With all of the stark contradictions in his character, Leland Stanford—a man best known as a railroad magnate, California governor, and putative philanthropist—embodies American typecasts that have bedeviled us for centuries. Today’s infamously disruptive, get-rich-quick, world-altering, ill-mannered, entrepreneurial culture traces directly back to this enigmatic, mythical man.

He had a quintessential American provenance. His earliest American ancestor arrived in New England a few years after the Mayflower moored at Plymouth Rock. A later Stanford fought in the Revolutionary War. (That ancestor’s widow had to fight the government to get his pension. How American is that?) Stanford’s people moved west to what is now Albany, New York and ran a bar called the Bull’s Head tavern, where he was born in 1824.

Leland’s real first name was Amasa, after a troublesome Old Testament figure who joined a failed rebellion against his own uncle, the duplicitous warrior king, David. Leland dropped Amasa in favor of his benign middle name—which means meadow, although Stanford was hardly so open and agreeable.

He spent most of his life altering himself, moving about, shifting. And he failed at just about everything. As a student, he was a repeated dropout who never graduated from what today would be high school. He claimed to have passed the New York State bar, but the record indicates he did not. He was, not surprisingly, a classic American anti-intellectual, who disparaged people with better educations. Later in life he liked to boast that he hired Harvard and Yale graduates to run his San Francisco street cars, his point being they had wasted their time at university.

By the time he was 28, Stanford was dead broke. Letters, manuscripts, and other documents reveal he fled in 1852 to California, where his brothers had already established a successful retail business. With understandable skepticism, the brothers sent Stanford up to the mountainous Gold Country to open a branch store, to see how he would do—and for the first time ever, he did fine. He got himself appointed local justice of the peace, opened a bar he called the Empire Saloon to honor his New York tavern past, and used the joint to dispense justice and liquor.

When the brothers moved out of their Sacramento headquarters and on to other enterprises, Stanford came back down the hill to take over—and met the partners who would help him accrue his vast wealth. A hardware store next door was run by two successful entrepreneurs named Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins. Another prosperous merchant of carpets and shoes by the name of Charles Crocker worked just around the corner. These men recruited young Stanford into one of the biggest, most audacious gambits in American history: financing and building the transcontinental railroad.

The new-found associates—soon to be forever known as the Big Four—made Stanford titular head of their start-up, the Central Pacific Rail Road, and secured a contract to build the western end of the rail line, to be financed largely by American taxpayers. The money was supposed to be paid back in 30 years.

Almost immediately, Stanford and his partners began a ceaseless—and successful—campaign to get still more money out of American taxpayers. They set up dummy companies to launder the proceeds into their own accounts, effectively hiding their true expenses and profits. Consequently, they began amassing great power. The Big Four, riding the coattails of Abraham Lincoln’s victorious 1860 election, engineered the election of Stanford, a Republican, as governor of California in 1861.

Becoming governor awakened something in Stanford, and his all-American paradoxes and opportunities began working in singular rhythm. He conflated government service with personal profit, and began bullying the state legislature, local counties, and cities to issue bonds to further fund his railroad and, by extension, his fortune. The railroad construction itself was borne largely on the backs of the pariahs of the time: Chinese immigrants, whom Stanford denigrated, along with Native Americans and others. The Big Four paid their Asian laborers less than their white workers and demanded much more of them as the project crossed the formidable Sierra Nevada and the scorching desert.

This was the mid-19th century American success story—four men had traveled west and struck figurative gold. But not many people knew what was really happening behind the mythic narrative, and of course, no one knew what consequences it would bear.

Leland Stanford would soon become embroiled in scandals, including one of the greatest in American history.

The eastern end of the transcontinental railroad—a scandalous enterprise in itself—met the Stanford group’s western end at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. Stanford and partners then raced to acquire every railroad in California and much of the West. Their monopoly exploited freight and passenger customers, charging outrageous prices and laundering the profits through veneer corporations. Furthermore, Stanford declared that his company should not have to pay back the loans to American taxpayers. A series of subsequent state attempts to investigate the railroad, which would soon change its name to the Southern Pacific, failed in large measure because Stanford bought off the so-called investigators.

