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.
Senator’s Thesis Turns Out to Be Remix of Others’ Works, Uncited
John Walsh Credit Matt Volz/Associated PressPhoto by: Matt Volz/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Democrats were thrilled when John Walsh of Montana was appointed to the United StatesSenate in February. A decorated veteran of the Iraq war and former adjutant general of his state’s National Guard, Mr. Walsh offered the Democratic Party something it frequently lacks: a seasoned military man.
On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service a main selling point. Still wearing his hair close-cropped, he notes he was targeted for killing by Iraqi militants and says his time in uniform informs his views on a range of issues.
But one of the highest-profile credentials of Mr. Walsh’s 33-year military career appears to have been improperly attained. An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution.
Mr. Walsh completed the paper, what the War College calls a “strategy research project,” to earn his degree in 2007, when he was 46. The sources of the material he presents as his own include academic papers, policy journal essays and books that are almost all available online.
Most strikingly, the six recommendations Mr. Walsh laid out at the conclusion of his 14-page paper, titled “The Case for Democracy as a Long Term National Strategy,” are taken nearly word-for-word without attribution from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document on the same topic.
In his third recommendation, for example, Mr. Walsh writes: “Democracy promoters need to engage as much as possible in a dialogue with a wide cross section of influential elites: mainstream academics, journalists, moderate Islamists, and members of the professional associations who play a political role in some Arab countries, rather than only the narrow world of westernized democracy and human rights advocates.”
The same sentence appears on the sixth page of a 2002 Carnegie paper written by four scholars at the research institute. In all, Mr. Walsh’s recommendations section runs to more than 800 words, nearly all of it taken verbatim from the Carnegie paper, without any footnote to it.
In addition, significant portions of the language in Mr. Walsh’s paper can be found in a 1998 essay by a scholar at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard.
For example, Mr. Walsh writes: “The United States will have an interest in promoting democracy because further democratization enhances the lives of citizens of other countries and contributes to a more peaceful international system. To the extent that Americans care about citizens of other countries and international peace, they will see benefits from the continued spread of democracy.”
The Harvard paper, written in 1998 by Sean M. Lynn-Jones, a scholar at the Belfer Center, includes the same two sentences.
Mr. Walsh does not footnote or cite Mr. Lynn-Jones’s essay anywhere in his paper.
John Walsh was appointed to the Senate after a 33-year military career. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressPhoto by: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Both the Carnegie and Harvard papers are easily accessible on the Internet.
In an interview outside his Capitol Hill office on Tuesday, after he was presented with multiple examples of identical passages from his paper and the Carnegie and Harvard essays, Mr. Walsh said he did not believe he had done anything wrong.
“I didn’t do anything intentional here,” he said, adding that he did not recall using the Carnegie and Harvard sources.
Asked directly if he had plagiarized, he responded: “I don’t believe I did, no.”
On Wednesday, a campaign aide for Mr. Walsh did not contest the apparent plagiarism but suggested that it be viewed in the context of the senator’s long career. She said Mr. Walsh had been going through a difficult period at the time he wrote the paper, noting that one of the members of his unit from Iraq had committed suicide in 2007, weeks before the assignment was due.
The aide said Mr. Walsh, who served in Iraq from November 2004 to November 2005, had “dealt with the experience of post-deployment,” but said he had not sought treatment.
Later, the senator, in an interview with The Associated Press, contradicted the aide, saying that he was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder when he used the authors’ work without credit, and that he would consider apologizing to the scholars for doing so. He said he was currently taking antidepressant medication.
Mr. Walsh in 2008, when he was adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated PressPhoto by: Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated Press
After The New York Times published the article about Mr. Walsh’s paper online on Wednesday, the War College’s provost, Lance Betros, a retired brigadier general, said in a telephone interview that the college would begin an investigation immediately.
Mr. Walsh’s paper will be run through an online plagiarism detection program, the provost said, and if there is evidence of a violation, the college will convene an academic review board to determine whether Mr. Walsh committed plagiarism and, if so, whether it was intentional.
The school’s commandant would ultimately determine any punishment.
“We’re not going to treat this any differently than with another student,” Dr. Betros said.
