After reading the federal criminal complaint filed against the Illinois governor this past Tuesday we at The Crystal Ball could think only one thing: Willie Stark, meet Rod Blagojevich. Of course the governor is innocent until proven guilty, but the indictment is thick, well sourced, and very, very specific. Of Illinois’ immediate past eight governors, Blagojevich would be the fourth sent to prison. That is a stunning statistic, and it reminds us of how bad a culture of corruption is once it takes hold. States such as Oregon and Virginia have developed governmental cultures that are clean–voters and the political class alike reject corruption as antithetical to what they are. Citizens and politicians in other states, e.g. New Jersey and Illinois, seem to accept a certain amount of corruption as the cost of doing business. That is corrosive, and eventually leads to such a toxic environment that it is plausible a governor could attempt to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate, seek to have a journalist fired using threats that equal little more than petty extortion, and engaged in such simple and obvious graft that the entire nation stands in a stunned gaze.
Who is to blame for acts of corruption? The guilty officials, of course, are the people we must hold culpable. Yet, the citizenry also bears its share of the rap once a culture of corruption develops because they have tolerated it. The public shouldn’t accept corruption under any guise–the people possess the means to turn dirty pols out of office and they have a responsibility to do so.
As we made our way through the complaint filed against Blagojevich, we were reminded of a passage Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato wrote with Glenn Simpson in their book, Dirty Little Secrets. Today we reprint an excerpted portion of Dirty Little Secrets for our readers to consider as the Blagojevich prosecution makes its way through the courts–and headlines…