There's a lot of truth in what the Post-Tribune's columnist Jerry Davich wrote in his blog this morning about who is to blame for political corruption.
I don't blame crooked politicians, or even those pols who may not be "crooked" but who have obvious "lapses in judgment" or whatever. They're going to cheat, lie, and bamboozle as much as they can get away with, regardless of public office. For them, it's partly human nature at work, and partly region politics as usual.
No, I blame you - the region's voters and citizens who elect 'em into office.
I blame you for keeping 'em in office year after year, decade after decade.
I blame you for choosing to whine about it, joke about it, or make hollow threats about it rather than actually do something about it. I see it year after year, pol after pol, election after election.
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Also, it shows the power of incumbency. There was a statistic that showed that incumbents get re-elected more than 98% of the time.
I believe that people always enter politics with the best intentions, then end up becoming corrupted as they face the temptations inherent in any position of power. That's why our system has all of the checks and balances built into it to limit corruption and its effects because the founders assumed that power would corrupt people over time.
In Lake County, Jerry Davich is talking about the habit of people always electing the same people into office year after year, sometimes to different offices in a game of "musical chairs."
When all of the same people have been in power for years and decades, it causes the checks and balances to become blurred because checking someone else's power could result in limits on one's own power.
The voters are acting as enablers by sending the same core group of people into year after year, even after reading news stories about investigations, corruption, waste and other problems.
Chris_Hedges 