From the Daily Southtown:

Honest politician talks about political corruption

November 7, 2006
By Phil Kadner Daily Southtown columnist

On the eve of today's election I found myself thinking about incorruptible politicians.

Certainly, in the history of Illinois, there must have been one such person.

And then a name out of the past came to mind.

It turns out this fellow is associated with a story that has come to epitomize Chicago's patronage system.

As a young law student at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, this man made his way over to the 8th Ward Democratic Headquarters on the city's South Side to volunteer his time.

"Who sent you?" the Democratic committeeman barked.

"Nobody," the young man replied.

"We don't want nobody, nobody sent," said the committeeman, adding that he didn't have any jobs available.

"I don't want a job," said the law school student.

"We don't want nobody who don't want a job," the committeeman replied.

Abner Mikva, the law school student, walked away from the Democratic machine that day. But he would eventually serve five terms in the state Legislature, five terms in the U.S. Congress and 16 years as a federal court judge, becoming chief of the U.S. Appellate Court for the District of Columbia, where he served with future Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

He resigned his lifetime appointment to the bench in 1994 to become White House counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Today he is senior director and visiting professor at the Edwin Mendel Legal Aid Clinic at the University of Chicago.

A lifelong Democrat, Mikva earned a reputation for integrity and honesty that may be unsurpassed in Illinois politics.

So I figured he was a good guy to ask the following question: Is the political system corrupt, or do we elect corrupt people to public office?

"A little bit of both, I suspect," Mikva replied.

He said some people get into politics hoping to get rich, "plain old dollar bill corruption," Mikva called it.

Others end up corrupted by friends and colleagues seeking favors.

"Soon after I won my first election to the state Legislature, I received a call from a law school professor who wanted to know if I could take care of a parking ticket for him," Mikva recalled.

"I said, 'Sure, I can take care of it. I'll pay it for you, just the way I pay my own parking tickets.'

"The man said he didn't want me to do that, and that's the last I heard from him.

"But the public plays a role in encouraging corruption. If you don't want politicians to do favors for their friends, don't ask them for favors yourself.

"One of the other problems in Illinois is that we take a perverse pride in our history of corruption.

"We talk about Paul Powell (the former Illinois secretary of state) and his shoeboxes stuffed with cash and repeat stories about Chicago political corruption and end up glorifying the very corruption we claim to detest."

Mikva's story about the professor who wanted his ticket fixed reminded me of a story Gov. Rod Blagojevich recently shared.

He said after his election for governor, he could no longer make casual conversation with longtime friends about football or baseball because inevitably they would ask him for a political favor.

"I'm sure that's true," Mikva said. "The public wants honest government, but people do their share to corrupt their politicians.

"There are citizens who ask for favors and politicians who seek favors from their friends.

"As an elected official, I always believed that once someone did you a favor there would be a quid pro quo down the road."

Mikva said that voters also have a responsibility to "vote the bums out" whenever they believe politicians are behaving unethically.

I replied that many voters thought they were doing that when Rod Blagojevich ran as a reform candidate for governor four years ago.

"I must confess I'm not happy with the governor's reform record," Mikva said, quickly adding that he would vote to re-elect him today.

"I'm a Democrat, and I weigh his ethics record against all the good things he's done as governor and vote for him," Mikva said.

"But in general, other than Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, we haven't seen anyone in state government elevate the issue of ethics in a way that has caught the attention of the Illinois electorate."

So what's a citizen to do in the current climate of corruption?

"I think it's important for voters to throw the bums out of office," Mikva said. "That's their civic duty.

"Back in 1974, there was a similar climate of political corruption, and that's what happened. An entirely new class of congressmen were sent to Washington to clean things up.

"These things are cyclical in American history. The government survives them."