Earlier this year, veteran political writer Thomas Edsall reported an eyebrow-raising fact about Americans' views of government.
Polling by Gallup, he noted, found that the proportion of Americans who believed government corruption is "widespread" had risen from 59 percent in 2006 to 79 percent in 2013.
"In other words," Edsall wrote, "we were cynical already, but now we're in overdrive."
Given the blanket coverage devoted to public officials charged with selling their influence, this shouldn't be surprising. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife were convicted last month of violating public corruption laws.
Former mayors Ray Nagin, of New Orleans, and KwameKilpatrick, of Detroit, were good for months of headlines.
So were Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, convicted last year on influence-peddling charges, and Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who pleaded guilty to charges of misusing campaign funds.
If you add state and local officials who cross the line, it might seem that we're awash in corruption. Yet as political scientist Larry Sabato told The New York Times, that's more perception than reality. "I've studied American political corruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries," he said, "and, if anything, corruption was much more common in much of those centuries than today."
Nor have the numbers through the past couple of decades risen. In 1994, according to the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, 1,165 people were charged in public-corruption cases, of whom 969 were convicted. Last year, 1,134 were charged, of whom 1,037 were convicted.
Corruption is hardly a negligible issue. Americans rightly have very little tolerance for public officials on the take. Officials who violate the law in this regard should face criminal prosecution and incarceration.
Americans remain uncomfortable with "corruption" as our forebears viewed it. A hefty majority believe that government is run on behalf of a few big interests. And Congress, whose ethics committees have not been rigorous in looking for misconduct that brings discredit on their chambers, has contributed to that view.
I would hardly contend that all who seek to promote their private interests are corrupt. But I do think the Founders had a valuable insight when they saw that a focus on private concerns could lead to neglect of the common good.
I have the uneasy feeling that too many politicians are self-absorbed, failing to put the country first, and using their office to promote their private interests.
Our founders had very firm ideas about the importance to the nation of "virtue" in a public official — and they were thinking expansively about the basic standards of public accountability.
Maybe it's time we looked to them for guidance.
Maybe it's time not to think of corruption only in the narrow sense of violations of specific laws or precepts, but more broadly in terms of failing to pursue the common good.
Lee Hamilton directs the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