Leland Stanford drove in the golden spike, connecting the Central Pacific Railroad with the Union Pacific Railroad and marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad line, on May 10, 1869, at Promotory Summit, Utah. Photograph by Andrew J. Russell. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

A fed-up federal government finally stepped in. In 1887, Congress created the Pacific Railroad Commission, “authorizing an investigation of the books, accounts, and methods of railroads which have received aid from the United States.” That launched a sweeping and granular investigation into the businesses at both ends of the transcontinental railroad, starting with the Stanford group.

Almost a year, hundreds of witnesses, and some 6,000 pages of testimony and conclusions later, the commission found Stanford and his people had lied to and defrauded the American people.

“I have never seen vouchers in such a state before in my life,” an independent expert accountant with 30 years’ experience working for railroad companies testified. “They are all in disorder, and nine-tenths of them are merely scraps of paper without receipts.”

The investigators found that millions of dollars had been “used for the purpose of influencing legislation and preventing the passage of measures deemed to be hostile to the interests of the company, and for the purpose of influencing elections.” In other words, the Stanford group had used millions of government money dollars to fight the government.

But that wasn’t the best—one should probably say the worst—of it. Essential accounting books that would have shown exactly where taxpayer money went had simply disappeared. Vanished. Vamoosed. “These books were not produced, and in the opinion of the Commission, were purposefully destroyed by direction of Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and Crocker. The evidence on this point appears to be conclusive.”

“The result,” the commission determined, “is that those who have controlled and directed the construction and development of these companies have become possessed of their surplus assets through issues of bonds, stocks, and payments of dividends, voted by themselves while the great creditor, the United States, finds itself substantially without adequate security from repayment of its loans.”

The Big Four made an estimated $62.6 million “surplus” on transcontinental railroad construction and a similar $55.5 million from the other many railroads they controlled, the commission concluded. For some context of what that money was worth in 1887, the California state budget that year was about $6 million (It’s over $200 billion today). The United States government couldn’t sue the railroad at that time because the debt was not yet officially due, and stockholders wouldn’t sue because they would likely lose their investments.

When Stanford got fed up answering the commission’s increasingly tough questions, he simply shut down, saying he had no knowledge, didn’t recall, or would not answer on advice of counsel. The commission brought him to court. In 1887, two members of a panel of three judges—personal friends of Stanford’s whom he had appointed to the bench—ruled against Congress and for Stanford.

He had won, but his fortunes would soon turn. The next year Stanford and his underestimated wife Jennie suffered the greatest loss imaginable. Their beloved only child, Leland Jr., died during a Grand Tour of Europe at age 15. The parents set out to memorialize him with the establishment of a university on their vast country estate in Palo Alto.

A few years later, Leland Sr. was betrayed by his business partner Huntington, when the wily old hardware store salesman engineered a corporate coup, had Stanford deposed as head of the railroad, and assumed the presidency himself. Huntington remained in the position for the rest of his life.

This American story of failure, reward, tragedy and duplicity has a tragic coda: murder.
Eight years after Leland Stanford died in his Palo Alto country mansion, on the brink of bankruptcy, his unassailable widow Jennie, who had saved Stanford University from shutting down by successfully fighting all the way to the Supreme Court for the return of a government loan, was murdered in a luxurious Honolulu hotel room. A coroner’s investigation found someone had purposefully poisoned her with pharmaceutical-grade strychnine.

The president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, made sure the investigation went nowhere—he could not afford to let another scandal rock the young, fragile institution. The killer was never discovered. And the university would go on to be a force for altering lives around the planet, as birthplace, incubator, and sustainer of Silicon Valley.

Today we often hear American stories of corporate chicanery, political fraud, coverups and crime—and they coexist with tales of our fathomless capacity for ambition, invention, and philanthropy.

Leland Stanford led the rare life big enough to contain them all.

