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Date Posted: 09:56:17 08/17/08 Sun
Author: JMR
Subject: Corrupt politicians voted in by corrupt people

This shows how corrupt our state is.....

The people put in office who does what they do.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/08/17/asking_more_of_a_senator/



YVONNE ABRAHAM

Asking more of a senator

By Yvonne Abraham | August 17, 2008

Dianne Wilkerson's supporters are a mighty forgiving bunch.

When the Boston Democrat failed to pay state and federal income taxes for years during the early 1990s, leading to a 30-day sentence in a halfway house, they did not conclude that a state senator who didn't pay her own taxes was the wrong person to decide how to spend theirs.

When the Office of Campaign and Political Finance and the attorney general's office cited Wilkerson in 1997 and 2005 for multiple and repeated campaign finance law violations - including tens of thousands of dollars in unexplained payments to herself and her two sons - her voters did not conclude that the senator was misusing the generous donations of committed supporters to benefit herself and her family.

When former AG Tom Reilly complained that Wilkerson had stonewalled his investigation, her constituents did not conclude that amounted to towering arrogance. When it came out that she had not paid dozens of parking tickets, they did not conclude that she considered herself above the law.

And when her personal financial problems escalated, and she failed to make her mortgage payments, and then was sued by her condo association for $13,000 she owed them, including an astounding $5,000 in bounced checks to her very own neighbors, her fans did not conclude that someone with such poor command of her own affairs was ill-equipped for the complexities of state government.

When she failed to gather the 300 signatures required to get her name on the ballot two years ago, they did not conclude that the senator, first elected in 1992, could barely be bothered trying to win their votes.

No. They stuck with her. They stuck with her, her constituents say, because she delivers, particularly for poorer residents. Gay rights activists say she was with them when few others were. And African-Americans say that as the state's only black senator among 40, she is too powerful a symbol to unseat.

In a month, voters will go to the polls to vote in the Democratic primary contest between Wilkerson and Sonia Chang Diaz, who gave the incumbent a scare two years ago. And Wilkerson is in trouble again: Earlier this month, she agreed to pay a $10,000 fine for yet more campaign finance violations, some as recent as last year. Under the agreement, Attorney General Martha Coakley will now monitor Wilkerson as if she were an errant child, requiring her to file monthly campaign finance reports. Coakley as good as said the senator cannot be trusted.

So will those voters finally conclude that their senator is beset by a distressing and pathological self-destructiveness?

Not likely.

"Who the hell hasn't had problems?" spat Cecil Guscott, from a politically connected local family, sitting at the counter at the Silver Slipper restaurant in Dudley Square on a recent afternoon. "When you're black, they put the damn tag on you. She's the only black senator. The Irish vote for their own, and the Italians vote for their own. We vote for our own."

"I've been voting for her for years," said Carol Westbrook, who sells wigs at Mr G's Plaza, on Harrison Avenue. "My finances are just as bad as hers, so I don't let that bother me."

And in a way, it's hard to argue with Guscott and Westbrook: Wilkerson survives in part because she is still the only African-American member of a body that is out of step with the state it is meant to represent. She survives because those who want to elect a candidate of color have so few options.

But she also survives for reasons that say more about the sorry state of politics than about Wilkerson herself. She survives because voters don't expect that their elected representatives be above their own inadequacies. She survives because her supporters, grateful for the constituent services they should be able to take for granted, don't expect more.

But they should expect more. In fact, they should demand it.

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