Harold Meyerson argues that reformers often come from corrupt environments:
So -- does this troglodyte drag Obama down a peg, even though he's on record cursing the president-elect? Clearly, Republicans hope so, but it's not as if these kinds of associations, tenuous though they may be, haven't dogged our greatest presidents before. In the months leading up to his election as president in 1932, then Gov. Franklin Roosevelt of New York was compelled to hold hearings on the emerging corruption scandals enveloping Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York City, the dapper, good-time front man for Tammany Hall, with which reformer Roosevelt had long been at war. FDR had to find a solution that wouldn't infuriate the big-city Democratic machines, which saw their own foibles writ large in the affairs of Tammany, yet would please his own reformer, goo-goo (that's short for good-government) base. Shortly before the election, Walker resigned, sparing FDR the necessity of having to oust the mayor himself. Republicans harrumphed at what they claimed was Roosevelt's lack of rectitude, but he emerged effectively unscathed.
--The Editors
