Legal corruption, systemic corruption and pseudoscandals

Meet the Press this morning was the usual hour of gossip and horse-race chatter. The both-sides-do-it hook for the morning was, on the one hand, Trump's radical right campaign and his obscure taxes and business deals, and on the other, tacky appearances around the Clinton Foundation.

There's an important distinction to be made between breaking the law, which is normally what's implied by "corruption."

But our system in the United States is also shot through with systemic corruption, as well. And the Citizens United decision in 2010 increased that corruption by several orders of magnitude.

This does not mean that individual politicians participating in the system are bad people. Some of them are. Most are not. But even the most conscientious public officials have to be fully aware of what their major donors want on particular issues. That's why campaign finance laws need to evolve with the times. Because donors will constantly look for new ways to evade existing laws without violating them.

President Obama very often speaks in a notably more progressive mode than he has governed. What he said about the ruling just after the Supreme Court handed it down was impressive (President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People WhiteHouse.gov) 01/23/2010:

One of the reasons I ran for President was because I believed so strongly that the voices of everyday Americans, hardworking folks doing everything they can to stay afloat, just weren’t being heard over the powerful voices of the special interests in Washington. And the result was a national agenda too often skewed in favor of those with the power to tilt the tables.

In my first year in office, we pushed back on that power by implementing historic reforms to get rid of the influence of those special interests. On my first day in office, we closed the revolving door between lobbying firms and the government so that no one in my administration would make decisions based on the interests of former or future employers. We barred gifts from federal lobbyists to executive branch officials. We imposed tough restrictions to prevent funds for our recovery from lining the pockets of the well-connected, instead of creating jobs for Americans. And for the first time in history, we have publicly disclosed the names of lobbyists and non-lobbyists alike who visit the White House every day, so that you know what’s going on in the White House – the people’s house.

We’ve been making steady progress. But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. By a 5-4 vote, the Court overturned more than a century of law – including a bipartisan campaign finance law written by Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold that had barred corporations from using their financial clout to directly interfere with elections by running advertisements for or against candidates in the crucial closing weeks. [my emphasis]

The reforms Obama brags about there were far from solving the problem, although McCain-Feingold did make some significant progress. But Obama felt the need to demonstrate that he had been trying to reduce the role of private money in politics. He certainly recognized in that speech that excessive power to financial donors was in conflict with democratic principles.

And he recognized how radical a decision Citizens United is: "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself."

He continues directly to emphasize the point:

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

Obama's actions to try to reverse Citizens United can be generously described as tepid in comparison to his words on that January 23.

Which is why progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party need to be able to walk and talk at the same time on the money-in-politics issue. It's certainly legitimate and necessary to defend Hillary Clinton against false charges or implications that she violated the law around donations to the Clinton Foundation. Clinton pseudoscandals ginned up by Republican ratf**kers and then magnified by the mainstream press have been one of the most pernicious features of American politics since 1992. Sean Wilentz did a memorable analysis of this phenomenon in Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election? The American Prospect 12/19/2001. And that wasn't even at the halfway point of where we are now in the history of Clinton pseudoscandals. Wilentz makes an important distinction there about the qualitative turn that had occurred in the dubious American tradition of political dirt-slinging:

Of course, negative propaganda stories have been a staple of American politics from the early years of the republic, when Federalist editors denounced the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson as a Jacobin atheist and traitor. Today's pseudo-scandal retains traits of classic mudslinging; above all, it involves distortion of an opponent's record and public statements. As in the past, many of today's partisan peddlers of pseudo-scandals spread them around through friendly journalists and pundits--modern equivalents of press lords like William Randolph Hearst and vicious columnists like Westbrook Pegler.

