Throwing aside all his previous hints and promises to the contrary, and ditching his much-vaunted "support" for public financing, Barack Obama has announced that he will refuse the public dollar in favor of raising millions and millions of campaign dollars to run a campaign with no legal financial ceiling.

But why should the public be surprised at having its interests tossed (as the popular expression puts it) under the bus? It's Barack Obama's stock in trade to discard inconvenient people, positions, and political principles to suit his own needs. (And while I was writing this, he did it again, claiming that his new "seal" was only a one-time thing and would never be used again. No, not after it was received with giggles and embarrassment for its political clumsiness and outright mockery of the Presidential seal.)

Let's go back to his beginnings, shall we?

Barack Obama made his political bones when he was hand-picked by Alice Palmer to take her place in the State Senate when she tried for the U.S. House seat vacated by then-indicted (later convicted) child molester Mel Reynolds. Palmer lost the primary to Jesse Jackson, Jr., then re-filed for her old seat.

Rather than run against her--or anyone--clever neophyte Barack Obama challenged the signatures on the petitions for all the candidates running against him, eventually winding up unopposed for the State Senate seat. During this primary season, though not even a superdelegate, Alice Palmer threw her support to and worked for Hillary Clinton.

The wider public first saw it when Barack pretended not to be aware of anything his own pastor had said for the past twenty years. He tried to make us believe that he was like some kind of cartoon husband, just along for the ride, snoozing through the sermon, just there for the atmosphere. At the same time, he professed to be a devout Christian.

While he held onto Wright as long as that fiction worked for him, as soon as Wright got a bit impressed with himself and brought his full show--complete with strutting, mugging, spot-on impressions, and even a little dancing--to the National Press Club, Obama was finished with him.

At first, Obama, while disapproving of Wright's words, nonetheless stood by his pastor, choosing instead to deflect a splash of racism onto his own white grandmother:

"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

(This, by the way, was when the term "under the bus" began to become associated with Obama's way of dealing with politically difficult allies.)

Then, while Barack wasn't looking, Trinity and its new pastor allowed another friend of Barack's--one he's known even longer than Wright--to step to the pulpit. When Father Michael Pfleger took the stage at Trinity, he just couldn't help himself. He got on a riff about white entitlement and ended up slamming Hillary Clinton by name, saying the reason she was crying in the primaries was because she realized her "entitlement" candidacy had been usurped by a black man.

Both presidential campaigns expressed dismay at Pfleger's sermon, but Obama chose the moment to cut ties to Trinity (conveniently without mentioning his very long friendship with Michael Pfleger, the same way he speaks of his close friend Bill Ayres as merely "an English professor," implying that he doesn't know the man very well. In fact, he has worked closely with the Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, on numerous occasions, and it is Ayres' contribution to the field of Education, not English, that Obama most prizes.)

Pfleger and Obama go back a long way, to the early days of street organizing on the South Side of Chicago, where Pfleger introduced Obama to street politics, grant-getting, and the Saul Alinsky method of political agitation. By all accounts, Barack was very good at it. Pfleger was one of the very few South Side ministers or political figures of any type that endorsed Obama over former Black Panther Bobby Rush in Obama's ill-fated bid to unseat him. (Obama was smacked down by Rush by a wide margin, largely because he couldn't connect with African America voters the way Rush already did.)

But, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with Obama's public association with the racist politicization of the Chicago pulpits. Just after beating back Hillary Clinton's bid to get the same number of delegates she actually received votes for in the Michagan primary (Obama was awarded some of hers, just to be "fair"), Obama stepped forward before the press to sadly tell us that he was leaving Trinity UCC.

Apparent end of story.

Soon after, his longtime pal and financial seed-planter Tony Rezko fell on hard times. But he asked nothing of Obama in this, his time of trouble, and Obama gave him nothing. In abundance. When asked what he thought of the conviction of his old friend on 16 counts of various flavors of political corruption, a sorrowful Obama said:

"This isn't the Tony Rezko I knew."

A curious claim, since the crimes for which Rezko was convicted took place while Obama knew him, took money from him, bought land next door to him, and seemed close enough to him that one might reasonably assume he would know how thoroughly corrupt he was. Unless one was a simply clueless person, instead of a slick Chicago politician working the system.

In fact, Rezko's crimes had to do with many people that Obama knew well, personally and politically, including the current governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. Rezko also has ties to the current Cook County Board President, Todd Stroger, who was endorsed by Barack Obama to take his father, John Stroger's, long-time position.

While that may sound a bit odd, you have to know Chicago. The only thing more important in Chicago than political influence (also known in the Windy City as "clout") is family. And, very often, politicians have both. There are certain names that pop up with great frequency in Chicago and Illinois politics--names like Stroger, Ryan, Madigan--and above all, Daley. And Obama, in his time, has known them all.

And let's not even bother to mention the blip that was Jim Johnson--until Obama figured out that having a friend of Countrywide picking his vice president--while he himself was hammering away at the mortgage industry, and Countrywide by name--was unhelpful to the goal of becoming president. (One wonders how he will manage to disavow Senators Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad, should the need arise.)

The historical record shows that Obama--the purported "new face" of the Democratic party--is anything but "new." The candidate of "change" is in fact a throwback to the bad old days of machine politics and cronyism. He is the same-old, same-old, brought to you by the apogee of political corruption, the Chicago machine.

In 1962, the Chicago machine delivered Illinois to John F. Kennedy, in one of the most shameless acts of national corruption in history (though nothing for Chicago itself). Today, it has submitted for your approval not a candidate for the twenty-first century, but a throwback to the worst bare-knuckle politics of the twentieth--or the Tammany Hall of the nineteenth.

Elect him at your own risk. And don't say I didn't warn you.