But Dr. Betros emphasized that the War College’s students were repeatedly reminded about the strict academic integrity policy. “We drill that in incessantly,” he said.
Located in Carlisle, Pa., the Army War College is a coveted career stop for ambitious officers, and its graduates since its 1901 founding include Dwight D. Eisenhower and Norman Schwarzkopf. Its current student handbook states that plagiarism will result in disenrollment and that discoveries of academic violations have led to degrees’ being rescinded and names’ being scraped off the bronze plaques honoring graduates on campus.
The master’s degree in strategic studies from the War College has benefited Mr. Walsh’s career: In a military evaluation the year after Mr. Walsh received it, his commander praised him for it, writing that he “leads his peers and sets example in maintaining continuous military education and training subjects pertinent to today’s leadership challenges.”
Mr. Walsh's career included time at the Army War College and as adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
In September 2008, Mr. Walsh, a recipient of the Bronze Star, was appointed adjutant general of Montana’s National Guard by the governor. A subsequent military evaluation said his prospects for the post had been “bolstered” in part by his degree from the War College.
In 2012, Mr. Walsh stepped down as the head of the Guard after winning his first bid for elected office to become Montana’s lieutenant governor. From that position, he was appointed to the Senate this year by Gov. Steve Bullock.
The Senate vacancy arose after President Obama nominated Max Baucus, the veteran Democrat, to be ambassador to China. Democrats had hoped that installing Mr. Walsh in February would strengthen the party’s efforts to retain the seat.
Mr. Walsh’s military record and centrist politics were seen as assets in the independent-minded state, and, as an incumbent senator, he would be better positioned to raise money for this fall’s election. Still, Mr. Walsh is trailing Representative Steve Daines, his Republican opponent, strategists on both sides say.
Questions have previously been raised about Mr. Walsh’s résumé and conduct, though they were comparatively minor.
He was reprimanded in 2010 for using his role as adjutant general to urge other guardsmen to join a private advocacy group, the National Guard Association of the United States, in which he was seeking a leadership role.
As a result, he was denied a promotion from colonel to general, he acknowledged in January. In response to the matter, Mr. Walsh released about 400 pages of his military records, which contained effusive praise from his commanding officers.
Mr. Walsh's name on a plaque listing graduates of the war college. On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service, including his time in Iraq, a main selling point. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
There has also been a discrepancy about where Mr. Walsh earned his undergraduate degree. He was listed in the biographical directory of Congress as having graduated in 1990 from the University at Albany, State University of New York, but actually earned his B.S. degree from what was then known as Regents College, an adult learning institute that issued degrees under the umbrella of the University of the State of New York.
Mr. Walsh changed the listing after the newspaper Roll Call ran an article about the matter, but he did not offer an explanation publicly.
The breadth of Mr. Walsh’s apparent plagiarism, however, is rivaled by few examples in recent political history. Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, was found last year to have presented the work of others as his own in a newspaper opinion article, a book and speeches. And Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. dropped his 1988 presidential bid when it was revealed that in campaign speeches he had used language similar to that of the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution.
Mr. Walsh appears to have gone considerably further.
About a third of his paper consists of material either identical to or extremely similar to passages in other sources, such as the Carnegie or Harvard papers, and is presented without attribution. Another third is attributed to sources through footnotes, but uses other authors’ exact — or almost exact — language without quotation marks.
The senator included 96 footnotes in his paper, but many of them only illustrate this troubling pattern. In repeated instances, Mr. Walsh uses the language of others with no quotation marks, but footnotes the source from which the material came. In other cases, the passages appear in his paper with a word or two changed, but are otherwise identical to the authors’ language.
For example, in the first paragraph of his paper, Mr. Walsh writes of George W. Bush: “During the 2000 presidential campaign Bush and his advisors made it clear that they favored great-power realism over idealistic notions such as nation building or democracy promotion.”
At the end of this sentence, which Mr. Walsh included without quotation marks, he footnoted a reference to a 2003 article in Foreign Affairs by Thomas Carothers, a prominent foreign policy expert. The only difference between Mr. Walsh’s paper and Mr. Carothers’ essay is that Mr. Walsh wrote “advisors” rather than “advisers” and did not use “had.” In other instances, Mr. Walsh swaps a synonym for a word in the original document.