But there are also crucial differences. Recent pseudo-scandals have relied on the manipulation of the courts, congressional committees, and the now-defunct Independent Counsel Act in order to harass elected and appointed officials with flimsy accusations. And the pseudo-scandal masters have managed to gain the subtle and often unwitting but crucial complicity of the independent mainstream news media. Without the credibility provided by law and journalism, the new style of pseudo-scandal might simply be dismissed as partisan maneuvering. Coated with a gloss of objectivity, however, pseudoscandals gain a respectful hearing, vastly reinforcing the blatant tub-thumpers, fake inside-dopesters, and latter-day Peglers who appear on the cable networks and talk-radio shows as well as in the newspapers. [my emphasis]

This is also an interesting point about continuity, "Although the focus of today's pseudo-scandals is primarily political money, the direct historical antecedent is the media-friendly demagoguery pioneered by Senator Joseph McCarthy."

And the ghost of Tailgunner Joe is still with us. Charlie Pierce adopted the name Tailgunner Ted for Ted Cruz during the Republican Presidential primaries because of his slimy public persona and his fanatical hardline rightwing politics.

And Donald Trump is at only two degrees of separation from Tailgunner Joe himself. He learned much of what he knows about politics from McCarthy's notorious protege, Roy Cohn. (Olivia Nuzzi, Trump’s Mobbed Up, McCarthyite Mentor Roy Cohn Daily Beast 07/23/2015; Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg, The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear Washington Post 06/17/2016; Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man 06/20/2016; Michael Kruse, ‘He Brutalized For You’: How Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s mentor Politico 04/08/2016; Trudy Ring, Roy Cohn and Donald Trump: Mentor and Protégé Advocate 08/16/2016)

Eliza Newling Carney takes a look at Hillary's Clinton's current wrestling with accusaions, Controversy Versus Corruption The American Prospect 08/205/2016. On one part of the endless e-mail controversies, she writes:

“These new emails confirm that Hillary Clinton abused her office by selling favors to Clinton Foundation donors,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a statement. Donald Trump has dubbed the Clinton Foundation a “pay-for-play” operation, called for it to shut down, and said he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate it.

These claims of corruption, however, have yet to be substantiated—despite microscopic scrutiny by the throngs of journalists, watchdogs, and political opponents poring over more than 30,000 Clinton emails. While the Kingdom of Bahrain did reportedly give $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, the Crown Prince would likely have obtained a meeting with Clinton regardless—as would such foundation donors as rock star Bono and philanthropist Melinda Gates.

Clinton aide Huma Abedin made a point of setting up Clinton’s meeting with the Crown Prince through official channels, not via foundation officials. And, not unlike DNC donors, Clinton Foundation contributors often walked away unsatisfied. When Band asked for help obtaining a visa for a British soccer player who had a criminal past, Abedin’s response was that it made her “nervous to get involved,” to which Band replied, “Then don’t.” The visa was not granted, nor was Bono’s request for help streaming a U2 concert through the International Space Station.

Hillary's official dealings with major Clinton Foundation donors are a legitimate object for press and public scrutiny. So are those of Republican politicians:

This caution applies not just to Clinton but to Donald Trump, who runs his own foundation, and to the many politicians on both sides of the aisle who have courted controversy by raising big, undisclosed contributions for their personal nonprofits. These include Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and unsuccessful GOP presidential hopeful, who raised large corporate donations for a Florida education nonprofit, and who was one of more than a half-dozen Republican White House candidates involved this year in secretive charitable fundraising.

Politicians' involvement with charitable contributions is something that deserves to be regulated better. It's one of those areas in which campaign-finance laws need to be continuously improved.

Democratic voter groups

This is a long post, and kind of heavy on the wonkery, because it includes some long quotes that give some good conceptual frameworks for looking at the class issues in this year's elections. More specifically, they give some basis for judging how close the Big Pundits are coming to reality when they make some self-confident assertion about what "the white working class" is thinking, or about what "latte liberals" want. (When they talk about what "the American people" want, that's easy to interpret; that mean what the pundit who's speaking wants. Big Pundits assume they speak for "the American people".)

