I was on C-SPAN this past weekend, discussing all sorts of things. (You should be able to see the program here, but as of this writing the link was not yet operational.) And the host played the latest Republican Party ad, which, no shocker, tries to tie Barack Obama to Rod Blagojevich. Take a look:

Ominous music. Grainy footage. Headlines showing that Obama--OMG!--once supported Blagojevich. References in news reports noting that Obama aides might have had talked to Blagojevich about filling the Senate seat Obama vacated. And the kicker: "Questions Remain."

As the indictment filed against Blagojevich notes, the guv was not too pleased with the Obama camp. So it's unlikely that any talks that did occur were of the pay-to-play variety he fancied. But here's the bigger political picture: the GOP ought to be careful in deploying the usual political attacks against Obama in the near future.

At a moment when the country confronts several crises--an economic meltdown and two ongoing wars--a distinct majority of Americans are rooting for Obama. He won the popular vote with 53 percent of the electorate. And my hunch is that given the current economic troubles, there are a number of McCain voters--who are not ideologues or Obama-haters--who would like to see Obama succeed. After all, it's their economy, too. Would these McCain voters (who may be independents) rather watch Obama help preserve modern-day American capitalism or would they prefer to enjoy him being slammed by GOP mud balls?

This was first published at www.motherjones.com....

Patrick Fitzgerald is back.

With his dramatic arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on an assortment of corruption charges--including the allegation that Blagojevich wanted to sell the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama--Fitzgerald, the hard-charging U.S. attorney in Chicago, has returned to the national stage as a scourge of dishonest government. His last star turn was as the special counsel who successfully prosecuted Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, for having lied to FBI agents and a grand jury during the investigation of the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson.

Throughout that investigation, the non-nonsense Fitzgerald repeatedly insisted that the case was about a simple matter: whether Libby had lied. But he did note it had wider implications. When Fitzgerald presented his closing argument, he declared, "There is a cloud on the vice president." He added: "And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice." Two weeks later, after winning a guilty verdict on four of five counts, Fitzgerald noted, "Mr. Libby had failed to remove that cloud....Sometimes when people tell the truth, clouds disappear. Sometimes they do not." And when Bush commuted Libby's sentence, ensuring that Libby would serve no prison time, Fitzgerald huffed, "It is fundamental to the rule of law that all citizens stand before the bar of justice as equals."

His not-too-subtle point was that when it came to integrity, the Bush White House--or at least Cheney's wing--was, well, cloudy. (The trial had revealed much about Cheney's hard-edged political operation.)

The Libby case, for some, was a hard-to-follow affair, and conservatives and Republican allies of Libby and the Bush administration had rampaged against Fitzgerald and tried mightily to muddy up the episode. Thus, Fitzgerald's implied indictment of the Bush crowd partially got lost in the middle of a partisan mud fight. With the Blagojevich case, Fitzgerald is once again championing honest government, but this time he appears to have a case less likely to get caught up in the distracting swirl of ideological attacks. After all, Blagojevich has few friends who will go on cable TV to blast Fitzgerald for being a run-amok prosecutor. There may even be Republicans who praise his pursuit of Blagojevich, a Democrat.