The real winners

Before I tell you how an indicted Illinois Combine Republican boss/Asphalt King and his loyal pork-barrel ally, the incoming U.S. secretary of transportation, are the big winners in the ridiculous Tombstone Burris affair, first let’s analyze what went wrong.

President-elect Barack Obama and the Senate Democrats could have saved themselves, and the rest of America, the pain of suffering through the political soap opera around the new junior senator from Illinois, Roland “Tombstone” Burris.

All Obama had to do was ask his big-bucks Hollywood donors to build a fake U.S. Senate set – exactly like those used by the secret operatives in the “Mission: Impossible” movies when they trick gullible Russians named Dimitri – and hire actors with great silver heads of senatorial hair to heap honors and praise upon our Sen. Tombstone.

I can’t take full credit for the idea. Comedian Dennis Miller deserves some, too, because it was hatched the other morning when I was a guest on his national radio show. Miller liked the idea, I think.

“So even if he wasn’t in the actual chamber, you just call him senator?” Miller asked.

But of course. If the actors presented Tombstone with an “official Mr. Senator” purple satin sash festooned with shiny medallions to wear along with white tie and tails at fake “state dinners” – each medallion listing the accomplishments he’s already carved onto the walls of that ridiculous mausoleum he built for himself – Tombstone would faint from joy.

All he ever wanted, really, was to be called a U.S. senator.

Tombstone’s ego would have been so overwhelmed by the stage sets and actors with leonine haircuts calling him senator, that he wouldn’t have noticed the 2-by-4s holding up the walls of the chambers, or the rubber-faced senatorial masks of Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Dick Durbin, or that Sen. John Kerry fright wig in the trash can.

It would have been easier than what happened when Gov. Rod Blagojevich, facing federal criminal charges of trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, decided to play the race card in appointing Burris, just after Obama announced he’d support Senate leaders who said they’d never seat Tombstone.

Obama felt compelled to privately slap Reid and Durbin upside the head the Chicago Way, forcing them to publicly scarf down some humble pie after they had loudly promised to never, ever seat any senator appointed by the tainted Blagojevich. Loyal readers know this was the subject of one of my columns last week predicting, quite accurately I’m forced to humbly admit, how all this would end.

Now, on to the political winners:

One of the minor winners is U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther and Illinois Democrat who was enlisted by Burris/Blagojevich to play the race card and offer a pretext for the seating of Tombstone. Though a career hack, Tombstone’s skin happens to be black, and without African-Americans in thrall, there would be no Democratic Party.

The race card worked, just a month after political writers gushed all over themselves that Obama’s victory proved, finally, that America had transcended race. Oops!

What wasn’t mentioned in all of this is what Chicago Tribune reporters Dan Mihalopoulos and Todd Lighty reported last year, that Rush’s Black Panther rhetoric obscures Rush’s role as a functionary in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago machine.

In January 2007, Daley put Rush in charge of a Daley political fund to help his aldermanic candidates. The big donors included Daley insiders, such as political strategist Tim Degnan, considered the fifth Daley brother. Another donor was Daley fashion adviser/waste management consultant Fred Bruno Barbara, named in testimony in the recent federal mob trial as once serving as a driver for the Chicago Outfit’s Chinatown crew boss, Angelo “The Hook” LaPietra.

Rush formally withdrew from the Daley fund after the House Ethics Committee advised him not to participate. But Rush knows that once in, you’re in. And if he forgets, Freddie and Tim will remind him.

Yet the big winners in the Tombstone Burris affair are William Cellini, the federally indicted Illinois Republican boss of Springfield and the head of the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association, and Cellini’s pal, former U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Combine, who didn’t have to worry about opposition as long as Cellini backed him.

LaHood, who like Burris has not been charged with any crime, is scheduled to appear Wednesday for his Senate confirmation hearing as Obama’s transportation secretary. He’ll be responsible for spending $700 billion or more on road and infrastructure development. Tombstone can make speeches. Cellini can make one phone call and reach the Obama administration where it counts.

There has been much coverage about Tombstone and Blago, so much righteous screeching and hardly a media mention about Cellini and LaHood. They’d consider this a victory. And they didn’t even need Hollywood set designers to accomplish it.