The report, released late Tuesday, does provide some new information. Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, had “one or two telephone calls” with Blagojevich between Nov. 6 (two days after Election Day) and Nov. 8, according to the report. Greg Craig, Obama’s incoming chief counsel and author of the report, explained in a conference call with reporters that coincided with the release that the uncertainty arises from Emanuel’s inability to recall whether it was one call or two. Craig said Emanuel gave the same information to the U.S. attorney, and whether there were multiple calls is irrelevant because the calls were appropriate.

Here are the details, from the report:

Soon after he decided to accept the President-Elect’s offer to serve as Chief of Staff in the White House, Mr. Emanuel placed a call to the Governor to give him a heads up that he was taking the Chief of Staff’s position in the White House, and to advise him that he would be resigning his seat in the House of Representatives. They spoke about Mr. Emanuel’s House seat, when he would be resigning and potential candidates to replace him. He also had a brief discussion with the Governor about the Senate seat and the merits of various people whom the Governor might consider. Mr. Emanuel and the Governor did not discuss a cabinet position, 501c(4), a private sector position for the Governor or any other personal benefit for the Governor.

In those early conversations with the Governor, Mr. Emanuel recommended Valarie Jarrett because he knew she was interested in the seat. He did so before learning — in further conversations with the President-Elect — that the President-Elect had ruled out communicating a preference for any one candidate. As noted above, the President-Elect believed it appropriate to provide the names of multiple candidates to be considered, along with others, who were qualified to hold the seat and able to retain it in a future election. The following week, Mr. Emanuel learned that the President-Elect and Ms. Jarrett with the President’s strong encouragement had decided that she would take a position in the White House.

According to the report, Emanuel also spoke four times with John Harris, Blagojevich’s chief of staff, who is also a target of the federal investigation. The conversations took place between the time Emanuel accepted Obama’s offer of the chief of staff position and Dec. 8. The report states that after jarrett withdrew her name from consideration, Emanuel, acting on behalf of Obama, gave Harris other names whom Obama believed to be qualified, including Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Mr. Harris did not make any effort to extract a personal benefit for the Governor in any of these conversations. There was no discussion of a cabinet position, of 501c(4), of a private sector position or of any other personal benefit to the Governor in exchange for the Senate appointment.

The report also focuses on a conversation between Jarrett and Tom Balanoff, the head of the Illinois chapter of the Service Employees International Union, in which Balanoff suggested Blagojevich was interested in a cabinet position. During the conference call, Craig said Jarrett thought the notion was “ridiculous” because Blagojevich was widely-reported to be the subject of a longstanding federal investigation.

Ms. Jarrett recalls that Mr. Balanoff also told her that the Governor had raised with him the question of whether the Governor might be considered as a possible candidate to head up the Department of Health and Human Services in the new administration. Mr. Balanoff told Ms. Jarrett that he told the Governor that it would never happen. Jarrett concurred.

Mr. Balanoff did not suggest that the Governor, in talking about HHS, was linking a position for himself in the Obama cabinet to the selection of the President-Elect’s successor in the Senate, and Ms. Jarrett did not understand the conversation to suggest that the Governor wanted the cabinet seat as a quid pro quo for selecting any specific candidate to be the President-Elect’s replacement. At no time did Balanoff say anything to her about offering Blagojevich a union position.

The report corroborates incoming senior adviser David Axelrod’s statements that he mispoke when he told Fox News that Obama had spoken personally with Blagojevich about the appointment and clarifies that contacts regarding the seat were made by Emanuel. The report also states that Obama, Emanuel and Jarrett were interviewed by the U.S. attorney’s office last week. Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald emphasized during a press conference about Blagojevich’s arrest earlier this month that nobody affiliated with the transition is suspected of any wrongdoing.

While the story is far from over, unless the FBI’s recordings of Blagojevich’s phone conversations reveal something new about Obama, his staff or associates, the transition is unlikely to have much additional new information to offer on the subject.

David Axelrod, Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel (WDCpix and Wikimedia Commons)

In the days following his election, it has become clear that President-elect Barack Obama is bringing a little bit of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s City Hall to Washington.

The White House chief of staff will be Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former Daley fund-raiser. Emanuel is stepping down from his district on the city’s northwest side to help Obama govern.

Obama’s senior adviser will be David Axelrod, a long-time friend and ally who wrote speeches and ran campaigns for Daley for almost 20 years.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

And a key player on the Obama transition team is none other than William Daley, the mayor’s younger brother and rumored to be in line for a Cabinet post.

What will it mean for the country to have so many denizens of Chicago’s City Hall in charge?

Well, speaking as a Chicagoan who’s been watching these guys for years, you can put aside any notion that the White House will be run by left-wing ideologues. By and large, this is a bunch of pragmatic deal makers who view ideology — especially extreme left-wing ideology — as a weakness.

