICLE: Just instinct.

SCARBOROUGH: Instinct?

BARNICLE: Yeah.

SCARBOROUGH [at moment of screencap]: Newspaper editor: shouldn't we have facts instead of instinct? That's what everybody's working on: instinct! You know what? I like him! So I expect that he's a really good guy. I hope if I ever run for politics again, I am given this much benefit of the doubt.

—Mark Finkelstein is a NewsBusters contributing editor and host of Right Angle. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net.