Mark Schone did a great interview with Tom Schaller, Ruy Teixeira and Sean Wilentz, What role did race play with white Democrats? Salon 06/03/08. Schaller, Teixeira and Wilentz do a good job in this piece of trying to adhere to empirical data on the groups they discuss. In it, they talk about the current Democratic coalition:

Schaller: I hate to crystallize it, but in a sense, and they're not equally proportionate in their size, but if you think of the Democratic Party as working-class whites, working-class blacks, which is almost a redundancy because of socioeconomic differences, though obviously there are some middle-class blacks, and then the elite class, whatever that is, the cappuccino, latte class ... and trichotomize the Democratic Party coalition as those three things, if you can get two of the three you're probably going to be the nominee. And I don't want to speak for Sean, but I think his point is well, OK, but you need all three to win the general election and which two do you need to start with? And I suspect Sean would say that you need to start with the two working-class components because the college professor and the New York City liberals, they're going to come home eventually. Whereas if you start with the cappuccino classes and the black coalition you don't know if you're going, and this is Hillary Clinton's essential argument, you don't know if you're going to get the white working-class voters to come along in the end. (my emphasis)

I actually think Schaller has some pretty good shorthand terms there. The "cappuccino classes" is a phrase that can cover the Democratic investment bankers as well as affluent environmentalists, small business owners, and liberal-minded middle managers and professionals.

Both African-Americans and Latinos are groups which face certain issues that heavily affect their voting behavior which are more likely to override class factors than among the majority whites, so it certainly makes sense to view them as distinct voting groups.

The "white working-class" designation is in some ways the vaguest, just because of lack of consensus on how that group should actually be defined, and the problems in the data that have to be used to do so. But it's still a meaningful and useful way to describe a critical element of the Democratic coalition.

Salon: My interest is whether or not you alienate them [the Clinton voters], after they've chosen the other candidate, by telling them that they were bad people for choosing that candidate.

Wilentz: I think that's an excellent point. The media is getting those voters very angry by saying that it is based on race. ...

Teixeira: It's interesting to note that even now, the national security issue having been highlighted, it's more a national security election now between Obama and McCain than it's likely to be later, because McCain has basically talked about what he's wanted to talk about and Hillary and Obama have been cutting themselves up with knives. So it's a pretty good time to be pushing the election in that direction. And yet, take the latest Pew poll, Obama is still ahead by three points, even in a poll in which he's deemed not tough enough by a lot of voters, many more than John McCain on national security, he's got a nine-point deficit among white voters. They don't give a white working-class voter data point, but nine points, which is much better than John Kerry. So already he's there. You would think that the dynamic as it unfolds and as it moves more to domestic issues whether John McCain likes it or not is going to make that even more favorable.

Schaller: For all the discussion of the Appalachian white voter, however you want to define it, which was made very real in recent weeks because of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and so forth, when you look at the election and pull this back to the lens of the actual electoral map and the states that actually matter, you're talking about Ohio, Pennsylvania, maybe Missouri, as your Appalachian states that matter, and then really, the election in the last two cycles where it matters, in the Midwest, particularly the upper Midwest and the Southwest, and the white voters there are a little different. In the Midwest, yes, they're a little more evangelical, but the Midwest has the highest high school graduation, it has the highest college graduate rates of any region in the country. And your independent voters in Colorado, in New Mexico and Nevada are potentially in play for Obama or for Clinton if she were to be the nominee. Those voters are transplanted voters, often from the greater Northeast, who moved down there because of property values and bigger communities and more control over their land and new jobs and a new economy, or they moved east from California. And Ruy and John Judis wrote about these sorts of communities: the Santa Fe-Albuquerque corridor, the Denver-Boulder corridor. So the white voter discussion, yes, is partially about the white Appalachian voter, but that's only a third of the conversation in terms of where it really matters [for the Presidential election]. We don't really have to talk about the Barney Frank white voter in Massachusetts because that's out of play and we don't have to talk about the white voter from South Texas because that's really not an issue, we need to talk about pretty well educated upper Midwest white voters and we need to talk about independent white voters in the growing suburbs of the Southwest and we, yes, we need to talk about Appalachian downscale, non-college educated or some college education white voters in Appalachian districts.

