um
well you know i i think it it really depends you know i think you know if if you know taking the current batch we've got you know i think Paul Tsongas probably isn't in it for like his own gain
i i don't see him as that kind of a guy i can believe like that Bill Clinton might be
um i certainly think a lot of people in Congress are
well
it's for me it's hard to talk about uh specifics because i don't know the people all i've read is uh the headlines the uh
um-hum
the generic question which is what they're talking about i think it's
yeah
all government any government is based on the honesty of the of the individual right
yeah well you know i think i think if you like compare us to other governments you know i i think we tend to be overly critical of our own government i mean you go and look like a lot of these African countries where corruption is right right out in the open it's like
you know you want to do something you know you better even be the president's best friend or you know pay me a lot of money
yeah well that's that's part of it the tradition certainly modifies it if you have uh tradition of of um like
baksheesh or whatever they call it
yeah or might makes right or money and which is might
right or bucks make right
so uh in certainly you're not going to have the same kind of honesty on the other hand uh
i i i think it seems to me that all the big scandals are based on either
individual honesty uh going corrupt or frankly uh
uh elective honesty going bad on us
well you know i i think you know to some extent you know people get the government they deserve is a cliche
yeah
but it it's really true i mean if
you know you hear these guy i think that this is the first election i've heard about where a lot of the incumbents are really finding saying okay we're getting out because it's too much heat
i mean normally it's yeah okay what big scandal but it comes times to reelect them they say hey this is the guy that brings home the bacon for us you know he's got seniority on all these committees we're not gonna replace him
yes and that's again the what you said earlier about people get what they deserve they say well if if if a dishonest person is uh good for us we'll keep him in office
yeah and i mean also you know you look i think a lot of it has to do with reform with with with the issue of campaign reform when it costs you i mean ten million twenty million dollars
sometimes i've heard horrendous figures to run for a Senate seat
you know job pays a hundred thousand a year
you know it it it the you work it out unless someone is incredibly altruistic
you know there's no reason for them to want to run for that
i i think that uh part of it again is this this uh
well organizations can go bad and our particular organization has is one of the best in the world but it's still relative to itself is uh is in serious need of reform
um
i've i've been overseas and
and there's a lot of as you pointed out there's a lot of corruption corruption in other countries and so when you come back to the States you say well as bad as this is
i'm still awfully glad to be here uh so i guess the you know this this question was can we ever get uh totally uh honest government and i would say uh
right
it's an imperfect system because people are imperfect
yeah only to the extent that i'm honest can i can i uh
uh act as an honest person
i i mean the problem is that
you know you've got as i said there's no incentive incentive to go into i mean look at our state legislature and things where very nominal pay but there's also not you know
what's the campaign the campaign is four guys go against each other and you know there's no advertising
those people i can believe are doing it because they want to change the process
but when you're talking about having to spend tens of millions of dollars
to get elected and then being in the pockets of all these people who gave you the money and then having to regard how to repay you know how to uh kind of do for yourself
i think i i really think that it's not so much that corrupt people go into it as that the process corrupts
i i i would agree with you there well the other side of the coin too is that that the whole that the process even from the beginning uh
you scratch my back i'll scratch yours uh i would even i would disagree with you a little bit because i think in the state level that's just part of the uh the internship so to speak and there's a lot of corruption
i i think it depends a lot on
on the state i think that it varies from state to state
oh yes but but what i meant was why do people go why do people run for the school board because that's step one on the ladder
oh oh man i don't want to talk about the school board we've just we've just been having school board meetings and it was like people suing each over over things they said