The post Was Leland Stanford a ‘Magnanimous’ Philanthropist or a ‘Thief, Liar, and Bigot?’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is no greater symbol of local California corruption than Bell, a city of 35,000 people, 2 1/2 square miles, and many gas stations in southeast L.A. County. For years, Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo and his minions exploited every dark corner of California’s convoluted systems of local governance and finance. They paid each other scandalously high salaries (Rizzo’s package of wages and benefits was worth $1.5 million annually), used the city’s redevelopment agency like a piggybank, borrowed improperly, squirreled away money in illegal retirement accounts, purchased property off the books, approved illegal fees and taxes, and used a sham charter election to exempt themselves from state laws.

Today, five years after this malfeasance was exposed, a new narrative of Bell has emerged. That narrative is one of triumph, best exemplified by a conference on the corruption scandal organized by Chapman University last month. The tale’s heroes were all assembled: journalists who broke the story, a police whistleblower, citizens who challenged corrupt officials, prosecutors who won convictions of those officials, and state officials who put through new laws in response. They were joined by the administrators and lawyers who painstakingly put the city of Bell back together. Among their many successes is a $22 million reserve in the city’s coffers.

All this should be cause for celebration. The Bell case—and the response to it—provided a new roadmap for how California communities can respond after they are victimized by city hall. Future municipal corruption cleanup crews will have new laws and two new state appeals courts rulings to aid them in removing and obtaining restitution from corrupt officials.

But when it comes to the question of prevention—of how to make sure that California doesn’t see more Bells—there is less reason to party. That’s because Californians have failed to learn the central lesson of our long history of municipal corruption: The new rules that are a response to such scandals often enable future scandals.

To put it another way: The sense of triumph we feel after getting past a scandal is part of our problem.

Bell, while spectacular in its particulars, is really part of a larger wave of never-ending local corruption cases that goes back 50 years. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, county tax assessors from San Francisco to San Diego put their discretion up for sale—offering businesses lower property tax assessments in exchange for power, cash, and votes.

The predictable response was to limit the discretion of local officials over property—first with state laws, and later with Proposition 13, which effectively took away the power of local officials to set tax rates. This set the pattern for responding to local California scandals. When cities or school districts find some way to cheat, the state puts new limits on their discretion. This limits the power of local communities and their appointed leaders. But it hasn’t stopped scandals.

Why not? Because the weight of all these new limits on the locals has made community governance in California incredibly complex. So complex that it’s nearly impossible for citizens to understand what local representatives are up to—and thus provide a check on their actions. In fact, it’s so hard for local elected officials to understand their own actions that most cities must hire expensive administrators and consultants to navigate through the sea of rules.

Effectively, all these limits have left local governments with two options if they want to obtain revenues and improve their communities. The first is to beg the state for money; this has been such a popular option that local governments represent by far the biggest lobby in Sacramento.

The second option is to cheat. Or, to put it less judgmentally: to peer into the dark corners of the complicated system and invent new ways to get around the rules to govern and raise revenues. It’s worth remembering that while the Bell officials were corrupt and flouted laws, they didn’t steal and they didn’t embezzle, at least not in the traditional sense. They were just unusually brazen in exploiting the dark corners of California municipal finance.

So to truly reform local governance, Californians must first recognize a paradox: Preventing local officials from behaving like those in Bell requires giving more discretion and freedom to local officials.

Instead of using limits and restrictions to force city officials into dark corners, let’s lift limits and give officials more discretion to operate more easily in the daylight. The best, most direct reform would be to give California’s local governments more power to raise taxes and other revenues themselves.

The power of taxation is itself a tool of accountability. When cities can tax, the citizens and businesspeople who might see their taxes raised have a strong incentive to watch what’s happening in city hall. And when taxpayers are watching, it’s much more difficult to give your city manager an $800,000 salary.

