Backscratching, Chicago Style

Brought to public view by that notorious member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (media division), The Washington Post.

First, this:

A few years ago, executives at the prestigious University of Chicago Medical Center were concerned that an increasing number of patients were arriving at their emergency room with what the executives considered to be non-urgent complaints. The visits were costly to the hospital, and many of the patients, coming from the surrounding South Side neighborhood, were poor and uninsured.

Michelle Obama, an executive at the medical center, launched an innovative program to steer the patients to existing neighborhood clinics to deal with their health needs.

That effort, in time, inspired a broader program the hospital now calls its Urban Health Initiative. To ensure community support, Michelle Obama and others in late 2006 recommended that the hospital hire the firm of David Axelrod, who a few months later became the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Next, this:

Two years ago, the office of Michelle Obama, the vice president for community relations at the University of Chicago Medical Center, published a glossy report detailing the improvements her office had made in the lives of local residents, in part by increasing ties to minority contractors.

Center administrators declined to disclose which businesses benefited; the report lists one — Blackwell Consulting Services.

In 2005, the center expanded its bidding process and invited African American businessman Robert Blackwell Sr. to join a competition to upgrade the center’s intranet, the in-house equivalent of a Web site. His company, Blackwell Consulting, won contracts totaling nearly $650,000.

Blackwell and his family, records show, have been longtime donors to the political campaigns of Michelle Obama’s husband, Barack. Robert Blackwell Jr., a former partner in the firm, is a major fundraiser for Barack Obama. At various times, Blackwell Sr. says, his and his son’s businesses each have retained Barack Obama as an attorney.

Now, technically, none of this seems, prima facia, to be illegal; though, as Cap’n Ed notes, UCMC is a public entity, so all those dollars being doled out were pulled oout of taxpayer pockets; it would be nice if there was some transparency in how the bidding process for these contracts was conducted and decided. As per the usual Camp Barry playbook, no one seems willing to talk about this stuff. The most forthcoming individual in these two stories, Robert Blackwell, Sr., admits the circumstances about how his firm was assigned that fat contract is “fuzzy.”

But it is interesting, at the least, to notice that in both instances Michelle seems to have been funneling lucrative contracts to people who are neck-deep in her hubby’s political existence.

Which begs the following questions: “Where would this guy be dumping money if he gets his hands on the federal fisc? And who really runs Messiahville: The One, or The Other One?”