Marcial Froelke Coburn begins her August, 2001, Chicago Mag story this way:

At 55, Bill Ayers, the notorious sixties radical, still carries a whiff of that rock ‘n’ roll decade: the oversize wire-rim glasses that, in a certain light, reveal themselves as bifocals; a backpack over his shoulder—not some streamlined, chic job, but a funky backpack-of-the-people, complete with a photo button of abolitionist John Brown pinned to one strap.

Yet he is also a man of the moment. For example: There is his cell phone, laid casually on the tabletop of this neighborhood Taylor Street coffee shop, and his passion for double skim lattes. In conversation, he has an immediate, engaging presence; he may not have known you long but, his manner suggests, he’s already fascinated. Then there is his quick laugh and his tendency to punctuate his comments by a tap on your arm.

Ugh to the tap on arm.  Yuck.

Double yuck, however, to the pic of Ayers standing on the flag, which is what’s going to be run in lots of places and in fact was just run on Hannity’s show on Fox.

He’s a friend of O.?  Held one of his first fund-raisers in Hyde Park?  Someone he met at Aldi’s?  Questions, we got questions.

Obama’s exaggerations, doubletalk, and systematic deception are “unappealing,” but also “unexceptional” for the politico on the campaign trail, says City Journal’s Fred Siegel in The Australian, but he fingers O. as a special case, with reference to his Chicago base:

What makes it different is that there’s not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.

Obama, far more than the others, is the “judge me by what I say and not what I do” candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.

Look to the Chicago Connection and his “conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics,” says Siegel, citing its “political and cultural tribalism,” where

racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics.

Siegel cites John Kass’s “Chicago way” and says:

At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.

Why did Chi pols anoint him?  To make themselves look good.

Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor, Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty of pork to Jones’s district. When asked about pork-barrel spending, Jones famously replied: “Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

He’s Jones’s boy — word used not as in Deep South but as at City Hall.   Tony Allen-Mills in The Times of London:

Long before Barack Obama launched his campaign for the White House, when he was considering a run for the US Senate in 2003, he paid an intriguing visit to a former Chicago sewers inspector who had risen to become one of the most influential African-American politicians in Illinois.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

The father-son motif arises:

Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”

Or, per Todd Spivak in the Houston Press, Jones became “Obama’s kingmaker”:

Several months before Obama announced his U.S. Senate bid, Jones called his old friend Cliff Kelley, a former Chicago alderman who now hosts the city’s most popular black call-in radio ­program.

I called Kelley last week and he recollected the private conversation as follows:

“He said, ‘Cliff, I’m gonna make me a U.S. Senator.'”

“Oh, you are? Who might that be?”

“Barack Obama.”

As a state senator, “he made a specialty of voting present,” says Siegel.  But in the U.S. senate, he was “such a down-the-line partisan that, according to Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the Democrats more often than did the party’s majority leader, Harry Reid.”

Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial politics.  . . . .   [W]hites who are at odds with, or who haven’t delivered for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright, with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.

More more more is at this site.