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Worst Week inWashington
The Fix’s
blog post on who is to blame for the current federal deficits. The problem? There is no Rep. Jack Kimble; that Twitter account is a spoof. Then, several reporters jumped the gun — via Twitter — on a release
By Chris Cillizza
But we’ve always thought that Twitter was a dangerous game for politi- cians. (We even wrote an essay warning pols to tone down the tweeting.) Now, it turns out that Twitter holds real peril for political reporters, too. Two examples from the week that was highlight the dangers. First, Washington Post editorial writer and blogger Jonathan Capehart used a tweet from Rep. Jack Kimble of California as a launching pad for a
T
he Fix is a confirmed FOT (Friend of Twitter). We’ve been using the microblogging service since the summer of 2009 and have en- joyed every minute of it.
touting the endorsement by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) of Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s Senate candidacy. The release in question was actually sent out by the campaign of Rep. Kendrick Meek, the Dem- ocrat in the race, to draw attention to Graham’s endorse- ment of Crist way back in 2009 — when the governor, now an independent, was still running for Senate as a Repub- lican. Graham had since rescinded the endorsement and is now backing former state House speaker Marco Rubio (R). To their credit — and Twitter’s credit — Capehart and the Huffington
Post’s Amanda Terkel, who tweeted on the Graham endorsement, correc- ted their errors quickly. Capehart wrote (via Twitter, of course) that he had been “bamboozled,” adding: “Lesson here: Never let a good opening get in the way of that final fact-check.” The Fix adopts a “there but for the grace of God go I” approach to mis- takes via 140 characters or less — as should any self-aware journalist. But
the slip-ups highlight the double-edged sword that is Twitter. On the one hand, you can instantly share your news and views with the world. On the other hand, you can instantly share your news and views with the world. The immediacy that has turned Twitter into an international phenom- enon — don’t all Hollywood celebs and pro athletes announce everything important on it these days? — presents major challenges for journalists trying to live by the “trust but verify” credo. (It wasn’t all bad news for journalists on
Twitter this week. A Japanese reporter im- prisoned in Afghanistan used a cellphone
to tweet that he was alive and well; he was released days later.) But Twitter, for complicating the already overcomplicated lives of politi- cal journalists, you had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or some- thing.
Have a candidate for the Worst Week in Washington? E-mail
chris.cillizza@
wpost.com with your nominees.
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KLMNO
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
Poli Sci 101: A cheat sheet for politicians
by Ezra Klein M
ost conventions in Washington are able to attract at least a bit of the city’s star power. Obscure trade associations get House mem- bers. Larger groups get senators, or maybe, if they’re lucky, a member of the White House’s senior staff. A glimpse of David Axelrod’s mustache, an obscenity from Rahm Emanuel — these
are the brushes with fame that power D.C.’s convention industry. There were no political luminaries in attendance at the American Political Science Association’s convention last week, however. The fact that the coun- try’s brightest political scholars had all gathered at the Marriott Wardman Park barely seemed to register on the rest of the town. Worse, you got the feel- ing that the political scientists knew it. One of the conference’s highlights, ac- cording to its Web site, was a panel titled “Is Political Science Relevant?” I, for one, believe that it is and that this town could benefit from a good dose of it. So as I made my way through the conference, I asked the assembled political scientists what they wished politicians knew about politics. Here are some of their best answers.
Washington is obsessed with oratory and persua-
Presidential speeches don’t make a big difference.
sion. Lawmakers are constantly begging the White House to take the rhetorical lead on this or that. Pundits and reporters talk incessantly about mes- sage and narrative. In the movies and on TV, govern- ing always culminates with a dramatic speech. The only problem? Speeches don’t matter. George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&Mand the author of the book “On Deaf Ears: The
Limits of the Bully Pulpit,” has studied the major speeches of every recent presidency. His conclusion: “When we actually looked at what happened to virtually all presidents, the public almost never moves in their direction. That was true with Ronald Reagan, with Bill Clinton. It was even true with Frank- lin Roosevelt before World War II. The country moved when Hitler did things, rather than when FDR made a speech. And we’re seeing the same thing with Barack Obama.” If the point of presidential speeches is to move public opinion — and that’s certainly what most of us think — they simply don’t work. So, what does? Well, Edwards says, the public actually has beliefs of its own. Or as he puts it: “The public supports what the president wants to do when they support what the president wants to do.”
