by Rushworth M. Kidder

There’s something engagingly blunt and muscular about draining a swamp. The metaphor was trumpeted by House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the 2006 midterm election campaign in an effort to shame her Republican colleagues for failing to reform their ethics. The phrase fairly bursts with a Paul Bunyan swagger. It evokes a world of axes, bulldozers, and big boots taming the frontier. But the trouble with big, captivating metaphors is that they can be mistaken for reality — and return to bite you.

That’s what happened last week when the sorry tale of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) snaked its way back into view. Despite his well-known history of failing to report income, pay taxes, or recognize conflicts of interest, Rangel still occupies a top tax-writing position as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. As further allegations against him uncoiled last week, Republicans reared up like creatures from the bog to accuse Speaker Pelosi of hypocrisy. If, they said, she really intended to “turn this Congress into the most honest and open Congress in history” (as she told NBC’s Brian Williams in 2006), she needed to lash the House ethics committee over the glacial pace of its investigation into Rangel’s activities. Meanwhile, they demanded that she pry her fellow Democrat loose from his powerful chairmanship.

Looking back, you can see why Pelosi got excited by her metaphor. In the 12-month period preceding the November 2006 election, House Republicans mired themselves in all manner of moral muck. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) stepped down over a sex scandal involving House pages. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) resigned over his relationship with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.) went to jail for bribery, fraud, and tax evasion. And Bob Ney (R-Ohio) bowed out on the eve of the election, sucked down by the Abramoff affair. By 2007 Gallup found that the “honesty and ethical standards” of Congress were ranked high or very high by only 9 percent of the public, standing above only advertising practitioners, car salesmen, and lobbyists in their listing.

You also can understand Pelosi’s bewilderment over the Rangel tangle. Compared to the mire of 2006, the current flap seems tame, victimless, and inconsequential. Choosing a what’s-all-the-fuss approach, she determined to let due process take its course, insisting that Rangel is innocent until proven guilty. Good arguments, all — in 2006.

But 2006 might as well be the Middle Ages. It’s been walled off from the present by the Great Wall of the ethics recession. Americans who once shrugged off high-level corruption, deceit, and irresponsibility as discomforting but unimportant now view those things as intolerable. Nor does it matter that the recession is abating. The whole experience has sensitized us to the ethical implications of organizational behavior. In 2006, the scandals focused on Beltway fat cats and left hardly a trace on the lives of ordinary Americans. By 2009, the scandals involved financial kingpins and slammed squarely into the nation’s pocketbook, leaving an ineradicable mark. Now that the ethics alarm has been raised, what would keep our moral outrage from descending wrathfully on any institution, like Congress, that failed to maintain its integrity? Shouldn’t it be clear to Pelosi & Co. that any ethical lapse, however small, is going to generate enormous turbulence? Isn’t there a clear connection between such lapses and another Gallup finding, published last week, showing Congress’s approval rating at only 21 percent — down from 31 percent in September and 39 percent in March?

So where did the swamp metaphor lead us astray? First, politics on either side of the aisle isn’t a dismal swamp. It’s a set of interpersonal relationships. If a few are putrid, many are not. To broad-brush the opposition so contemptuously may win you high-fives from fellow polarizers, but it sets you up for a fierce attack when next they see you compromising — as they saw Pelosi doing in the Rangel affair. Second, as homebuilders know, it’s often harder to change a landscape by draining it than by filling it with the rock, gravel, and sand that eventually displaces the mud. Real change, topographically as well as politically, often comes by addition, not subtraction. Third, in the age of environmentalists who recognize marshes, bogs, and wetlands as vital to our ecology, this is a startlingly unpropitious metaphor. There’s little argument, these days, that wetlands are not something to exploit but to protect.

In one way, however, her metaphor makes a point. It reminds us that the ethical problem in Congress is a matter not of individuals but of cultures. It’s not enough to root out a handful of DeLays or Rangels: Remove one alligator, and another crawls in to take its place. Nor is it enough to send Pelosi packing or goad the ethics committee into action. The entire moral mindset must be shifted.

That’s exactly what the public is waiting to see. Last year made us extraordinarily aware of ethical lapses. Now it’s easier to recognize the elements of a culture of integrity — the values underlying public service, the ethical reasoning required to craft good public policy, and the moral courage that promotes effective action. Which is another reason her metaphor lets us down. You build culture by creating, not just by draining. Faced with ethical lapses, Congress must do more than simply engineer an emptiness. The public wants positive results.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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