Teixeira: I agree with that and even a little bit more specific, if you look at a lot of these places, including even in some of these Appalachian linked states and certainly outside of it, one thing that's kind of interesting, the sort of upper tier of the white working class if you define it in education terms, those with some college, which is a growing group compared to the rest of the white working class, they tend to be quite a bit more sympathetic to Obama than people with a high school degree or less. I think if Obama could possibly put more of those voters in play, that could make a difference in a lot of these states. It appears like a lot of these voters that have at least some college, a little more cosmopolitan, are a little less likely to reject Obama on cultural familiarity or even a racial basis. That could wind up making a difference in this election. I think there's a problem because people hear the white working class, however it's defined, they gravitate as if pulled in by a magnet to the idea that some blue-collar dude who works in a factory or something, has a high school degree, it's so different than the way any reasonable definition of the white working class would be today. It's such a variegated and highly diverse and much more upscale group than I think people are used to thinking about it.

Part of what makes these categories seem vague and awkward is that they tend to come into play when we're talking about national trends and statewide elections. But it's not always easy to put defining images or concepts together with the groups being described. In a local or Congressional election, you're talking about getting support from this homeowners association, or that trade group, or the city veterans group, or a regional environmental coalition, or the local merchant's association, etc. But when we talk about voting by groups in larger aggregates, it's harder to think of commonly-assumed images or groups to which to attach them.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Politics and Violence in America (1969) looked at the changing demographic dynamics within the national Democratic Party, as exhibited in the politics of 1968. Since that was the pivotal time for the political realignment that eventually shaped the parties as they are in 2008, it's an interesting comparison.

He describes the growing constituency of the Republican Party as the "technostructure", highly skilled professionals and middle managers:

The technostructure has, of course, its hip wing which in the main followed [Democratic] Senator [Eugene] McCarthy in 1968. ["Hip" in 1969 meant cool, fashionable, stylish.] But its square majority in the suburban foxholes saw themselves contentedly, if not quite ecstatically, in Mr. Nixon. The highly programmed character of the Nixon campaign faithfully expressed the technical virtuosity of the new men, as the campaign's intellectual emptiness reflected their conviction that technique matters more than substance. Mostly salaried employees, moving from one place to another at the organization's behest, they are beset by taxes, mortgages, installment debt, social permissiveness, rebellious children and racial integration. In the campaign Mr. Nixon called them "the forgotten people ... those who are not breaking the law, those who do pay taxes, those who do go to work, those who do support their churches and their schools." These "forgotten Americans," he said, "finally have become angry ... because they love America and don't like what has been happening to America for the last four years."

Schlesinger saw Gene McCarthy's appeal lying with new interest groups that had grown up within the Democratic coalition. The New Deal coalition had united industrial workers, farmers, Northern urbanites and Southern segregationists. By 1969, the Southern segregationist configuration was no longer possible, unless some of those voters could be kept within the Democratic Party on some new basis.

McCarthy was the prototypical latte liberal, though latte's hadn't become "hip" yet. This was the pre-Starbucks era. They had progressive instincts on peace and social reform issues. But they would die of embarrassment if any of their friends saw them walking a picket line. (We're talking stereotypes, here.) To put that latter point another way, they were individualistic enough to not want to think of themselves as part of an interest groups. Schlesinger writes:

The new interest groups - the suburban middle class, the college students, the church groups, the peace groups - may be less familiar than the wool industry or the steelworkers, less familiar even than the Negroes, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican Americans, the Indians and the poor in general. That hardly makes them any less interest groups.

Historian Peniel Joseph makes a similar point about Obama's core voters (Obama Breaks Political Ground En Route to Nomination PBS Newshour 06/04/08):

I think what Obama has done -- and this is what Hillary Clinton supporters have to realize and even Latino voters have to realize, as well -- it's the whole notion of "E pluribus unum" in terms of he's going beyond just race and saying that he's going to represent all Americans.

