'EVERYONE MAKES MISTAKES'

I have the dubious distinction of living in the most corrupt state in America. I am talking about Rhode Island, which despite its noble past as one of the original 13 Colonies is pretty much a banana republic. "The political condition of Rhode Island is notorious, acknowledged and shameful," the great muckraker Lincoln Steffens once wrote. "It is a state for sale, and cheap."

That was in the early 1900s. But at long last, my home state is trying to go clean. A bill before the legislature would ban campaign contributions. Elections would be publicly financed so candidates wouldn't have to go around hitting up corporations or fat-cat donors. Rid our elections of the influence of money? Reduce the temptation for politicians to trade cash for favors? My neighbor in Providence, the capital, calls the Clean Election Act "socialist" and "un-American." He's typical.

It probably won't surprise you to learn that this reform effort was the idea of an out-of-stater. Her name is Te-Ping Chen, a college student at Brown University who hails from liberal Oakland, California. Her bill, she says, will remove the considerable financial obstacles to running for election and inspire ordinary Joes--"plumbers, barbers and even schoolteachers!"--to enter the political arena. One-party monopoly might give way to multiparty plurality, with greens, libertarians and socialists all fronting candidates.

I asked Chen whether she had ever heard of Edward D. DiPrete. She hadn't. He was Rhode Island's governor back in the 1980s who was convicted for accepting bribes, extorting money and using the money for his campaigns.

Had she heard of the late Joseph A. Bevilacqua? Again, no. He was the state's top judge until 1986. It was alleged beginning in the late '70s that he liked to pal around with people tied to organized crime. Finally, with impeachment proceedings looming, the chief justice resigned. His successor was Thomas F. Fay, who resigned a few years after assuming his post, also in the face of impeachment proceedings. Among other things, it turned out he was using court funds (which he later reimbursed) to buy himself expensive meals and rent tuxedos.

What about Providence's infamous former mayor, Vincent A. Cianci, or Buddy, as everyone in town called him. In the mid-1980s, while in office, he assaulted a man he suspected of being his estranged wife's lover with a lit cigarette, a log and an ashtray. "Everyone makes mistakes," Buddy said apologetically, and a few years later, well, he was re-elected. It seemed as though Cianci would finally be out of our lives when he was convicted of racketeering charges in 2002, but now a federal three-judge panel has ruled that he was wrongly sentenced. That neighbor of mine already has a RE-ELECT BUDDY bumper sticker.

I went recently to a state hearing on the Clean Election Act. A panel of about a dozen legislators sat in a small, boiling-hot room. Rhode Island politicians have a way of slicking down their hair so that even if they aren't wearing toupees, it still looks like they are. (Even barbers should be able to get elected to political office, I remembered Chen's saying, and thought that this reform could not come soon enough.) They asked some good and pointed questions. They listened intently to what supporters of the legislation had to say. It's hard to know whether this was in fact all for show, since they know the bill doesn't have much chance of passing. Chen told me she recently went to one legislator's office to pitch him on Clean Elections. After hearing her out, there was a pause. Then he started laughing.