Post 2:

The book The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why has been an interesting read thus far, to be sure. Drew describes a plethora of flaws in the American political system, many of which are obvious to the educated reader. She proceeds to detail, in more specifics, what allows these flaws to work through use of an actual example. Up through Chapter 7, Drew mostly describes the influence that money has had on the political system, especially presidential elections. Other than this, she points out that increased partisanship and lack of virtue has caused a dramatic decrease in the overall quality of recent politicians. To demonstrate the latter, she goes into (unnecessarily excessive) detail about the Watergate Scandal that defeated the Nixon administration as well as scandals amongst other administrations (such as the Clinton administration). To show the former, the author analyzes the effect soft money has had on the political system, and notably she describes the soft money loophole (which, in my opinion, was poorly explained: I still have no idea how exactly the loophole works, other than that it allows illegal amounts of money to be transferred to parties) and political action committees (PACs). Another example, which particularly caught my attention, was the Ted Sioeng/John Huang/Hsi Lai temple conspiracy. To quote the book, “[an article said] that Sioeng ‘may have been a conduit’ for some of the ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ that intelligence agencies traced from mainland China into California banks and that he used some of those funds to make political contributions” (92-93). John Huang then had a suspicious meeting with the President, following which intelligence agencies confirmed that China might have been attempting to influence American presidential elections through contributions. This, of course, was illegal, as nonresident foreigners couldn’t make contributions to party national committees, though he ultimately gave four hundred thousand dollars to the Democratic National Committee in 1996. Drew describes this particular incident for pages and pages, which is in one way a pro and in another way a con. Drew is very detailed in her description of particular events, which certainly draws the reader in, but it appears at times that she is rambling. Some of her details are important; others, like the color of a prosecutor’s assistant’s hair, are so trivial that it seems one would not include such in a book of any prestige. It is clear to me, however, that Drew’s intended audience is not a teenager with only a little knowledge of political corruption. Her book is likely written for a deeply involved political scientist or someone more avid on the topic than I. In retrospect, I would rather have selected another book, but I’ve gotten thus far and I do not intend to quit. I predict that the remainder of the book will focus primarily on some form of corruption less associated with commerce.