David Axelrod is largely - and rightly - credited with successfully crafting Barack Obama's campaign message machine and using it to great effect during the campaign.

But before he elected a president, Axelrod advised campaigns for a host of politicians including Chicago's mayor Richard Daley. In fact, he considers himself an expert in "urban politics" - which translated means big city Democratic machine politics.

It is important to note that Republicans have their own "machines" - mostly in the south where "courthouse politics" employs many of the same patronage, kickback, and even "pay to play" schemes you routinely find in Democratic-run big cities. No party has a corner on corruption - which made the Democrat's "outrage" in 2006 at the "Republican culture of corruption" so laughable.

But Axelrod just elected Mr. Clean as president. And it is important to get a handle on what a man who will be a close advisor to President Obama in the White House thinks of Patrick Fitzgerald's corruption investigations.

Fitzy has taken down a host of pols in Chicago including aldermen, politically connected businessmen like Tony Rezko, and even 2 of Mayor Daley's closest aides in city hall.

That last scandal involved serious violations of a court ruling that was supposed to clean up the city's corrupt patronage system. Chicago mayors (and other big city pols) have used patronage as a means of controlling the Democratic party for decades. But a lawsuit against the practice in Chicago resulted in a ruling that most city jobs had to involve a fair hiring procedure where only the most qualified candidates would get government jobs.

Then in 2005, the Chicago Sun Times broke a fairly routine scandal involving the use of (or, in this case, the non-use) of city trucks - contracts to politically connected (and sometimes mobbed up) trucking firms that paid millions of dollars for little or no work. The city was entertained for weeks with stories of bribes being paid city employees to steer truck contracts to specific firms, ghost payrolling, lolligagging truckers drawing taxpayer monies for going golfing, and other examples of extraordinary venality on the part of city politicians.

Once Fitzy got involved, the investigation expanded to include the entire patronage system in Chicago. And what prosecutors found was simply astonishing; 30 city pols who routinely violated the patronage law by doctoring documents to show interviews with candidates that never happened, resume tampering, and other fraudulent actions all to get loyal campaign workers city jobs. Fitzy's investigation eventually reached deep into Daley's office as two of his closest aides - including his patronage chief Robert Sorich - were convicted in the case.

Here's how it worked:

In February 2005 a grand jury indicted Sorich for devising a scheme to "provide financial benefits, in the form of city jobs and promotions, in exchange for campaign work." As part of this scheme, it charged, Sorich and other officials "corrupted the city's personnel process" by awarding "jobs and promotions" to preselected candidates "through sham and rigged interviews."

At the Sorich trial Kozicki, then in the buildings department, testified that as managing deputy commissioner he had altered 19-year-old Andrew Ryan's interview rating to ensure that Ryan scored high enough to get a building inspector's job for which other applicants were more qualified. Andrew Ryan is the son of Tom Ryan, secretary-treasurer of Carpenters Local 13, a union that was a major financial contributor to Daley's 2003 reelection campaign.

As Axelrod has said, a too-zealous prosecutor can look at normal political behavior and suspect impropriety. In a 2006 Vanity Fair interview, the Obama aide complained about Fitzgerald's scrutiny of Chicago politics.

"He goes after fleas and elephants with the same bazooka," Axelrod said. "At some point there's a line ... where you begin criminalizing politics in its most innocent form."