As talk swirls about government reform up at the state Capitol, Espresso Pundit has some thoughts about how efforts to fix government often end up backfiring. We’re reminded of what George Washington Plunkitt said about how reformers were only “morning glories”:

The fact is that a reformer can’t last in politics. He can make a show of it for a while, but he always come down like a rocket. Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods business. You’ve got to be trained up to it you’re sure to fail. Suppose a man who knew nothing about the grocery trade suddenly went into the business and tried to conduct it according to his own ideas? Wouldn’t he make a mess of it? He might make a splurge for a while, as long as his money lasted, but his store would soon be empty. It’s just the same with a reformer. He hasn’t been brought up in the difficult business of politics and he makes a mess of it every time.

This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2009.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

2 replies on “Reform and Remembrance”

  1. So, your takeaway message here Jim? We should all just go into our homes, close our doors and wait for the corrupt and those ‘trained up’ in the corruption and mismanagement of the public trust to eventually cause the implosion of our state and country?

    That’s pretty grim and I hope you and your cynical author are very, very wrong.

  2. Well, I wouldn’t say that I hold Plunkitt up as a role model, although I think he had a keen understanding of human nature and politics that holds up pretty well 100 years later.

    Nor do I recommend that you not pay attention and not be informed. But I will say that reform–which generally sounds great–often has unintended consequences. Take Clean Elections: In an effort to squeeze “special interest” money out of the Legislature, you’ve tilted it dramatically to the right. That may or may not be a good thing, depending on your political persuasion, but it’s sure not what the authors of the initiative hoped would happen. But they didn’t understand politics well enough to foresee that consequence. (Neither did I, BTW, when I voted in favor of Clean Elections!)

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