Role of Lobbyists & Money in U.S. Politics

American politics. Granted unprecedented access by Tony Coelho, the California Representative who was the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Jackson paints a vivid portrait of a political system that has been compromised by the vast sums of money that are needed to win elections. He relates the modern day political machinery to that of the Tammany Hall era and George Washington Plunkitt. Boss Plunkitt made a famous distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. Dishonest graft was graft perpetuated by "blackmailin' gamblers, saloon keepers, and disorderly people" (Jackson, p. 167). Honest graft involved seeing opportunities to enrich oneself while simultaneously doing good works for the people one represented. In Plunkitt's conception, then, speculating on property armed with the foreknowledge that the government was going to build something that would increase the value of that property was all part of the game, and was honest graft because in his mind it hurt nobody. Dishonest graft involved hurting others explicitly in order to enrich oneself.

I believe that this distinction is thoroughly mistaken and facile. The bottom line is that graft is always hurtful to someoneùin the prior example, the people whose property Plunkitt would purchase are clearly suffering because they are being defrauded out of the profit that he

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Approximate Word count = 910
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page)

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