And the Story Is?

I don't know what to say about the Obama transition report about his team's contacts with Gov. Blagojevich. They claimed there was nothing untoward on their part and the report confirms it. It's an internal report and so if it said anything different then we'd have a whole new kind of self-incriminating elite running things in the White House come January. At the same time, the whole speculation is tiresome, and while a continuance of it is concerning, I think this is a case of the traditional media punching themselves out. The futile search for "questions" to be followed by more "questions" is dwarfed by the severity of the financial crisis, and the fact that Patrick Fitzgerald moves at his own deliberate pace means that this is not a story that will be fed by a trickle of leaks.

I'm sure I'm not contemplating the lengths to which the traditional media will stoop to undermine a new President, or how they can spin endless amounts of bullshit about essentially nothing, but this story isn't really poised to catch fire from my viewpoint (though I could be wrong). Before this report came out, sizable amounts of people think Obama's team was "involved" (whatever that means) in discussions with Blago's people and it didn't change their opinion of Obama a bit. What will constrain Obama's ability to govern is a Republican phalanx dedicated to obstructionism, not this non-event.

UPDATE: See also. I don't know if AdNags is necessarily right, but what's important is that he THINKS he's right, which means there's a possibility that the enduring narrative will be "The GOP can't lay a glove on Obama." This furthers a "Republicans in disarray" meme as Nagourney extracts quotes of them sniping at each other. And people like me will be able to say "keep trying with this stuff, it's not working."