Yesterday, The Daily Progress published an article about the rarity of scandal in Virginia politics.
“As far as I know, no governor has had to deal with a scandal similar to this one,” said Geoff Skelley, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“The only governor to ever resign the office in Virginia history was John Tyler in 1827,” Skelley said, “but he did so because he was elected to the U.S. Senate and had to resign the governorship to take the Senate seat.”
So no previous governor has ever resigned because of a scandal – making the idea that McDonnell would all the more unlikely.
But it seems that Virginia’s corruption-free label (or at least the appearance of it) is more of a cultural phenomena. It’s been well documented that the state doesn’t have the ethics rules or enforcement to back it up.
Even Governor McDonnell believes in corruption-free image of the state. After he praised the prosecution of Phil Hamilton, a state delegate from Newport News who’s bribery charges sparked the last attempt at ethics reform, he said:
Virginia has long been a state marked by honest, transparent and ethical governing by both parties. Today’s judgment is a reminder that no one is above the law.
So the question is, why (even now) are so little political leaders taking strong positions on ethics reform?
Dahlia Lithwick wrote an article for Slate that asked a similar question.
“The first part is the culture,” [John McGlennon is chairman of the government department at the College of William and Mary] explained. “We have long operated under the notion that in our government we entrust the representation of running the state to distinguished citizens who are expected to act in the best interests of the state. And because we trust them, we shouldn’t impose burdens on them.” McGlennon adds that this is what Daniel Elazar has termed “the quintessential example of the traditionalist culture.” His second observation is that the part-time Virginia legislature has for many years “been populated by lawyers that inevitably had business in front of the state,” and it was tacitly understood that their practices would benefit from their elected positions. They believed that disclosure was sufficiently strong medicine and—more importantly—they still cite the fact that there are so few prosecutions as evidence that the system works.
This is, of course, circular logic, McGlennon adds. “There haven’t been incidents,” he says, “because so little is illegal.”
She continues:
Megan Rhyne is executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, and I asked her the same question: How did Virginia allow itself to be snookered into a system that presumes its leaders don’t take Rolexes for favors? She says, “It may sound hokey and naïve, but the belief in Virginia has always been that a part-time legislature is a gentleman’s club. We just don’t do these things.”
As I wrote yesterday, between the weak physical presence of the General Assembly and a deeply engrained political culture, it’s no wonder state leaders aren’t jumping at the opportunity to fix this issue.