So it's not the old politics of sort of interest group politics, and we have the feminists or African-Americans or environmentalists, and we all want a piece of the pie. We want a transformation where one candidate actually represents all those interests, including the interest of white, working people and the white poor, as well.

I didn't quote that to try to equate McCarthy's appeal with Obama's. That would confuse more things than it would clarify. But Joseph describes some of that sense of wanting to get beyond "interest group politics", the idea being that there's something inherently wrong with interest groups.

Continuing with Schlesinger's definition of the McCarthy vote in 1968:

It was McCarthy's achievement to understand that voters were beginning to defect from the old interest groups. It was his effort to put together a coalition of the new interest groups. The inner logic of his remarkable campaign was to unite the college-educated, whatever their race, religion or previous condition of servitude: teachers, students, church leaders, enlightened businessmen, civic-minded suburbanites, the rising professional, managerial and technical classes. This, of course, is why his campaign was so popular in the suburbs. This is why he was the Democratic aspirant with the greatest appeal to Republicans. This too accounts for the "we happy few" flavor of the McCarthy campaign. It explains why his embattled followers on the streets of Chicago [during the 1968 Chicago convention] were mostly sons and daughters of the white middle class — why they received so little sympathy or support from the blacks, the workingmen and the poor.

In that last observation, I suspect Schlesinger was overly influenced by the conventional wisdom of the day. I'm sure that there were plenty of blacks, poor people and workers who didn't think the Chicago police ought to be busting heads unless it was really necessary. And people could figure out even from TV news reporting in those days that the Chicago "police riot" wasn't necessary.

Unfortunately, the following is probably an anecdote that accurately portrays one of the less attractive aspects of Gene McCarthy's perspective:

He was attempting something novel in progressive politics — a revolution against the proletariat. [That sentence is an uncharacteristically lame formulation by Schlesinger.] McCarthy himself pointed up the contrast between his conception and Robert Kennedy's conception of the Democratic coalition when he told a university audience in Corvallis during the Oregon primary that public opinion polls showed Kennedy running best "among the less intelligent and less educated people in America. And I don't mean to fault them for voting for him, but I think that you ought to bear that in mind as you go to the polls here on Tuesday." (my emphasis)

Here's RFK partisan Schlesinger's take on the Kennedy voters within the Democratic Party in 1968. He saw the 1968 standard-bearer Hubert Humphrey as trapped within "Old Politics" conceptions based on a New Deal coalition that had been transformed dramatically since 1945:

The Kennedy way, in my judgment, stands in sharp contrast to both the Humphrey and McCarthy ways. Kennedy saw the Democratic party as a coalition neither of political brokers nor of college graduates but as a link between the two Americas — between educated and uneducated America, between rich and poor America, between white and black America. Unlike Humphrey, he did not suppose that the traditional political institutions could control their constituencies in the new age of television and public opinion polls. Unlike McCarthy, he did not regard the "less educated" as necessarily the "less intelligent," and he was not prepared to surrender the working masses — even the cops and the cabdrivers — to George Wallace.

Like Humphrey and McCarthy, Kennedy began his analysis with the crisis of the Roosevelt coalition; but I think he read the Roosevelt experience with more precision and penetration. He dissented from the Humphrey way because he understood that Roosevelt did not create his coalition through the institutions to which Humphrey had committed himself; these institutions were the effect, not the cause of FDR's success. He dissented from the McCarthy way because he did not believe that the old Roosevelt coalition had splintered beyond recall, though he knew that coalition had to be extended by enlisting the technostructure and the suburbs. Where Humphrey proposed to reconstruct the Roosevelt coalition from above, through the political brokers, Kennedy proposed to reconstruct it from below, through his intense personal identification with the victims and casualties of American society, through urging programs on behalf of the alienated groups and through increasing their own direct participation in the political and administrative process.

Tags: 1968, arthur schlesinger jr, democratic party, eugene mccarthy, robert f kennedy jr., ruy teixeira, sean wilentz, tom schaller