Eric points out that a big part of the problem of the Rezko-Obama story is self-inflicted.

Rezko’s looming trial date (it’s next month) was bound to exhume any part of the story that had died. The national media was inevitably going to want to take a crack at the tale that places Obama squarely in the skeezy milieu of Illinois politics.

And if he became a top contender, his rivals were bound to look for ways to play the Rezko card and throw him off for at least a few news cycles.

Spring of last year would have been the time for Obama and his advisers to write “The Audacity of Tony,” a meticulous, utterly honest, month-by-month, day-by-day account of all his dealings with Rezko since 1990.

Then to scrub all his political accounts of any donations somehow attributable to Rezko (instead of doing this by conspicuous degrees).

And, finally, to sit with interested reporters until he’d addressed every last question they might still have about the legal work he did for non-profits who worked with Rezko and the granular details of the real estate deal.

His failure to have done this for 15 months doesn’t speak to a guilty conscience so much as it speaks to dubious crisis-management skills.

The real questions left are less to do with the house and more to do with the relationship.  In fact, the house seems somewhat settled by most who have looked into it, but the extent of Rezko’s fundraising is stuck in the fog of campaign finance reports.     As it stands now, everytime anyone with a bit of connection to Rezko surfaces Obama has to account for that person and it’s a never ending cycle.