If local control means anything, it means letting local elected leaders make their own choices about how much revenue they must raise to meet their local needs. But for 50 years, California leaders and voters have moved in the very opposite direction.
Doug Willmore, the city manager who is now leaving Bell after having dug it out of its hole, noted in his presentation at the Chapman conference that the city’s finances remain very complex. Revenues and expenditures are accounted for in 36 different funds. The city’s chief objective must be “normalizing” finances, his presentation said.

But California’s rule-heavy system doesn’t allow for normal. And so here’s the bad news about the good news in Bell: The city’s recovery may delay our reckoning with our own role in municipal scandals.

Until we understand the paradox of Bell, there will be more Bells.

The post The Only Thing Worse Than Scandals Are California’s Attempts to Stop Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Bai became interested in the intersection of scandal and political journalism in 2002, when he wrote an article about former U.S. Senator Gary Hart, who was contemplating a run for president. Hart had been the frontrunner in the 1988 presidential race—the favorite to win the Democratic nomination with a double-digit lead on the presumptive Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush—when rumors emerged of his womanizing. Amidst reports of affairs and photographs of him with young women, Hart dropped out of the race and public life.

Hart didn’t run for president in 2002, and over the next decade, Bai covered two more presidential campaigns. “I watched our candidates growing more remote and much less willing to offer complex ideas,” he said. As a political journalist, “you sit across from a candidate, and you know that they’re looking at you like you’re a hired assassin.” He sensed that something had “broken in this part of the process”—and he traced that break back to the Hart scandal.

Bai said that in the 1980s, a new generation of journalists was eager to follow in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s footsteps. They wanted to uncover the next Watergate—and they were “determined not to let another liar into the White House.” This impulse coincided with new technology—the rise of the satellite dish and cable news—as well as other cultural shifts.

As a result, the relationship between the American press and politicians underwent a fundamental shift. In our collective memory, we attribute this change to Hart. Hart, the story goes, invited journalists to follow him around. Hart was quoted saying, “‘If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.’” Reporters merely accepted his challenge and uncovered a scandal.

When you look at the facts, the narrative is less clear, said Bai. The reporters who broke the news of a possible clandestine relationship had dug into Hart’s private life before this quotation was made public. And, the invitation itself was proffered in an offhand and sarcastic manner.

As Bai explains it, journalists made the decision to go into Hart’s bedroom, and to blur the line between the political and the private. “We had a responsibility to reckon with” this sea change in political journalism, he said, “and discuss it and debate it”; instead, journalists pinned the shift on Hart.

Referring to the mass media critic Neil Postman, Bai said that in the 1980s, American culture began “to take on the arc of a sitcom.” Politicians—and media figures alike—became celebrities. This collision of celebrity and politics was inevitable, said Bai; Hart was simply the lightning rod.

In the ensuing decades, a door has been opened, said Bai, for would-be politicians who have nothing to say and no new ideas to contribute.

Miller added that politicians have become inhibited as well—pointing to Mitt Romney and the “47 percent” comment that torpedoed his 2012 election campaign. Romney has said that his takeaway from the experience was that politicians should act as if every moment of their existence is being recorded and taped—and this in an era when real moments from politicians were already scarce.

What, Miller asked Bai, is the difference between Bill Clinton—who managed to get elected president despite allegations of one affair and to stay in the public eye after confessing to another—and Hart?

Bai said that in the post-Hart era, what we consider “political talent” has changed. Clinton would do anything to stay president: “He had the skill to survive and he had the shamelessness to survive.” Clinton, said Bai, had the same level of intellect as Hart. But he was a different kind of a leader. Hart led on principle where Clinton led on will and personality.

Would we, asked Miller, have been better off knowing about John F. Kennedy’s affairs?

Bai said that the answers to such questions aren’t easy. JFK was having an affair with a woman who was also having an affair with a mobster; that probably mattered on a policy level. And, to give another example, presidential candidate John Edwards’ 2007 anti-poverty plan included “responsible fatherhood”—while he had an aide pretending to be the father of his child.