He writes on his second page: “There are deep disagreements about the appropriate theoretical framework, about whether democracy is simply an institutional arrangement for choosing rulers or an end in itself, about how to measure and evaluate democracy, and about the importance of prerequisites for democracy.”
The footnote at the end of this sentence, presented without quotation marks in Mr. Walsh’s paper, is to a chapter by Robert L. Rothstein in a 1995 book of essays, “Democracy, War, and Peace in the Middle East.”
Mr. Rothstein’s sentence is slightly longer and uses “profound” rather than “deep,” but is otherwise identical.
Such copying of a footnoted source without quotation marks is prohibited in the War College’s handbook. “Copying a segment of another’s work word for word, then conveniently ‘forgetting’ to include quotation marks, but ‘remembering’ to cite the source,” is described as academic fraud in the handbook.
Americans have been pretty cynical about politics since at least Vietnam and Watergate. And key reforms that conservatives sought for decades and finally achieved have done nothing to quiet public distrust of the political class.
In fact, two of these reforms — the ban on congressional earmarks and a series of court rulings that radically deregulated campaign-finance law – have intensified the public’s hostility to both politicians and the political process.
From 2006 to 2013, the percentage of Americans convinced that corruption was “widespread throughout the government in this country” grew from 59 to 79 percent, according to Gallup. In other words, we were cynical already, but now we’re in overdrive.
Over the period from 1964 to 2012, the percentage of voters who said that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves” more than doubled, from 29 to 79 percent, while the share of the electorate that believed government was run for the benefit of all the people” fell from 64 to 19 percent, according toAmerican National Election Studiesand data supplied to me by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory.
The ban on earmarks,adopted after the Republican takeoverof the House in 2010, has tied the hands of congressional leaders. Still, earmarks, despised by reformers on the left and right, served an essential political purpose. The House and Senate leadership and ranking committee members used earmarks to persuade their reluctant colleagues to vote for or against key bills; they used them as a tool to forge compromise and as a carrot to produce majorities.
The prohibition on earmarks has done nothing to restore respect for Congress. Just the opposite: It has contributed to legislative gridlock and increased the difficulty of winning enactment of tax and immigration reform.
If the goal of the earmark prohibition was to increase the favorability ratings of Congress, it has failed in this regard, too. The public perception of Congress was already deeply negative in 2010, and it has steadily worsened.Pollingin June and July reported on RealClearPolitics showed disapproval of Congress averaging 77.3 percent and approval, 12.3 percent.
Meanwhile, conservative-backed, court-ordered reforms of campaign finance law – most prominently, Citizens United v. F.E.C., McCutcheon v. F.E.C. and Speechnow.org v. F.E.C. — have created a system of election financing that reinforces the public’s view that government is run for the benefit of powerful special interests.
AFebruary 2010 Pew pollfound that 68 percent of respondents disapproved of the Citizens United decision; 17 percent approved. Disapproval among Republicans stood at 65 percent, among Democrats at 76 percent and among independents at 66 percent.
Under the current court-ordered campaign-finance regime, corporations, unions and the rich can now spend more freely to influence the outcome of elections. This lopsided influence has been buttressed bya series of decisionson the part of the Federal Election Commission that allowed politically active tax-exempt organizations to keep their donors secret, even when these groups were spending money specifically to influence voter choices.
Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, succinctly described the situation to me in an email: “Our political process has increasingly become an accepted system oflegal corruption.” He elaborated: “We have an electoral process today in which concepts such as the rule of law, transparency and other democratic values are fraying rather obviously.”
Covering Baltimore politics some 45 years ago, I was struck by how newly empowered ethnic groups used political power to acquire economic power, often dodging city laws and rules to benefit favored constituencies with city contracts, engineering and architectural awards,bond counsel, and so forth. These deals made headlines. But there was a degree of ambiguity to this so-called corrupt activity – it might even be called “good” corruption, which it famously was by George Washington Plunkitt, the turn of the century Tammany Hall enthusiast whocoined the phrase“honest graft.” Politicians representing ascendant ethnic constituencies skirted legal and regulatory systems purposely designed by powerful entrenched interests to block emerging competitors.
It was with these thoughts in mind that I raised the question of corruption in a series of emails and phone conversations with sources who study or practice politics. They provided some interesting insights.
Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, took a relatively hard line: “In general, I am an enthusiast for the rule of law and think both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ corruption come with significant costs to that value.” There are, however, “difficult cases,” he acknowledged, “where political entrepreneurs use the public’s fear of corruption to push forward on unrealistic and counterproductive measures – e.g. banning earmarks, open meeting laws, etc. I really don’t think representative government will work very well if such rules are not occasionally bent and stretched.”
Bob Bauer, a leading Democratic election lawyer, pointed to the dangers inherent in the use of the word “corruption” to describe what may in fact be a routine ingredient in the competent practice of politics: “Corruption is an entirely plastic concept,” Bauer wrote, adding “rather than distinguishing between ‘good’ from ‘bad’corruption, we” should “consider the cases in which something is called ‘corrupt’ which is not truly corrupt at all.”
Taking Bauer’s argument a step further, Stan Brand, a lawyer who specializes in cases involving allegations of political corruption who was general counsel to the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983 under the Democratic speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., warned that the public’s belief in pervasive political corruption has allowed prosecutors to run amok.
In a phone interview, Brand contended that United States attorneys, in particular, have been adopting a grab bag of legal theories to justify indictments. When they found their way blocked by the courts, Brand argued, they would simply create new legal doctrines to charge politicians with crimes. “They go wherever their theories can work. They take the path of least resistance,” he said.
Charles Stewart, a political scientist at M.I.T., elevated the issue to a more abstract level, suggesting that the issue of corruption could be addressed using the “veil of ignorance” approach of the political philosopher John Rawls:
“What would we want the distribution of public goods to be, if we didn’t know what our status in life would be? We would probably start with a basic quality of life issue — I would want to have high-quality roads and schools. I would want the police to treat transgressions against me without reference to my station in life— and for the police to treat accusations against me without reference to my station in life.
“After that, behind the veil of ignorance, we might agree that it will be necessary, in forming majorities in order to govern, that the winners get access to the spoils of victory — so long as the just distribution of public goods discussed in the previous paragraph were taken care of. So, we might agree that if I’m part of an ethnic group whose party loses an election, I might not get the next park to be built. Or, assuming that everyone has access to the fruits of their entrepreneurial activity, that the government might give extra help to the winners’ supporters in throwing business their way.
“Within this framework, corruption would seem to rest in violating principles of the just distribution of basic public goods —making it so that some people don’t have a just amount, in order that some other people get more than their fair share.”
As a general rule of thumb, reformers, liberal and conservative, are often serving – wittingly or unwittingly – the interests of competing elites.
The best politicians are sensitive to the relative importance of moral considerations as they shift from the public arena to the back room, aware that ultimate judgment of what they have done will be based more on what they produce than how they produce it. Political morality in this context becomes something far less rigid and rule-bound than many in the public conceive it to be – even though, in their own lives, most people act more like politicians than they would like to think.
Effective governance is currently running head-on into growing public skepticism about the legitimacy of political maneuvering and compromise. This reflexive skepticism makes it hard to recognize that politics is a process of negotiation and concession. The perverse consequence is that the art of politics is held in contempt.
Both the court decisions regarding campaign finance and the ban on earmarks betray a certain naïveté about the reality of governing. The expectation of a government free of bribery may be legitimate – but,as I wrotewhen I was covering Maryland politics, the legal presumption of legislators who are “impartial, disinterested and unbiased in the routine carrying out of daily business, in the context of a system imbued with favoritism, may possibly stretch a democratic form of government beyond its credible limits.”
John Walsh Credit Matt Volz/Associated PressPhoto by: Matt Volz/Associated Press
John Walsh was appointed to the Senate after a 33-year military career. Credit J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressPhoto by: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Mr. Walsh in 2008, when he was adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated PressPhoto by: Lisa Kunkel/Independent Record, via Associated Press
Mr. Walsh's career included time at the Army War College and as adjutant general of the Montana National Guard. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
Mr. Walsh's name on a plaque listing graduates of the war college. On the campaign trail this year, Mr. Walsh, 53, has made his military service, including his time in Iraq, a main selling point. Credit Mark Makela for The New York TimesPhoto by: Mark Makela for The New York Times
