From the Atlantic: The Case for Corruption, Why Washington needs more honest graft

From Jonathan Rauch - the guy who gave us the word demosclerosis - an argument that cleaning up politics has made the political process less functional. He suggests that the governing system lost something vital when political machines were broken apart and the use of patronage to build coalitions became distasteful. Its an interesting counter-intuitive take on what makes governments work.

- Click here for the article.

The government shutdown last fall wasted billions of dollars, upset innumerable plans, and besmirched both political parties. But it did have one constructive effect. Surveying the wreckage, grown-ups in both parties realized that the politics of public confrontation is a lot better at closing the government than running it. So, to avoid a repeat, they decided to try something old. Something very old. In a healthy return to machine politics, they handed budget negotiations over to political hacks cutting deals behind closed doors.

Once upon a time, the budget process was reasonably regular. In fact, it was conducted under what was called regular order. The budget-committee chairmen would do some horse trading to build a consensus within each chamber, the House and Senate would then pass those budgets without too much ado, and the two chambers would work out their differences in a conference committee. Then the appropriations committees would do more or less the same thing, making sure to spread around enough pork-barrel goodies to get their friends paid off and the budget passed. The president and the congressional leaders would be involved throughout the process, every now and then calling a budget summit, but most of the real work would go on behind the scenes.
In the past few years, by contrast, regular order has been replaced by regular chaos.

Public ultimatums supplanted private negotiations, games of chicken replaced mutual back-scratching, and bumptious Republican House members took to dictating terms to their putative leadership. Last fall, after one tantrum too many, Congress seemed exhausted. As part of a deal to reopen the government, it returned the task of setting the next fiscal year’s budget to the budget and appropriations committees, sending them off to a smoke-free smoke-filled room to cut a deal. The result, a trillion-dollar spending bill loaded with incentives for each side, sailed through Congress in January.

How often backroom deal making will work in today’s age of hyper-partisanship remains to be seen, but Congress’s recourse to it represents a welcome rediscovery of a home truth. Politics needs good leaders, but it needs good followers even more, and they don’t come cheap. Loyalty gets you only so far, and ideology is divisive. Political machines need to exist, and they need to work. No one understood this better than the street-smart political sage George Washington Plunkitt, who articulated the concept of honest graft.
Plunkitt was a factotum of New York’s renowned Tammany Hall political machine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among his accomplishments was holding four public offices at once, drawing salaries for three of them. It was his custom to opine on politics from the shoeshine stand at the county courthouse, where his reflections were taken down by a reporter named William L. Riordon and published in a 1905 classic called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. His greatest insight was the distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

“There’s the biggest kind of a difference between political looters and politicians who make a fortune out of politics by keepin’ their eyes wide open,” Plunkitt said. “The looter goes in for himself alone without considerin’ his organization or his city. The politician looks after his own interests, the organization’s interests, and the city’s interests all at the same time.” Dirty graft is parasitic, mere larceny, whereas honest graft helps knit together a patronage network that ensures leaders can lead and followers will follow. Reformers who failed to understand this crucial distinction, Plunkitt said, courted anarchy. “First,” he reasoned, “this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be h--- to pay.”

Can Ron and Rand Paul take over the Republican Party?

They're trying.

The author suggests they are building a "libertarian machine."

Truman's Pardon of the Duke of Duvall County

Another post from Grits for Breakfast. Archie Parr was a party boss in South Texas and key to Lyndon Johnson's electoral success.

And a great blog I'm adding to the Executive Links: Pardon Power.

Culture of Corruption

Slate asks why Chicago is so corrupt, and how we measure corruption:

The most straightforward way to measure corruption is to check the number of convicted local officials. Between 1995 and 2004, 469 politicians from the federal district of Northern Illinois were found guilty of corruption. The only districts with higher tallies were central California (which includes L.A.), and southern Florida (which includes Miami). Eastern Louisiana (and New Orleans) rank somewhat further down the list.

But a high conviction count doesn't necessarily mean more corruption. It could mean that a district happens to have very strict transparency laws or a zealous and effective federal prosecutor—like Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago. You might try to measure corruption by checking the number of city employees per 1,000 people. (Bigger governments suggest patronage-style politics.) Or you could check to see how long it takes to acquire a construction permit through legal means. (Long delays may reflect a system of rampant bribery.)

Public perception may be the most useful measure. If the inhabitants of a city view corruption as a given, they'll be more inclined to forgive politicians who have already been tainted by scandal, like Chicago's current mayor, Richard Daley.

Street Money

The Philadelphia political machine is apparently alive, though not necessarily well, and a peculiar custom has come under scrutiny. From the New York Times:

WHEN Philadelphia ward leaders realized the contest for the Democratic nomination for president would extend through the Pennsylvania primary, it set their salivary glands running. It meant they would have an opportunity to extract street money from the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And street money is the manna of Philadelphia ward politics.

Street money is the name for cash given to party committeemen and women who hand out literature and drum up the vote on primary and election days. It comes from the candidates and is dispensed to the party’s 69 ward leaders who, in turn, dole it out to the city’s more than 3,000 committeemen. In Philadelphia, it is a mandatory fee for most Democratic candidates.

Though legal, it has also become a subject for mandatory derision — at least for the Democratic campaigns and those out-of-state political commentators who have been camped out here for the last month. For them, handing out street money, an old political practice that is rarely used elsewhere, is archaic, unsavory or worse.

They aren’t alone. Last week, the Obama and Clinton campaigns announced they would not be dispensing street money today. Mr. Obama cited philosophical objections to paying people to support his candidacy. Mrs. Clinton’s reasons were more pragmatic. As one Clinton supporter, Gov. Ed Rendell, explained it, she has barely enough money to run TV ads, let alone shell out the typical $300,000 in street money a candidate pays.

But there’s another side to what so far has been a one-sided story. Street money — an integral part of our city’s political ecology — has its uses. More to the point, it’s not going away.

Philadelphia is a living museum of American history, where the political machine, though it wheezes and gasps, still functions much as it did 100 years ago. Then, a political campaign was a labor-intensive activity. It took legions to spread the good word about candidates, round up voters to go to the polls and assist in their deliberations by handing out sample ballots containing the names of candidates blessed by the party.

Now that patronage is all but gone, how does a party keep those legions on the job 12 to 14 hours come voting day? The answer, according to ward leaders, is street money. They argue that paying someone $100 for a day’s worth of honest labor for the party and its candidates is more democratic (with a small d) than the millions spent on modern capital-intensive politics, with its pollsters and media consultants and TV ads. And they have a point.