‘Citizen- legislators’ empower the very special interests they’re meant to fight.
In this year of “tea partiers” and political insur-
gents, we keep hearing the same refrain: The founders envisioned not career politicians but citizen-legisla- tors — decent folk who’d leave the farm to serve the public, then return home before they became corrupt fat cats. It’s this idea that lends term limits such per- ennial appeal. And yet, says David Canon, a political scientist at
the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the au- thor of “Actors, Athletes, and Astronauts: Political Amateurs in the United States Congress,” term limits would actually have the opposite effect. He explains:
“If you have a bunch of rookies in there who don’t have much experience, you’re basically turning power over to the permanent government in that town: the staffers and the lobbyists the newcomers end up relying on.”
That’s the conclusion of the new book “Lobbying
Lobbyists don’t run the show.
and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why,” which is easily the most comprehensive study of lobbying ever published. The authors randomly chose 98 legislative fights and then sifted through more than 20,000 lobbying reports and 300 inter- views with key players to come up with a surprising
result: Usually, the lobbyists lost. In fact, the best predictor of action wasn’t the money spent or the lobbyists
involved. It was the politicians. Action became more likely when major play- ers decided they wanted to act (think Barack Obama winning the White House and deciding to pursue health-care reform) or suddenly were given the power to act (recall how the embarrassment of the Abramoff scandal empow- ered ethics legislation that had long been stalled in Congress). “Our research indicates that members of Congress don’t listen to lobbyists unless they want to,” says Beth Leech, a political scientist at Rutgers and one of the co-authors.
Politicians should talk to political scientists.
This one may not be so surprising, but it is con- vincing: As the 24-hour news cycle accelerates into the 1,440-minute news cycle, distracting us with an incessant stream of meaningless one-liners and manufactured outrages, the considered, rigorous, historical examinations favored by political scien- tists offer an increasingly valuable antidote. “The 24-hour news cycle is really focused on little,
tiny swells and waves on the surface of the ocean,” says John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. “But in fact, most of the big things affecting the ocean are these currents underneath. They’re what’s moving the water.” And that’s what political science studies. So political science is often accused of a sort of nihilism: Lobbyists don’t much matter, it says. Speeches are ineffective. Voters are driven by the econo- my, and campaigns barely move the needle. Most of the stuff that obsesses us during election season has no effect on the eventual outcome. But if politicians took these findings to heart, it would free them to do their
jobs better. “The fact that much of what cable news is talking about on any given day is not important probably is empowering,” Sides says. Particularly combined with the finding that what does matter, both for elections and for people’s lives, is how well the country is doing. Worrying less about tomor- row’s polls and news releases and more about the effect of today’s policies could make for better bills — and happier, more successful politicians.
Ezra Klein blogs on domestic and economic policy for The Washington Post at
washingtonpost.com/ezraklein.
DAVID LEE/HBO
In a Harvard seminar on urban inequality, HBO’s “The Wire” is on the syllabus. In this image from the show’s first season, Baltimore detectives talk with the drug dealer D’Angelo Barksdale, center, played by Larry Gilliard Jr.
Why we’re teaching ‘The Wire’ at Harvard
by Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson
we get some help from Bodie, Stringer Bell, Bubbles and others from HBO’s “The Wire.” Take this scene in a Baltimore hous- ing project from the show’s first season: Two teenage drug dealers marvel at the ingenuity of their boneless Chicken Mc- Nuggets and imagine the inventor who must have become incredibly rich off his creation. An older dealer, D’Angelo, mocks their naivete, explaining that the man who invented the McNugget is just a guy in the McDonald’s basement who dreamed up a money-making idea for the real players. To D’Angelo, the formal labor market is fundamentally unfair. People are not rewarded according to their true worth, and powerful institutions regularly ex- ploit those with less power. Social in- equality is the inevitable result — the McNugget inventor doesn’t get his due. “It ain’t about right. It’s about money,” D’Angelo tells the young dealers. “The Wire,” which depicted inner-
I
city Baltimore over five seasons on HBO, shows ordinary people making sense of their world. Its complex char- acters on both sides of the law defy sim- plistic moral distinctions. Critics loved it. Its fans hung on every episode. We think it is more than just excellent tele- vision. Impressed by its treatment of complex issues, we developed a course at Harvard drawing on the show’s por- trayal of fundamental sociological prin- ciples connected to urban inequality. Our seminar was designed for 30 stu- dents; four times that many showed up for the first class last week. Of course, our undergraduate stu- dents will read rigorous academic stud- ies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can’t. More than simply telling a gripping story, “The Wire” shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, impris- onment, and how the situation feeds on itself. Those kinds of connections are very
difficult to illustrate in academic works. Though scholars know that deindustri- alization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply inter- twined, they must often give focused at- tention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, “The Wire” can be more creative. It can
n our course on urban inequality at Harvard this semester, we want our students to understand the roots of the social conditions in America’s inner cities. To that end,
weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor.
