Further, there may -- or may not -- be a disconnect between how Axelrod and Obama define reform. NBC's Steve Rhodes has dug up a 2005 Chicago Tribune op-ed by Axelrod about the indictment by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald -- the same guy on Blagojevich's case -- of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's patronage chief for circumventing a federal ban on political hiring. (The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto passes the op-ed quote along.) Noting "the federal bureaucracy, sheltered from politics by law, has not always been known for its responsiveness and efficiency," Axelrod wrote:

"(At a news conference) Fitzgerald proclaimed his vision of a day when the recommendations of elected officials, business, labor, and community leaders will no longer count -- a day when we entirely remove politics from government. And he seemed to be declaring his intention to use the criminal code to enforce that vision. It is this system, free of political influence, I had envisioned as a young man. But after a lifetime of observing government and participating in politics, I wonder if such radical 'reform' is really desirable."

There's that word again -- reform.

In Chicago and Illinois politics the Machine rules. It's The Chicago Way. The Machine has produced Rod Blagojevich, an f-wording twerp now likely giving the jeebies to Barack Obama as he transitions to the presidency. Yet Obama is a self-ballyhooed reformer -- a practitioner in hope and dreams and "change we can believe in." How comforting for him to have demonstrated his commitment to change by reforming the Machine.

At bottom, the Blagojevich episode -- whether it involves Obama himself or people close to him such as Emanuel or Axelrod -- demonstrates the disconnect between Obama's deeds and his high-sounding words. He talks tirelessly about reform but was an unobjecting beneficiary of the Machine who did not reform it. Instead, "with very little mud on his suit," he treated it with deference. Likewise on issues from earmarks to education to ethanol, Obama has failed to prove through his actions he is the reformer his rhetoric proclaims.

Like Rod Blagojevich, Barack Obama is a product -- eager or acquiescent -- of the Chicago Machine. Clearly, he would prefer that any ties he might have to it recede quickly in the rear-view mirror. The Blagojevich episode gives those ties a prominence that could fracture the determined incuriosity of an Obamatized national media. And as with Bill Clinton's "bimbo eruptions," so with Barack Obama: Blago and the machine may dog him through much of his presidency.