How to Finish off the GOP Machine

By Zachary Roth, Washington Monthly. Posted January 12, 2007.

The Machiavellian case for public financing of elections.

Early this summer, in one of the periodic manifestations of the herd mentality for which this city’s pundit class is known, official Washington decided that corruption didn’t matter. The main piece of evidence for this conclusion was the special election in June to replace Randy "Duke" Cunningham, the California Republican congressman who months earlier had been convicted of bribery. The Democratic candidate had made issues of ethics and influence the focus of her campaign -- and wound up losing to a former GOP lobbyist. "The culture of corruption isn’t selling," declared Slate’s John Dickerson the following day, referring to the Democrats’ label for the Republican scandals of the previous year. Democrats largely accepted the new conventional wisdom, deciding merely to check the box on corruption, rather than making it a focus of their pitch to voters. As the campaign wore on, they invoked the “culture of corruption” less and less frequently. Several Democratic strategists told me before the election that they just didn’t think people cared that much about the issue.