T
he last season of “The Wire” aired before the Wall Street collapse in 2008, so the show reminds us that
inner-city residents faced profound dis- advantages even before the downturn. For decades, poor, urban, black neigh- borhoods have been devastated by fac- tory closings, crippling joblessness, fail- ing schools and government neglect. Before the recession began in 2007, only 59 percent of black men over age 20 in cities were employed, compared with 74 percent of white men nation- wide, according Bureau of Labor Statis- tics data. In 2009, the share of black men in cities who had jobs dropped to just 55 percent, compared with 69 per- cent of white men in the United States. “The Wire” shows how these statis-
tics play out. With limited prospects for stable employment, many characters enter the illegal drug trade. There are the executives who direct gang opera- tions, such as Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell, and the lower-level deal- ers on the corner, such as Bodie and Poot. The wide availability of drugs dev-
amine the disappearance of jobs and the devaluation of labor, the often shady world of urban politics, the trou- bled urban education system and the negligence of the mainstream media in coverage of important local issues. All these institutions and social forces ex- acerbate inequality. “The Wire” pre- sents these complex processes without sacrificing nuance or resorting to over- simplification. The series also provides an opportu-
nity to address another issue frequently debated by social scientists: depictions of the black poor. Some have main- tained that “The Wire” reinforces stereotypes of the urban poor as de- pendent on welfare, lazy, criminal and immoral — perceptions that too often influence decisions about who is deemed worthy of assistance. But in our view, the show powerfully undermines those stereotypes. Through its scrupu- lous exploration of drug-dealing gangs, the police, politicians, unions, public schools and the print media, viewers see that an individual’s decisions and behavior are often shaped by — and in- deed limited by — forces beyond his or her control.
With the freedom of artistic expression, “The Wire” can do what academic texts can’t.
astates Bubbles, who struggles with ad- diction, and the whole neighborhood is endangered by the violence between gangs vying for control of the trade. A core theme of “The Wire” is that
various institutions work together to limit opportunities for the urban poor. In its first season, the show focuses on the war on drugs, which it convincingly depicts as an ill-conceived undertaking whose outcome has been the mass jail- ing of nonviolent offenders. Cops such as Carverand Herc patrol the neighbor- hood and repeatedly arrest dealers on the corner; Wee-Bey, Avon and Cutty are in and out of prison throughout the series. But the community does not seem safer, and the drug trade has hardly been curtailed. These story lines draw students into
important academic research, such as sociologist Bruce Western’s book “Pun- ishment and Inequality in America.” His analysis shows that widespread in- carceration of the urban poor aggra- vates economic inequality, masking the hardship in urban communities and producing a growing population of ex- convicts unable to find stable jobs to support their families. Subsequent seasons of “The Wire” ex-
“The Wire” is fiction, but it forces us to confront social realities more effec- tively than any other media production in the era of so-called reality TV. It does not tie things up neatly; as in real life, the problems remain unsolved, and the cycle repeats itself as disadvantages be- come more deeply entrenched. Outside the world of television drama, sociolo- gists aim to explain what causes certain social conditions and then assess the merits of competing theories. The solu- tions, however, are usually less clear. “The Wire” gets that part right, too. Trying to steer the young Dukie away from the crime and drug trade in his neighborhood, former gang member Cutty tells him that the “world is bigger than that.” With a tinge of hope that his life might be different, Dukie asks, “How do you get from here to the rest of the world?” The response: “I wish I knew.”
Anmol Chaddha is a doctoral student of sociology and social policy at Harvard University. William Julius Wilson is the Geyser University professor at Harvard. His book “When Work Disappears” served as an inspiration for the second season of “The Wire.”
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