The New Yorker's cover is generating a lot of buzz right now, but it is almost inarguable that the real substance is to be found in Ryan Lizza's actual piece on Sen. Obama's Chicago years.

Honestly read, Lizza's article throws more than a little cold water on the notion of Barack Obama as a political reformer, or as a 'candidate of change.'

Predictably, supporters of Sen. Obama are spinning the piece as evidence of Obama as the tough, pragmatic pol.

Nate Silver, of the new polling site Five Thirty-Eight, writes:

That does not mean that the Obama that emerges from Lizza's piece is particularly warm and cuddly. He is certainly a very political creature, and there is something a little steely and postmodern about it all.

Barack Obama as the Blade Runner? Well, give Silver credit for originality, I guess...

Realistically, perhaps the most interesting new revelation in Lizza's piece is his description of "the most important event in Obama’s early political life" -- which covers Obama's participation in Illinois' 2001 redistricting, when Obama helped redraw his Illinois State Senate seat after a crushing loss to Rep. Bobby Rush in a primary race for the US House in 2000.

Writes Lizza:

Obama began working on his "ideal map." [Democratic Party political consultant John] Corrigan remembers two things about the district that he and Obama drew. First, it retained Obama’s Hyde Park base—he had managed to beat Rush in Hyde Park—then swooped upward along the lakefront and toward downtown. By the end of the final redistricting process, his new district bore little resemblance to his old one. Rather than jutting far to the west, like a long thin dagger, into a swath of poor black neighborhoods of bungalow homes, Obama’s map now shot north, encompassing about half of the Loop, whose southern portion was beginning to be transformed by developers like Tony Rezko, and stretched far up Michigan Avenue and into the Gold Coast, covering much of the city’s economic heart, its main retail thoroughfares, and its finest museums, parks, skyscrapers, and lakefront apartment buildings. African-Americans still were a majority, and the map contained some of the poorest sections of Chicago, but Obama’s new district was wealthier, whiter, more Jewish, less blue-collar, and better educated. It also included one of the highest concentrations of Republicans in Chicago.

"It was a radical change,"Corrigan said. The new district was a natural fit for the candidate that Obama was in the process of becoming. “He saw that when we were doing fund-raisers in the Rush campaign his appeal to, quite frankly, young white professionals was dramatic.” ... It immediately gave him the two things he needed to run for the Senate in 2004: money and power. He needed to have several times as much cash as he’d raised for his losing congressional race in 2000, and many of the state’s top donors now lived or worked in his district.

Lizza's description of Obama's involvement in redrawing his Illinois State Senate district is another little-known piece of the political history of a presidential candidate running as a reform, or 'change candidate.'

Here might be a timeline of events in Sen. Obama's early political career:

1) In 1992, Obama is instrumental in "Project Vote," a voter registration drive, which gains him attention within the Chicago Democratic Party;

2) In 1996, in his first-ever race for the Illinois State Senate, Obama had all four of his Democratic Party primary opponents thrown off the ballot -- including incumbent Alice Palmer, who won in the preceding election cycle with 83% of the vote, enabling Obama to run unopposed in his first race, which, observed iconic Chicago Democrat Abner Mikva "is a good way to win," according to Lizza; and

3) In 2001, after Obama was crushed by Rep. Bobby Rush in a 2000 Democratic primary race for the US House (where Obama badly misjudged his chances), he gerrymandered his Illinois State Senate district, keeping his Hyde Park base and moving part of the district to the North Side, including in it one of the richest zip codes in the city of Chicago -- thus enabling him to tap into the rich vein of campaign $ found there for his next political race.

Thus, in 1992 we see Obama register new voters, raising his political profile, but when it came time for him to run for office in 1996, he made sure those new voters had only one choice: Obama. Then, when his attempts to rise politically were badly thwarted at the ballot box in another race in 2000, he redrew his State Senate district in 2001 to advantage himself politically, both electorally and financially, for his next race.

For a reform or 'change' candidate, this incongruous chain of events will be very hard to explain and justify. But running as a 'change candidate' is how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, and how he continues to position himself in the general election against John McCain.

If McCain's people have even an ounce of sense, they'll be using this accurate narrative to strike at the heart of Obama's campaign rhetoric of 'change.'

If the Obama people are smart, they will be screaming long and hard about The New Yorker's cover in order to divert attention from the substance of the article inside.

It's no wonder Obama's supporters are making so much noise...