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Ah, Corruption Smruption!
Oct. 2nd, 2005 04:46 pm♠
Monk was struck this weekend by a new jarring note from conservative thinkers. We are informed that corruption on the part of our political leaders is not really a big deal. After all, we are sophisticated adults and know that people are not perfect. And we are not talking about the likes of Ann Coultur and Rush Limbaugh pushing this line.
This talking point flows out of the recent flurry of corruption stories dealing with Republican leaders: the arrest of insider David Safavian, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's suspicious killing in the stock market, and, of course, the indictment of Tom DeLay. In spite of these cases, we are to observe that President Bush's approval ratings only went up (notwithstanding the fact that his approval rating could hardly go anywhere but up after being washed away by Katrina).
Monk first heard this line as he was cooking his steak dinner on Friday night, having PBS's NewsHour humming in the background. David Brooks said:
"In other words, I don't think corruption hurts the party unless there's a failure of policies -- unless the party has no policies that help the American people. And this last week is a perfect indication that we've had some big corruption stories. George Bush's approval ratings have shot up five points in the latest Gallup Poll and two other polls."
That was interesting, but maybe it was just a fluke. Then, over the weekend, Monk read William Kristol's piece in the Weekly Standard making the same argument, titled "Policy Trumps Scandal," in which Kristol writes:
'But the poll numbers do remind us that while "corruption" matters, it doesn't necessarily trump all. The media love scandal stories, but citizens put them in perspective. The citizenry tends to reserve judgment on charges and accusations about which they don't yet know all or even most of the facts. Sensible people don't leap to generalize from a few cases about a whole administration or an entire political party. And they tend to care more about substantive policies and real-world results than they do about alleged sleaze or even corruption. As John J. DiIulio Jr. put it (in a somewhat different context) in his contribution to our tenth anniversary symposium, "policy matters most."'
The reason why this comes across as so much chutzpah to Monk is that he remembers the Clinton years, going to the very first years. Conservative thinkers then seemed to believe there was nothing more important than the moral tone that a government sets for the people. Of course, the leaders then were dominantly Democratic, and since peace and prosperity reigned so fully, conservative Republicans had little else with which to try to score political points. We were hounded by moral lectures complete with vigorous finger-pointing.
Neverthemore, one supposes that hypocrisy is an occupational hazard for moralists.
xXx
Monk was struck this weekend by a new jarring note from conservative thinkers. We are informed that corruption on the part of our political leaders is not really a big deal. After all, we are sophisticated adults and know that people are not perfect. And we are not talking about the likes of Ann Coultur and Rush Limbaugh pushing this line.
This talking point flows out of the recent flurry of corruption stories dealing with Republican leaders: the arrest of insider David Safavian, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's suspicious killing in the stock market, and, of course, the indictment of Tom DeLay. In spite of these cases, we are to observe that President Bush's approval ratings only went up (notwithstanding the fact that his approval rating could hardly go anywhere but up after being washed away by Katrina).
Monk first heard this line as he was cooking his steak dinner on Friday night, having PBS's NewsHour humming in the background. David Brooks said:
"In other words, I don't think corruption hurts the party unless there's a failure of policies -- unless the party has no policies that help the American people. And this last week is a perfect indication that we've had some big corruption stories. George Bush's approval ratings have shot up five points in the latest Gallup Poll and two other polls."
That was interesting, but maybe it was just a fluke. Then, over the weekend, Monk read William Kristol's piece in the Weekly Standard making the same argument, titled "Policy Trumps Scandal," in which Kristol writes:
'But the poll numbers do remind us that while "corruption" matters, it doesn't necessarily trump all. The media love scandal stories, but citizens put them in perspective. The citizenry tends to reserve judgment on charges and accusations about which they don't yet know all or even most of the facts. Sensible people don't leap to generalize from a few cases about a whole administration or an entire political party. And they tend to care more about substantive policies and real-world results than they do about alleged sleaze or even corruption. As John J. DiIulio Jr. put it (in a somewhat different context) in his contribution to our tenth anniversary symposium, "policy matters most."'
The reason why this comes across as so much chutzpah to Monk is that he remembers the Clinton years, going to the very first years. Conservative thinkers then seemed to believe there was nothing more important than the moral tone that a government sets for the people. Of course, the leaders then were dominantly Democratic, and since peace and prosperity reigned so fully, conservative Republicans had little else with which to try to score political points. We were hounded by moral lectures complete with vigorous finger-pointing.
Neverthemore, one supposes that hypocrisy is an occupational hazard for moralists.
