Quote:
Originally Posted by badgoodDeb
Well, coming from Chicago and Illinois, I'm used to quite a lot of government corruption .....
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A friend from Chicago talked about local politics. He said folks there
expected their politicians to be corrupt, but
did demand they at least be amusing.
He gave the example of a state assemblyman who was excoriated by a local newspaper, and accused of high crimes, misdemeanors, and mopery and dopery on the spaceways.
The only part of their savage criticism the assemblyman actually responded to was the accusation he did not live in the district he represented. If that were proven, he'd be removed from office immediately and a special election held to replace him. Living in the district you represented was a hard and fast requirement for
holding office.
The rest - accusations of fraud, bribery, racketeering, embezzlement - were all...negotiable.
I remember back when Mayor Daley controlled Chicago for years, with the aid of a fine tuned political machine. He was finally kicked out of office by a reform slate dedicated to ending machine politics, but I wondered if that actually made things better for Chicago citizens.
The implicit contract between the machine and voters is "You support the machine, and the machine takes care of you." Successful machines stayed in power because they kept their part of the deal and
did try to take care of supporters. What I was able to see from afar following Daley's exit was that the reform slate didn't do as good a job of keeping their part of the bargain.
(My SO grew up on Long Island under a Republican machine, was involved in local politics, and intimately familiar with the process. The machine was
not a bad thing for those living under it.)
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Dennis