Are the Dems the Corrupt Party Now?

TW: No is the short answer or at least not yet anyway although they are working on it. Corruption follows power almost in perfect correlation. If so, the Dems given their growing power will become increasingly susceptible to corruption and its corrosive effects on maintaining power. Corruption is one of those regulators which help keep any single party from retaining power indefinitely.

Those Dems who claimed righteous immunity as a party relative to corruption, especially of the bribery and/or sex related type, were naive and wrong. However, those Republicans seeking to tar the Dems as the new Republicans, if you will, relative to corruption are jumping the gun. Give us time. Unless, of course, the new POTUS can set a fresh example despite the inevitable forces pulling him and more importantly his people towards the dark side.

From Economist:
"...The image problem that sunk the last Republican congress wasn't the outrageous actions of a few members. The ceiling didn't come down because of..Mark Foley... Voters were convinced that congressional Republicans had become the tools of lobbyists, at best unaccountable and at worst corrupt. Republican bragging about the K Street Project—which drew business lobbyists away from the Democrats—backfired. Illegal donations and deals brought down teams of congressmen and senators. The Jack Abramoff scandal, all by itself, brought down at least ten congressmen and senators who resigned or were defeated.

Republicans need to figure this out before they build a quilt out of the disconnected scandals—Rod Blagojevich (money), William Jefferson (money), Tim Mahoney (sex), Kwame Kilpatrick (sex and money)...

It was the shorter, more widespread House banking scandal that convinced Americans not to trust the Democrats. In 1992, voters learned that 355 former or current members of the House had overdrawn their accounts at the congressional bank. Dozens of congressmen resigned in disgrace, and more were defeated at the polls.

Unless voters are convinced that the party in power is collaborating to game the system, or that it's blowing a major national crisis (as with the 2006 Republicans and the Iraq War), they don't kick it out. Individual scandals don't a "culture of corruption" make."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2008/12/subculture_of_corruption.cfm