In his video monologue on former Del. Phil Hamilton’s (R) bribery and extortion convictions, Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Jeff Schapiro says Hamilton’s case is a “rarity in Virginia politics.” That’s what Virginians want, and hope, to believe about their politicians, except it might not be true. Schapiro touches on a few instances of legislators gone bad in his piece (and infers that the blame may be because our current political class is made up of bored dilettantes, hack lawyers or worse, anti-tax Republicans). But the rot reaches much deeper that the General Assembly.
A couple of years ago, the Daily Beast combed through various federal databases on public corruption and ranked Virginia #2 in the nation for bad apples. When you are more corrupt than Illinois, or New Jersey, that’s saying something.
But perhaps their methodology was flawed. Surely the land of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe couldn’t produce so many political grifters.
Well…even more recent history has shows that’s not quite true, either.
As I wrote in an Examiner piece back in January, there’s enough corruption — coupled with old-fashioned incompetence — to make Gen. Washington weep. Shady deals for park land, outright theft, bungled accounting…it was enough to cause the General Assembly to create an independent inspector general’s office in the most recent session.
And then there’s Richmond municipal government, where the local inspector general churns out audits disclosing incompetence, idiocy and yes, thievery (you can read, and often weep, at those reports here) on a regular basis.
The only bright spot for Richmond is that a sitting council member hasn’t gone to jail in recent years. For a while, incumbency and jail time went together like peas and carrots. Now if only they could get their staffers to keep their hands to themselves…
But let’s give Schapiro’s thesis the benefit of the doubt. Corruption narrowly defined is somewhat rare in Virginia politics, or at least it is as applied to elected officials at the state level. But dig just a bit and one finds that among the Old Dominion’s lower-level pols, bureaucrats, contractors and hangers-on, having sticky fingers, and flexible ethical standards, is more common than we care to admit.
