There are no Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff, not one, not one single Democrat. Every person named in this scandal is a Republican. Every person under investigation is a Republican. Every person indicted is a Republican. This is a Republican finance scandal. There is no evidence that Jack Abramoff ever gave any Democrat any money and we’ve looked through all of the F.E.C. reports to make sure that’s true…I know the Republican National Committee would like to get the Democrats involved in this. They’re scared. They should be scared. They haven’t told the truth. They have misled the American people, and now it appears they’re stealing from Indian tribes. The Democrats are not involved in this.
Video of Dean's comments here.
I hate to burst Dean's bubble but my Senator, Byron Dorgan, has admitted to accepting money from employees of Abramoff's firm. Sure that's not directly, but since when did one need to have received a personal check from Jack Abramoff to be connected to this nonsense? If Abramoff employees gave money to Democrats at the direction of Abramoff, is that not the exact same thing?
Suggesting that, in order for a politician to be involved in the corruption they had to get their money directly from Abramoff, is spin. Pure and simple. Nothing more.
Abramoff was a go-between for major Indian gambling interests and politicians in Congress. On Abramoff's directions those gambling interests made big-time donations to a lot of politicians. Mostly Republicans, sure, but a lot of Democrats as well.
To deny that this is a bi-partisan scandal is to ignore the problems at the heart of the issue. There needs to be lobbying reform, but if we allow the issue to be spun off as the corruption of one party and not the other - thus implying that replacing one party with the other will fix the problem - all we will do is sweep the problem under the rug until the next Jack Abramoff comes along, be he Democrat or Republican.
Congress is corrupt. Our politicians clearly cannot resist the temptations posed by big-money lobbyists, so we need to change some of the rules. But before we can do that we have to resolve that the problem resides within the system, not with one political ideology or the other.