In this regard, they’re a lot like their boss. Mayor Daley acts as though he’s above ideology — in part because he has so much power he doesn’t really need it. Yet for all his power — and, believe me, he controls absolutely everything in Chicago, including the city’s legislative body — Daley is primarily a deal maker. He’d rather win you over than roll you over, though he relishes the second option if the first one fails.

That may explain why Daley seems to have a deep affinity for Republicans, especially President George W. Bush. In the aftermath of the 2004 presidential campaign, Daley sang in the Karl Rove chorus, assailing the national Democratic Party as a collection of “Washington elites” who lost the election because they “don’t like faith-based organizations” or people “who might read the Bible or read the Koran.”

I don’t know why Daley was so harsh on Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. Kerry only had nice words for him.

But I’ve always felt that Daley got along with Republicans because he knew they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, challenge his dominance in a Democratic town like Chicago. In contrast, his Democratic underlings — everyone from aldermen to congressmen — are constantly maneuvering to be well-positioned to replace him when he leaves office. After awhile, that sort of ceaseless plotting can make even the most powerful of politicians paranoid. In fact, I suspect  Daley endorsed Obama for president to get him out of Chicago once and for all.

In any event, Daley’s admiration for Republicans is mutual. In 2006, Bush spent his 60th birthday whooping it up with Daley at a restaurant on the city’s near south side. More important, the president has poured in more than $15 billion to help Daley expand O’Hare Airport — a huge boondoggle in which the city forced hundreds of homeowners in Bensenville, an adjoining predominantly Republican suburb, to sell their homes. As you can see, power politics is truly a bipartisan affair in Chicago.

William Daley has picked up his brother’s affinity for Republicans. So much so that if young William had not been raised in the household of his father, the legendary Democratic Party chieftain, Mayor Richard J. Daley, I doubt he would even be a Democrat.

Examine William Daley’s resume, and you’ll see he’s essentially a businessman who would fit in well with what’s left of the moderate wing of the Republican Party. He was vice chairman of Amalgamated Bank, and then a partner in a corporate law firm before President Bill Clinton brought him to Washington as a special counsel. He soon upset the Democratic union base by helping negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

OK, so Daley did spend a stint as a Democratic partisan when he chaired Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign. But less than a year later, he went to work as president of SBC Communications, the giant phone company based in San Antonio, Tex. Daley went from fighting Republicans to urging their legislators and regulators to pass legislation that, as The New York Times put it, “would make it easier” for SBC “to roll out high-speed Internet service.” That, my friends, is flexibility.

Now, it’s true that Emanuel enjoys beating up Republicans. But I sense he does so more out of a love of winning than advancing any particular Democratic ideology.  He reminds me of Frank Kruesi, Donald Tomczak, Tim Degnan and other great mayoral arm twisters who terrorized City Hall on behalf of Mayor Daley through the years.

Guys like these never seemed happier than when wielding the considerable power they spent their days accumulating. If they have a philosophy, it’s a simple one: “Crush your friends — just for the heck of it.”

In the long run, I predict Emanuel will be reviled as much, if not more, by Democrats as Republicans, who won’t feel quite as much pressure to obey his commands.

Finally, there’s Axelrod, the spin artist supreme. He’s at his best on election night, when he parades before the cameras to explain why a loss for his candidate is really a victory, or a victory for the opposition is really a loss. For awhile I was starting to think his reputation was overrated — after all, how hard can it be to run the campaigns of an unbeatable mayor like Daley?

But in retrospect, I’ve come to realize that it can’t be easy making the Daley Machine look efficient and smart.

Not to bore you with too many sordid details from my hometown. But consider the four years preceding Daley’s 2007 run for reelection. His administration got nailed for awarding $100 million in affirmative-action contracts to a politically connected white-owned firm. His top City Hall aide went to prison for overseeing a hiring operation rigged to favor the well-connected over the well-qualified in tests and interviews. There was the Hired Truck scandal, in which his Transportation, Streets and Sanitation Depts, doled out $4-million worth of contracts to private truck drivers who did little more than campaign for the Machine on Election Day. And some city employees got nailed for running a heroin operation out of his Water Dept.

Have I forgotten anything? Oh, yes, the Red Line and the Blue Line — two of the city’s main train lines — fell apart for lack of regular repairs.

Yet, with Axelrod writing the propaganda and running the campaign, Daley still won re-election with more than 70 percent of the vote. That proves that either Axelrod’s a genius or the voters of Chicago are fools.

Either way, spinning for the White House will be a breeze.

Ben Joravsky is a staff writer for Chicago Reader newspaper, where he writes a weekly column about politics, and the co-author of “Against the Tide: The Middle Class in Chicago.”