As the details of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s (R-Calif.) corruption became clear, it was an odd sort of scandal. Cunningham’s malfeasance was as bold as it was embarrassing. His defenders hardly tried to spin the details, instead pointing to vague pleasantries about the lawmaker’s personality and background. By the time federal marshals raided Cunningham’s home, you knew this one wouldn’t spark debate, because there was nothing to debate.
But The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber makes a critically important point about Cunningham’s corruption, when compared to that of Tom DeLay — Cunningham’s problem wasn’t his treachery; it was the ease with which it was understood.
We’re conditioned by the congressional scandals of previous decades — Dan Rostenkowski’s skimming from the House kitty, Jim Wright’s dubious book income — to think that corruption, once exposed, puts you on a fast track to jail, or at least early retirement. In fact, the only offense likely to land a politician in hot water is small-time corruption, the kind of petty crime that’s easily understood. Engage in grand-scale, sell-your-soul-to-the-devil-style venality, and, as long as you don’t violate the letter of the law, you can prosper long after your unethical dealings become known.
Quite right. As Scheiber explains, DeLay has chosen a course far more outrageous than Cunningham’s, building a malicious mini-empire, with a right-wing apparatus that includes PACs that keep him and his allies in power and a K Street Project that extends his reach to Washington’s entire lobbying industry. In terms of true offensiveness, DeLay’s operation, Scheiber noted, “ranks up there with the most profitable and pernicious in history.”
The difference between Cunningham and DeLay is that the bolder, more ambitious, and more outrageous corruption is punished less than more routine graft. Indeed, even in DeLay’s example, the charge that has become the most problematic isn’t his corrupt system, it’s the fact that a lobbyist paid for some trips abroad.
Why does the more sweeping malfeasance get less attention?
Most news organizations are profoundly uncomfortable making subjective judgments, however obvious. Instead, the preoccupation is with small, easily provable allegations. When it comes to political discourse, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, the result is that politicians get nailed for tiny embellishments but get away with statements that are technically true but spectacularly dishonest, such as George W. Bush’s claims about the size of his 2001 tax cut. Likewise with corruption, where the press practices a kind of literalism that dwells on what is officially illegal or improper (like an affair with an intern) while ignoring behavior that is technically OK but ethically obscene.
It’s exactly why Cunningham has been forced to retire and DeLay continues to run the House of Representatives.