It “comes down to judgment and context,” said Bai. Moral people do immoral things, but that doesn’t define them. As Senator Bob Kerrey told Bai, none of us are the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives. People and journalists have to judge the totality of others’ character, said Bai. It’s what compassion demands.

In the audience question-and-answer session, Bai was asked how the media decides what scandals to cover and which to ignore.

Bai said that journalists make decisions about what to cover and what not to cover every day—but when it comes to scandal, they throw up their hands and say that the voters can decide whether it matters or not. Scandal coverage wins prizes and gets journalists on TV—but they must use their judgment. Watergate was an important moment in the field, but journalists took the hunt for scandals in some dark directions in the decades that followed. Today’s journalists need to rethink Watergate’s lessons, as well as their role in scandal-mongering.

Another audience member asked Bai to talk about President Obama.

On the one hand, said Bai, Obama appears to refute his theories. He’s scandal-proof and morally upright; like Gary Hart, he’s professorial and a little bit arrogant with the media. “But here’s the thing about Obama,” said Bai. “Obama’s a story.” He didn’t run as a candidate on a platform—“hope and change are not an idea,” said Bai. Obama ran as an inspirational story about what was possible in America; he was marketed as a narrative character. And that marketing would not have been possible in previous political eras.

The post When Journalists Became Scandal Mongers and Politicians Became Celebrities appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Which scandals matter and deserve the hyper-attention of our 24-hour news cycle? In advance of the Zócalo “Has the Media’s Obsession With Scandal Ruined American Politics?”, we asked experts in political science and communications: What can the American media do to cover politics in a way that helps our democracy?

The post Can Sensationalism Save Democracy? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Candidates for president—and for most other significant offices, really—don’t try to explain their ideas or their theories of the moment anymore. It’s hard to know if they really have any. Technology had a lot to do with this, of course. [John] Kerry’s controversial quote overwhelmed his campaign, at least for a few days, because of the 24-hour cable news cycle that hadn’t even existed when [Gary] Hart ran [for president] back in 1987—a senselessly competitive environment where inexperienced producers fixate on whatever minutiae seems new, to the exclusion of all else, and where reporters and pundits rush into TV studios armed with little more than vague impressions. (It struck me, watching some of the coverage of the Kerry “nuisance” controversy, how few of the commentators seemed to have actually read the piece they were talking about.) But the reverberation of that one comment would have been exponentially louder just four years later, with the sudden popularity of blogs and sites like YouTube and Facebook, and it would have been downright deafening four years after that, after Twitter had taken over the world.

By now, every candidate knows that a single misspoken line, a single emotional or ill-advisedly candid moment, can become a full-blown, existential crisis by the time the bus pulls up at the next rally. And if there’s not much room for nuance in a cable TV report, there’s none in 140 characters, which means that even a well-articulated argument can (and almost certainly will) be reduced and distorted by the time it reaches the vast majority of voters who will pay attention. Rarely is any candidate willing to risk sudden implosion by actually thinking through the complex issues out loud, as the most talented politicians of Hart’s day were accustomed to doing; it’s safer to traffic in poll-tested, blandly comforting gibberish about “middle-class jobs” and “ending business as usual,” which disturbs no one and does no harm. It’s safer to tell yourself, as Joe Lockhart did, that you really don’t need to cater to reporters anymore, because you can talk to your own e-mail list directly instead. Candidates routinely complain that reporters never talk to them about the actual substance of governing, but the truth is that with few exceptions, when you ask them to do exactly that, their reflexive response is no.

At the heart of this changed dynamic, though, isn’t merely a technological shift in the nation’s media, but a cultural one. There was a time when politicians and the journalists who covered them, however adversarial their relationship might become at times, shared a basic sense of common purpose. The candidate’s job was to win an argument about the direction of the country, and the media’s job was to explain that argument and the tactics with which it was disseminated. Neither could succeed without the basic, if sometimes grudging, cooperation of the other, and often, as in the case of Hart and some of his older colleagues in the media, there existed a genuine trust and camaraderie. Modern media critics might deride these kinds of relationships as coziness or corruption, but there was a very real benefit to it for the voters, which was context. Reporters who really knew a politician could tell the difference between, say, a candidate who had misspoken from exhaustion and one who didn’t know his facts. They could be expected to discern between a rank hypocrite, on one hand, and a candidate who had actually thought something through and adjusted his views, on the other.

