Sen. Obama told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board that he had never done any favors for Tony Rezko.

Obama added that he had never “done favors for [Rezko] of any sort. Most of the time, I’ve never been in a position to do favors for him. I don’t control jobs. I don’t control contracts. There were no bills that he was pushing when I was in the state legislature that I know of or that he talked to me about. And there were no bills in federal legislation that he was concerned about, so there was no sense of the betrayal of the public trust here.”

Then, over the holidays the Tribune ran a story entitled “Obama intern had ties to Rezko” in which we learn that Obama gave a 20-year-old a five-week internship answering phones and logging mail.

“Mr. Rezko told the senator of John Aramanda’s interest in an internship and asked that he be considered,” Gibbs said. “Sen. Obama advised him to contact the office, which he did. The application was put into the internship pool, where it was considered, and he was eventually offered an internship. Rezko did provide a recommendation for John.”

Hardly blockbuster material. Tom Bevan over at Real Clear Politics (not exactly the center of the Obama for President campaign) called the Tribune story a “joke” and a “gotcha” piece in a recent posting.

Please. If we went and made a federal case over every Congressional internship that’s been doled out over the years to the child of a friend or political contributor we’d run out of trees and ink by next Thursday.

Backlash to the blacklash?

Meanwhile, the LA Times had a decent backgrounder on Obama the other day, including several quotes from his colleagues in the Illinois state Senate. But this was the best paragraph, I thought.

Just a generation ago, when Harold Washington was campaigning to become the first black mayor of Chicago, he and Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale attended Sunday Mass at St. Pascal’s, a white Roman Catholic parish in Northwest Chicago. They were spat upon, cursed and lucky to leave unharmed. In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama carried every precinct but one in St. Pascal’s Portage Park neighborhood. Talk to people who live there now and you could get the impression that Obama grew up one block over.