California's Electoral System

California's Electoral System of Today -- No return to the New York Tammany! It would be tempting to view the defeat of the Tammany Hall Political Machine by the opponents of political corruption as the clear triumph of good over evil. But the victory of the greatness of the 'morning glories' sniffed at by the politicians over Boss Tweed and his ilk was not so simply realized.

The fall of the party bosses had as much to do with negative as well as positive political, historical and social influences upon the urban landscape of America. The first foremost and most sweeping example of this is the Great Depression that precipitated the subsequent nationally-based New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration. This economic catastrophe created a program of federal social welfare surmounted the informal 'good corruption' policies on a local level that had allowed the Tammany politicians of the George Washington Plunkitt ilk to be supported.

However, as gradually America became less fragmented by ethnicity and religious tensions, the class-based alliances and the narrow, polarizing ethnic alliances of the politicians became uprooted.

Plunkitt joked that New York City was governed better than Philadelphia because of the Irish presence in New York, because the Irish were better leaders -- and the Irish were synonymous with leadership in New York! This comment shows the dominance of that particular group in New York's political and geographical territory -- the mere fact that one city was an 'Irish' city or purely Irish run, speaks of the dominance of working class political ethnic alliances in particular cities and urban party districts.

It is also worth noting that Irish were often Catholic, and marginalized from other forms of economic advancement, other than politics. Another reason Plunkitt derisively referred to reformers as morning' glories was he felt they would not and could not stay in the communities he catered to -- in other words, the morning glories were imposing reform from the outside, without knowledge of specific local conditions, or constituent's individual desires and needs. Reformers seemed like creatures of the intellect, not people who were willing to help other individuals.

Plunkitt, true to his working-class roots says that one cannot learn about people's desires in books -- rather one must go to the people and talk to them directly. Later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was at least able to convey the same effect, in impression if not in reality, that he understood the ordinary, humble concerns of the common working person, through his fireside addresses.

This is another example of how the New Deal created legitimate ways to deal with the need for a sense of political connection between common, ordinary Americans, as well as provide jobs and social services that guarded against the excesses of capitalism and mitigated the imbalances of wealth of Tammany's Golden Age. Tammany Hall politicians stressed the need for municipal ownership of jobs without the creation of a civil service administration, in contrast to the new deal.

Tammany opposed an expansion of federal or even state government so the political machine's appointed men could have government jobs. But the civil service system, greater social mobility of ethnic groups through education and federal subsidies, and the presence of a safety net all conspired to destroy the political machines -- if not political corruption in its entirety. Today, however, political corruption is a kind of different animal.

More often than not, the causes of corruption today lie in political patronage of large business organizations and special interest groups, who give their wealth to increasingly expensive political campaigns, in implicit exchange for favors. But there is also a problem in many state bureaucracies. In some states, the civil service that is egregiously corrupt as the system it was created to supplant.

Witness the example of the New Jersey Department of Youth and Family Services, which was repeatedly cited for not following up on questionable cases, resulting in two young boys being nearly starved to death. Although California does not boast a comparable example, this is a sobering reminder of the need for competent political staff in the service of government bureaucracies. Political corruption was not defeated merely by the enthusiasm of the advocates of reform. It was the removal of the incentives for political corruption to continue.

Thus, we must ask ourselves, why does political corruption continue today? Campaigns are too expensive -- thus political campaign finance limits are necessary.