Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 6, 1994 TAG: 9402080007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Geoff Seamans
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Can't imagine why. After all, incumbent Robb never was charged with the abuse-of-power stuff that got several of his aides in trouble with the law. And we don't really know, do we, exactly what occurred at those Virginia Beach parties during Robb's governorship in the early '80s.
And as for North, does he not claim vindication from charges of funds misappropriating and evidence tampering, by virtue of the fact that his jury convictions were overturned on appeal?
Of course, the reason they were overturned was precisely because North had - to Congress, under a grant of immunity - already confessed to the activities for which he was charged!
What makes North unusual is that it is by his sinful works that most of us know him. Usually, the bad stuff isn't a politician's claim to fame but rather - as in Robb's case - something he or she would just as soon never become public. For North, it's the bizarre reverse: Had he never shredded a document, formally lied to Congress or improperly diverted a public dollar, he today would not be a leading candidate for the Senate.
Measured by sheer effrontery, this is hard to beat. But measured by how much money the taxpayers got stiffed for, North is small stuff.
By that standard, the all-time corruption record belongs to the savings-and- loan scandal.
And measured by systemic pervasiveness, the champion is probably the Oklahoma county-commissioner scandal of the early '80s.
Actually, that's only when the corruption was brought to light and the offenders prosecuted. The system of illegal kickbacks, and worse, went back for decades.
To set the stage: County commissioners in Oklahoma are sort of, but not a whole lot, like county supervisors in Virginia.
Like supervisors in Virginia, they're elected from individual districts, and they form a board that sets local tax rates and fixes county budgets.
Unlike supervisors in Virginia, they have nothing whatsoever to do with the schools, including financing them - and everything to do with road building and road maintenance.
Most of the offenses in the Oklahoma corruption cases involved kickbacks to the commissioners on orders for road-maintenance materials. Occasionally, it involved unadorned theft from the public purse, via the manufacture of entirely fictitious requisitions.
What's so striking is the near-universality with which the commissioners, presumably respected pillars of their local communities, partook of the opportunity for illicit gain. Of the state's 77 counties, only 17 were untouched by the scandal. In all, about 200 commissioners were convicted by federal judges and juries; with three per county, there are only 231 sitting commissioners in the whole state at any given time.
Some reportedly claimed that they thought the job title meant it was OK to take the bribes, or "commissions." Right. That defense, if it can be called so, crumbled when prosecutors pointed to the secrecy surrounding the transactions as evidence that commissioners on the take knew full well they were committing crimes.
The scandal attracted national media interest at the time, and later the scholarly curiosity of a now-retired University of Oklahoma political scientist, Harry Holloway.
In "Bad Times for Good Ol' Boys," published just last year, Holloway concludes that Oklahoma's county commissioners were not innately more or less moral than anyone else. Nor, he concluded, is the state's political culture any more or less tolerant of corruption than the culture of any other state.
What made so ubiquitous a scandal possible, rather, were institutional structures of government peculiar to the state.
Lack of strong auditing and accounting controls, for example.
Use of elected commissioners rather than hired professionals to administer the grittiest details of secondary-road construction and maintenance.
A powerful "county lobby" in the state legislature, a residue of the state's agrarian populist history, that resisted modernizing reforms.
By this theory, Virginia government is (or at least was) graft-free (relatively) not because Virginians necessarily adhere to a higher moral standard than other Americans, pleasant a conceit as that may be. Rather, it is (or was) because the institutional structure of Virginia's government has provided less opportunity for corruption.
The theory seems right enough to me. It seems, at any rate, in harmony with Virginian James Madison's view of the inevitability of special interest, not to mention the general checks-and-balances institutionalism of the Founding Fathers. You keep corruption in check by making it hard to be corrupt.
Judging from this year's Senate race, it wouldn't hurt if Virginia figured out ways to make it a little harder.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB