Dinner with Barack

NY Times finally notices Mr. Rezko's relationship with Sen. Obama, "patron and friend until indictment", though still "unclear" on a few key points. Nice little excerpt here with a little local color:

“Senator Obama is a very intelligent man, and everyone by then was very familiar with who Tony Rezko was,” said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, a nonpartisan research group. “So it was a little stunning that so late in the game Senator Obama would still have such close involvement with Rezko.”

While it is not clear what Mr. Rezko got from the relationship, he liked to display his alliances with politicians, including Mr. Obama.

In one instance, when he was running for the Senate, Mr. Obama stopped by to shake hands while Mr. Rezko, an immigrant from Syria, was entertaining Middle Eastern bankers considering an investment in one of his projects.

Doubtless the Senator shakes hands with a lot of people, as his spokesman hastened to say, though the venue was quite select:

While Mr. Obama was running for the Senate, Mr. Rezko was also raising money for a huge development in the South Loop of Chicago, often playing host to dinners in a private room at the Four Seasons Hotel here.

Former Rezko associates said that Governor Blagojevich attended one of the dinners, and that at Mr. Rezko’s request, Mr. Obama dropped in at one for Middle Eastern bankers in early 2004, just as he was starting to pull ahead in the Senate primary. The visits, Mr. Rezko’s partners said, helped impress foreign guests.

“I remember that he had been on the campaign trail, and he was completely wiped out and exhausted,” said Anthony Licata, a lawyer who represented Mr. Rezko on real estate deals. “My recollection is that he drank ice tea, and he talked about how he was really making progress, and we were all excited to see him.”

Mr. Burton said it was not unusual for Mr. Obama to be “shaking hands late in the Senate primary season.”

“If someone recalls meeting him during this period,” he said, “Senator Obama has no reason to doubt it.”

Very lawyerly. And don't forget he drank ice tea.

Previous posts: Obama Outgrows Illinois, Deadeye Durbin and his Sidekick Barack, Obama Lies on Rezko