In his engaging book The Eighteen-Day Running Mate, about Tom Eagleton’s disastrous foray into national politics, Joshua Glasser describes how a bevy of reporters actually camped out in Eagleton’s hotel suite so they could be there if McGovern called to offer him the number two spot on the ticket. (He did, and they were.) Later, when Eagleton’s candidacy was in peril, a few reporters went down to the tennis courts at the lodge where they and McGovern were staying, because the nominee was playing a match and they wanted to ask him a few questions. McGovern invited them to ride back to the lodge with him so they could talk.

Glasser relays these scenes as if they were commonplace, and yet they jolted me when I read them; to someone who has covered multiple presidential campaigns in the modern era, it couldn’t have sounded any more bizarre if he had reported that McGovern had personally murdered a reporter and disposed of the body. In today’s political climate, even if I could somehow manage to find out where the candidate was spending his downtime, I wouldn’t get within a hundred yards of that tennis court without being turned away, probably with a stern lecture. Today, even a phone call from someone like me requesting a routine interview mobilizes a phalanx of highly paid consultants whose job it is to deflect my questions and then, if they see any merit in having the candidate cooperate, to orchestrate and rehearse his responses.

“You didn’t prep for a candidate’s meeting with Jack Germond,” Joe Trippi told me when we talked. “What you’d want is for a candidate to just have a beer with Germond and answer his questions, you know? And back then, frankly, most of them could.” Now, Trippi told me bluntly, “No one would walk into an interview with you unprepped. I wouldn’t let it happen.”

That’s largely because, beginning with Watergate and culminating in Gary Hart’s unraveling, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted, from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. Whatever sense of commonality between candidates and reporters that existed in McGovern’s day had, by the time my generation arrived on the scene, been replaced by a kind of entrenched cold war. We aspired chiefly to show politicians for the impossibly flawed human beings they were—a single-minded pursuit that reduced complex careers to isolated transgressions. As the former senator Bob Kerrey, who had been accused of war crimes in Vietnam after a distinguished career in public service, told me once: “We’re not the worst thing we’ve ever done in our lives, and there’s a tendency to think that we are.” That quote, I thought, should have been posted on the wall of every newsroom in the country, just to remind us that it was true.

Predictably, politicians responded to all this with a determination to give us nothing that might aid in the hunt to expose them, even if it meant obscuring the convictions and contradictions that made them actual human beings. Both sides retreated to our respective camps, where we strategized about how to outwit and outflank the other, occasionally to our own benefit but rarely to the voters’.

Maybe this made our media a sharper guardian of the public interest against frauds and hypocrites. But it also made it hard for any thoughtful politician to offer arguments that might be considered nuanced or controversial. And, just as consequential, the post-Hart climate made it much easier for candidates who weren’t especially thoughtful—who didn’t have any complex understanding of governance, or even much affinity for it—to gain national prominence. When a politician could duck any real intellectual scrutiny simply by deriding the evident triviality of the media, when the status quo was to never say anything that required more than 10 words’ worth of explanation, then pretty much anyone could rail against the system and glide through the process without having to establish more than a passing familiarity with the issues. As long as you weren’t delinquent on your taxes or having an affair with a stripper or engaged in some other form of rank duplicity, you could run as a “Tea Partier” or a “populist” without ever having to elaborate on what you actually believed or what you would do for the country.

All of which probably has some bearing on why, more than a quarter century after Hart disappeared from political life, both our elected leaders and our political media have fallen so far in the esteem of voters who judge both to be smaller than the country deserves. At the outset of Barack Obama’s second term in office, only a quarter of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing all or even most of the time, according to Pew Research polling. (That number later dropped after a series of self-manufactured budget crises in Congress.) Meanwhile, between 1997 and 2013, trust in the mass media fell almost 10 points. Four decades after the legend of Woodward and Bernstein came into being, only 28 percent of Americans were willing to say that journalists contributed a lot to society’s well-being—a showing that lagged behind almost every other professional group.

Thank heaven for lawyers.

The post Have Our Politicians Become Boring? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If only it were that easy to kick Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling out of L.A. But, alas, Tarantino’s film is pure fantasy. There is simply no person, institution, or network in today’s Los Angeles with the clout to force powerful Angelenos to repent their sins—much less drive them out of town.

The racism heard on the leaked tape may have been news around the country, but Sterling’s discrimination against renters in his apartment buildings, and his anti-black, anti-Mexican, and misogynist views, were well-known facts of Los Angeles life for 30 years. Over those decades, no one in L.A. sought to dislodge Sterling from his role as owner of a major sports franchise. And now, with his bigotry a national news event, Sterling has become an outrageous example of the inability of L.A. to police itself, and its elite.

Even after the public release of an audio tape of Sterling demanding his girlfriend stop associating with black people, no Southern Californian was able to pull a Marsellus Wallace and kick him out of L.A. The consequences he has faced so far—and will face in the future—are all coming from the outside: from the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (who suspended him for life on Tuesday), from Sterling’s fellow team owners (who could force him to sell), and from corporations that sponsor pro basketball (and have disassociated themselves from the Clippers).

Thank goodness for those punishments, because who here would have had the juice to force him to sell the team? Prominent business leaders? L.A.’s rich corporate types are more engaged nationally and globally than locally, and they don’t have the public profile, or leverage, to threaten Sterling or his team. City political leaders? L.A.’s charter keeps mayors and city council members from having too much power. Ironically, the mayor of Sacramento, former pro basketball star Kevin Johnson, has had more of a role than L.A.’s own mayor, since Johnson was retained by the players’ union for advice on dealing with Sterling. The town’s newspapers or TV stations? They’re mostly shrinking in ambition and staff.

In L.A., accountability almost always requires outside intervention. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca had mismanaged the jail for years, but only resigned earlier this year after the federal government began investigating. When Dodgers owner Frank McCourt was sabotaging the team, it took the commissioner of baseball, in Milwaukee, to force the team’s sale. In the past generation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s special education program, and the Los Angeles Police Department all have required forms of federal receivership.

Outside intervention, of course, is no panacea. But the alternative is unchecked defiance, the best current example being Brian D’Arcy, head of the biggest union of L.A. Department of Water and Power (DWP) employees. For months, he has refused demands from city leaders, the courts, and the media that he turn over financial documents on two nonprofits that received $40 million from ratepayers. Even as he stonewalled, D’Arcy served on the Los Angeles 2020 Commission, a group of distinguished L.A. citizens, as they issued a report complaining about a lack of accountability in city government. Did I mention that defiance is a close cousin of shamelessness?

In Sterling’s case, it’s unclear whether other powerful Angelenos would have moved against him—even if they could have. For one thing, he’s got the kind of hallowed, homegrown personal narrative—poor kid from the Eastside (Boyle Heights) who becomes a Westside titan (real estate)—that buys plenty of second chances here. And Sterling bought social status by becoming a major player in the phony, philanthropic Beverly Hills hotel chicken dinners that always make rich people look charitable and sometimes raise money for a good cause.

By handing out money to many different people and organizations across all lines of geography, cause, and ethnicity, Sterling incentivized much of Los Angeles to ignore his racism. Among those who looked the other way for years was the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, which was about to give him a second lifetime achievement award when the recent news broke. It didn’t hurt Sterling that he advertised his charitable exploits in the L.A. Times, a paper that has portrayed him more as creepy uncle than as unrepentant racist.

This particular moment has exposed the underbelly of Southern California’s open culture. Weak institutions and weak leadership free people here to do as they please and be who they are. But when someone powerful does real damage to Los Angeles and its reputation, there’s no one able and willing to protect us.

