It's The Corruption, Stupid

The looting of America

Bill Clinton was the first presidential candidate I was old enough to vote for back in 1992. That means my entire adult life has unfolded in the wake of a phrase made famous during that campaign and repeated in seemingly every election since.

It usually surfaces during one of those cable news pundit-fests, after the panel has exhausted itself debating the passions of the moment and someone, eager to sound smart and rise above the noise, reminds the table of what has become a kind of sacred truth in American political lore:

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

The author of that phrase was Clinton’s iconoclastic strategist, James Carville. And it captured the political moment perfectly, as the Clinton campaign successfully defined President George H. W. Bush as out of touch and uncaring while overseeing a struggling economy.

But the bigger idea behind Carville’s words, and why they’ve been repeated ad nauseam ever since, is the belief that people ultimately vote their pocketbooks over everything else. When prices are high, when unemployment rises, when people are struggling, they tend to take it out on the ruling party. All other issues become secondary.

Of course, there is plenty of political science research suggesting that voting patterns and behavior are more complicated than that. The peaks and dips of the economic cycle are usually far bigger than any administration’s ability to control them. And the economy itself is a complicated set of inputs. It’s not simply the stock market. But nonetheless, there is a great deal of truth to the idea that when people feel the economy is not working for them, voters are likely to blame the people running the government.

All of this is the backdrop for where we are now. With gas prices and inflation spiking, and with technologies like AI disrupting entire sectors of the workforce, “it’s the economy, stupid” would seem like a powerful slogan for Democrats hoping to launch a blue wave that could take back Congress and usher in new leaders at the state and local levels.

Because here’s the thing: while most presidents have very little direct control over inflation, the guy in the White House has become the face of the pain at the pump because of his deeply unpopular war in Iran.

So the economy can and should be front and center for Democrats running this fall. But I also think there should be a heavy dose of a distinct but deeply related line of attack.

Corruption.

Running on the idea that a ruling party has been corrupted by power has long been a staple of American politics. But when it comes to actual corruption, there has never been anything close to what we are seeing now.

What makes all of this even more surreal is that the current president made corruption in Washington a centerpiece of his campaigns. Remember the chants of “drain the swamp” and all the bad-faith distortions and lies around Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine?

We can now see much of that for what it was: one of the great acts of chutzpah and projection in modern political history.

Right now, more than ever, it’s the corruption, stupid.

Or maybe more accurately, it’s the stupid corruption.

Or the so-brazen-it-sounds-like-a-bad-superhero-movie corruption.

Or the Mt.-Rushmore-of-malfeasance corruption.

Or the we-rob-them-blind, with “them” being the American people, corruption.

The news yesterday of a scheme that would effectively shield Donald Trump, his family, and his businesses from IRS audits and tax prosecutions, even as they rack up more shady deals in a day than a season of The Sopranos, is only the latest example of the mind-numbing venality surrounding this administration.

There are now billions of untraceable and unaccounted-for dollars sloshing around this White House, from foreign governments, cronies, people seeking favors, corporate supplicants, and a general rogues’ gallery of grifters, conmen, and thieves, that it becomes harder and harder to see this as a government by the people and for the people.

Instead, it increasingly resembles a giant self-enrichment scheme, with every level of the regime seemingly focused on looting as much as possible for friends, family, and loyalists.

At the same time, and this is no accident, we are witnessing unparalleled attacks on democracy. But why are they trying so desperately to hold onto power? It’s clearly not about passing policy. It’s about enrichment through entrenchment, about keeping the keys to the national piggy bank long enough to funnel public money, our tax dollars, into the coffers of the connected with as little oversight, accountability, or reckoning as possible.

The sheer audacity of the scam is breathtaking.

But there can still be a reckoning, first at the ballot box and then hopefully in a court of law. Because one thing I hope still unites most Americans is that we do not like getting robbed, especially when we are already struggling. Corruption this brazen is a very easy story to tell.

Consider this quote from John Thune, the top Republican in the Senate, when asked about yet another outrageous grift: the reported $1.8 billion slush fund emerging from Trump’s pressure campaign against the IRS that critics say could funnel money toward loyalists, including those who perpetrated an armed insurrection on January 6.

Thune responded, “My assumption is that, based on some of the blowback that’s come since this was announced, that there would be a significant amount of attention paid to it.”

Corruption is destructive on many levels, of course. But eventually it gets back to where we started. It’s the economy, stupid. A corrupt political system eventually produces a corrupt economy, one that enriches a small circle of insiders, monopolists, loyalists, sycophants, grifters, and oligarchs while hollowing out the vitality, stability, health, and security of the country at large.

Corrupt systems are weak systems, held together by loyalty not to the Constitution or the public good, but to greed, self-preservation, and the pursuit of power.

Maybe another time-honored phrase is also appropriate. “Throw the bums out.”