He likely never had an intention to stop corruption, being most likely neck deep in it himself for his entire political career. But this reminds me of a central message from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
From time to time Emperors would rise to power with the promise (along with the apparent authentic intention) of cleaning up the corruption that was crippling the government of Rome. Basically, the Praetorian Guard had become a sort of Mafia in Rome, expecting to receive enormous sums of tax dollars just because that's what had become the long established norm. Besides that, everything was a scam to enrich them, and they came to think of all these scams as their birthright. Even emperors were powerless to do much about it, since if they tried too hard, they'd find themselves hacked or strangled to death and replaced by a less civic minded one.
It's just the nature of behemoth states that the most corrupt will rise to the real seats of power behind the scenes, and become thoroughly entrenched there, generationally. Which, of course, is why the Founders wanted the Federal Government to actually have very little power, apart from the instance of war, thought to be a very rare and unusual event, and would have been apart from the growth of the central state and the war-seeking corruption that naturally comes with it.
But today we have not only behemoth Federal Government but behemoth state government to match, "all part of the same hypocrisy," as Micheal Corleone observed in Godfather II.
An excellent summation.
Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living?
