In picking Sarah Palin, John McCain reinforced his own
anti-establishment credentials. “I found someone with an
outstanding reputation for standing up to special interests and
entrenched bureaucracies,” he declared in announcing her selection.
So in an election in which everyone claims to be for change and
reform, which ticket has the best record of going against
government-as-usual?
Sarah Palin’s record of butting against her own scandal-wracked
party in Alaska is a local legend. Time magazine called her “the
Frank Serpico of Alaska politics: she ratted out her state party
chairman [and] whupped the good old boys’ network” by defeating an
incumbent governor who’d won statewide election five times. Last
year she demanded that Ben Stevens, the son of the now indicted
Sen. Ted Stevens, resign as Alaska’s member of the Republican
National Committee after the younger Stevens had his office raided
by the FBI. This year she personally recruited her lieutenant
governor to launch a primary challenge against pork-barreler Rep.
Don Young, a father of the “Bridge to Nowhere” that Palin helped
kill as governor.
The media wasted no time taking shots at Palin’s record, noting
that during her 2006 campaign she told residents of Ketchikan,
where the infamous bridge would have been built, that she felt
their pain in being called “nowhere.” While mayor of Wasilla she
asked for congressional earmarks, but none have been attacked as
wasteful or corrupt. Her renegotiation of contracts drawn up
between oil companies and an ethically suspect legislature and her
decision to rebate much of the resulting increased revenue to
residents is being labeled a tax increase by liberals who never
previously met a revenue hike they disliked.
Would that level of scrutiny be applied to, say, Barack Obama’s
claims that he supported reform in Illinois, where U.S. Attorney
Patrick Fitzgerald has a full-time job just prosecuting corrupt
appendages of the Chicago Daley machine to whom Obama is close?
Obama’s chief strategist is David Axelrod, who has long performed
the same role for Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Axelrod didn’t respond to interview requests, but in 2005 he
wrote an eye-opening piece in the Chicago Tribune entitled “A
Well-Oiled Machine,” which described how he changed his early view
as a crusading journalist that the Chicago machine was “corrupt and
contemptible.” But since becoming a political consultant, Axelrod
wrote, he now sees that “diverse constituencies fight fiercely for
their priorities” and in meeting those needs elected officials
often engage in patronage, i.e., “the exchange of
favors—consideration for jobs being just one.”
Axelrod defends this system as often creating employees “who go
the extra mile because they know the quality of services they
provide citizens reflects on their political sponsors.”
But that’s hardly the reality of Chicago government. As
Axelrod’s client, Obama sat on the sidelines when good-government
liberal Forrest Claypool challenged Cook County Executive John
Stroger in the 2006 Democratic primary. The Chicago Tribune
concluded that “county government works for Stroger’s pals, not for
the people and businesses that pay taxes. And it certainly doesn’t
work for the impoverished people who have nowhere else to turn.”
Stroger won his primary but then had to resign after a stroke. He
was replaced on the ballot by his son, Todd Stroger, who in turn
was endorsed in the general election by Obama. Stroger fils has
since raised taxes, further padded the county payroll with “friends
and family,” and presided over further deterioration in
services.
When it comes to state government, Obama is equally AWOL in
supporting reform. Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a longtime ally of Obama,
has been identified as “Public Official A” in the corruption trial
of Chicago financier Tony Rezko, who was a key fundraiser for both
men. After Rezko was convicted on 16 felony counts in June, it
became clear the governor was under active investigation by the
feds. Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan’s office prepared a
14-page memo to his party’s legislators on why they should support
impeachment proceedings against Blagojevich. Madigan’s “talking
points” compared the corruption festering on the governor’s watch
to a tumor that must be removed.
But Madigan’s move drew an immediate rebuke from Senate
president Emil Jones, who was a close mentor to Barack Obama when
he served in the Illinois senate. Jones said he thought it wrong
for the Speaker to “promote the impeachment of a Democratic
governor.…Impeachment is unwarranted in my opinion, and should not
be used as a political tool.” Jones has been a huge force in
Obama’s rise. He recounts a conversation he had with Obama in 2003,
in which his protégé told him, “You can make the next U.S.
senator.” Jones replied, “Got anybody in mind?” “Yes,” Obama said.
“Me.” Over the next year, Jones burnished Obama’s thin reform
credentials by making him lead sponsor of a watered-down ban on
gifts to lawmakers, while all the while Jones personally blocked
more substantive ethics legislation from reaching the floor.
The Blagojevich and Jones ethics issues sound like something
voters both inside and outside Illinois would want to hear about
from Sen. Obama. Does he side with those Democrats who want to move
aggressively against a governor who appears to be corrupt—or with
his old Chicago buddies who prefer to wait? Obama’s campaign failed
to respond to requests for his views.
Obama always had a so-so reputation among those trying to clean
up Illinois politics. “We have a sick political culture, and that’s
the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, executive
director of the Chicago Better Government Association, told ABC
News. Stewart noted that he’s “been noticeably silent on the issue
of corruption here in his home state, including at this point,
mostly Democratic politicians.”
Every candidate is using the rhetoric of change and reform this
year, but voters would do well to look beyond the rhetoric for
examples of actual change. Barack Obama has gone along to get along
with his local party’s machine. In contrast, Sarah Palin fought
hers tooth and nail. John McCain challenged his own party countless
times in the Senate, while Joe Biden has been a loyal Democratic
wheelhorse in that body for 36 years. But when it comes to
informing voters, the media seem far more interested in the
assertions candidates make than in the reality their records
reveal.
John H. Fund, The American Spectator’s Politics columnist,
is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our
Democracy (Encounter Books).
