Obama appeared yesterday at a public hearing by the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health to push for compensation for poisoned workers, but his mere presence was more interesting to some.

Apologetic for the “fuss” he was creating at a meeting Tuesday in Naperville, Sen. Barack Obama pleaded the cases of hundreds of Illinois workers who became sick toiling at nuclear weapons plants less than a half century ago.

The prospective Democratic presidential candidate also brought along a crush of media attention.

“This is one of the rare times it’s useful to have this big throng,” he said to the more than two dozen media members attending a federal worker health advisory board meeting. “That’s a joke. Don’t hold it against me.”

He is not concerned that his star power presence at these types of hearings gets in the way of his message.

“A lot of you wouldn’t be here today, otherwise,” he said. “The whole point of appearing here is to make sure the story is widely disseminated.”

But this hearing did deal with an important issue.

For the 29 years he worked at a Joliet chemical plant, John Keca thought he was manufacturing detergents.

“He was sick most of his time” at the plant, his widow, Phyllis, 80, said Tuesday.

But in fact, Keca had been exposed to uranium dust while working at the Blockson Chemical Co. Blockson had a government contract to extract uranium from ore between 1952 and 1962.

John Keca died in 1996 of colon cancer, his wife said.

Meanwhile, one of the AP’s top political reporters demonstrated once again why the Beltway media crowd is such an object of derision. Check out this lede:

Sen. Barack Obama had a good first date in New Hampshire this week — he was a little late, but wore a nice suit, had interesting things to say and used a little flattery.

* And Jeff Greenfield, who used to be a decent reporter, has apparently lost his freaking mind. This Greenfield piece for CNN has been making the rounds on the blogs this week.

The senator was in New Hampshire over the weekend, sporting what’s getting to be the classic Obama look. Call it business casual, a jacket, a collared shirt, but no tie.

It is a look the senator seems to favor. And why not? It is dressy enough to suggest seriousness of purpose, but without the stuffiness of a tie, much less a suit. There is a comfort level here that reflects one of Obama’s strongest political assets, a sense that he is comfortable in his own skin, that he knows who he is. […]

But, in the case of Obama, he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb. Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of “GQ” to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable.

And maybe that’s not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Washington, DC - all of it, from the very tippity top right down to the lowliest janitor who thinks he owns the place - is the problem.