Sterling’s conversation with his girlfriend—who, as a 30-year-old multiracial gold digger, was the perfect companion for the wealthy 80-year-old Los Angeles racist—was offensive and nonsensical. But Sterling did say one thing that hit close to home. When his girlfriend asked why he wouldn’t stand against racism in the world, Sterling said on the tape: “We don’t evaluate what’s right and wrong. We live in a society. We live in a culture. We have to live within that culture.”

For all the criticism of Sterling that you hear from Angelenos now, he is decidedly the product of Los Angeles culture. He thrived here. Now, he defines us.

The post Donald Sterling Is Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two decades ago, I was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun when I met Spencer Schlosnagle. A lanky, amiable young man of 30, Schlosnagle was in the midst of a re-election campaign for mayor of Friendsville, a small town along the north-flowing Youghiogheny River in the Western Maryland mountains. Complicating his reelection were accusations that he had been exposing himself to motorists along a nearby interstate.

Schlosnagle saw his name go into headlines in newspapers and magazines throughout the Maryland panhandle and beyond. He was even profiled on TV’s Current Affair. These were the days before smartphones and the Internet.

His attorney at the time said Schlosnagle suffered from “impulsive personality disorder” and was seeking counseling.

Despite the controversy, Schlosnagle won. His margin of victory was a resounding 99 votes in a town with a population of just 577.

The population has dropped since then, but, all these years later, Schlosnagle, approaching 50, remains mayor.

The immediate political future of Weiner doesn’t look as bright. Before his latest controversy erupted in July, Weiner was among the leading Democratic contenders in the city’s mayoral race. New Yorkers seemed to have forgiven the former city councilman for sexual exploits that surfaced in 2011 and were willing to give him another chance. That was until he was revealed to have continued them in the months that followed. Now he’s tumbling in the polls.

So what accounts for one politician’s redemption and another’s deterioration?

What Schlosnagle, who, at 21, was the youngest person ever elected mayor in Maryland, seems to have learned well is that all politics is local. He may have caused a stir in conservative, small-town Western Maryland, but he knew his constituents.

He was one of them. They passed him on the streets regularly, shook hands with him at community events, and attended Sunday services together. He had personal problems, for sure, but his constituents in Friendsville saw them as just that: Schlosnagle’s problems. And he handled them himself, publicly and in the courts.

His record was impressive. Schlosnagle worked hard to spruce up the town, winning millions of dollars in government grants to improve public services and parks. He brought new businesses into vacant buildings. He pushed for repair and construction of new sidewalks and trimmed overgrown trees along streets. Ultimately, he helped improve the image of a town that had previously been seen as an Appalachian Dodge City, where the bars were home to frequent fights and shootings.

The bottom line: As mayor, Schlosnagle delivered the goods.

And there lies Weiner’s problem. What has he accomplished as a politician other than other than notoriety? A recent examination of Weiner’s 12-year congressional career by The New York Times showed he was the leading sponsor of just one piece of legislation. It did not become law.

When Weiner announced his mayoral candidacy in the spring, he acknowledged that he had “made some big mistakes” but hoped “to get a second chance” to help out those in the middle and working classes. New Yorkers were even open to giving him a second chance.

But his more recent revelations of online sexual escapades show that he has not learned his lesson. And, unlike Schlosnagle, he had no record on which to lean

It could be, too, that the combative, self-aggrandizing personality of Weiner and the pain he’s caused his wife have made New Yorkers reluctant to forgive him. He’s not just hurting himself but others as well.

Schlosnagle was single. He didn’t deceive anyone, least of all his constituents, about his shenanigans. He faced up to them in court. He sought counseling. He may have paid a small political price; he had ambitions of being a county commissioner, and those were never realized. But he continues to serve as mayor of Friendsville, and he was even inducted into the Maryland Municipal Hall of Fame in 2004. His redemption came from a combination of his easy-going but earnest personality, his community accomplishments, and the wisdom of the people of Friendsville, who saw his potential despite personal problems.

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