DecodeDC

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98: Spirited History Jul 23, 2015

Show notes

Forget the debate over Alexander Hamilton’s spot on the ten-dollar bill. The founding father’s image may be better suited on a bottle of bourbon.
On the latest DecodeDC podcast, guest host Todd Zwillich sits down with Reid Mitenbuler, author of Bourbon Empire: The Past and Future of America’s Whiskey. Zwillich and Mitenbuler discuss a battle between two founding fathers—Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson—and how that battle has profoundly affected both American bourbon and business.

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97: Tell me a (political) story Jul 16, 2015

Show notes

Political campaigns are about a lot of things: message, money, organization and of course, more money. But campaigns are also about storytelling.
Stories help candidates connect with voters, putting a human face on dry policy debates. Some politicians are born storytellers, while others need some help.
That’s where strategists like Burns Strider come in.
Strider is a long-time Democratic operative who has worked on more than 100 campaigns, including as the head of faith outreach for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
On the latest DecodeDC podcast, guest host Michelle Cottle chats with Strider about political storytelling, which he sees as the heart and soul of American politics.
“A candidate’s job is to share themselves with the American people. And the stories, the narrative has to be real. It has to be honest. It has to be told,” says Strider.
Strider’s storytelling craft extends beyond just the candidates. Lately, he’s been helping train a pro-Hillary Clinton army of workers at the grassroots level, organizing classes to teach people how to tell their own personal stories about Clinton.
“You have to equip and empower surrogates out around the country, and let it work its way down and sideways and up and about in a campaign and in your body of supporters, and have them telling your story too,” Strider explains.
Strider admits that it’s a little ironic that he’s part of a team of people behind the scenes carefully crafting the “authentic” image of a candidate. But at the end of the day, he says you can’t fool the American voter.

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96: Revisiting Populism's Popularity Jul 09, 2015

Show notes

The number keeps growing but at the moment there are 22 noble or nutty (you pick) souls running for president – and the election is still 16 months away.
One of them, Bernie Sanders, says he is a socialist, whatever that means in 2015 America. Sanders certainly does, however, fit in to the great American populist tradition, so we thought this would be the perfect time to rerun our podcast on the origins of populism.

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95: SCOTUS: The People's Court? Jul 01, 2015

Show notes

The Supreme Court’s term has ended with two supreme-sized rulings, one affirming a right to same-sex marriage, the other upholding the Affordable Care Act. Overall, the conventional rap on the term has been that it was a decidedly liberal year for the conservative Roberts court.
That’s true but simplistic, according to Stuart Taylor Jr., whom we brought in to decode the court’s most recent pronouncements on this week's podcast. Taylor graduated from Harvard Law School and went on to cover the Supreme Court for the National Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, The American Lawyer and other publications. He's also the co-author of “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It” and “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud.”
Taylor’s take is that the Chief Justice John Roberts’ court is much more aligned with mainstream public opinion than people give it credit for. There are four consistent conservative justices and four liberals, and Justice Anthony Kennedy wanders between camps. The end result over the years has been a trail of opinions that well represent public opinion.
But a certain partisanship on the court, Taylor says, is inevitable.
The Constitution simply does not have direct and obvious guidance on many of the issues and social conflicts the court has to adjudicate in the modern world: same-sex marriage, abortion, lethal injections and so forth. The cases that come to the court are close calls, with strong arguments on every side. All the justices believe their opinions are the most faithful to the Constitution. Ultimately, Taylor argues, the justices’ broader views on policy and political philosophy tip the scales.
And with the legislative and executive branches so often tied up in partisan and petty knots, the judiciary ends up as the final voice more often than ideal, as with Obamacare this year. All these are reasons why the Supreme Court may be the most intellectually interesting political game in town.
Music in this episode by:
Thijs Bos ( http://soundcloud.com/thijs-b-1 )
Hex Cougar ( http://soundcloud.com/hex-cougar )
Joss Ryan ( http://soundcloud.com/jossryan )
The Quadraphonnes ( http://quadraphonnes.com )

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94: The $140 Billion Investment No One Is Tracking Jun 25, 2015

Show notes

Every year, we spend $140 billion on grants and loans for college students. How's that investment doing? Well, we really don't know, and to find out, it turns out we'd have to break the law.

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93: LBJ and the racial divide, 50 years later Jun 18, 2015

Show notes

It isn’t often that the president of the United States opens up about America’s history of racism or about how African Americans have suffered because of it - or about how white America must accept responsibility for these wrongs.
But that is exactly what happened 50 years ago this month when President Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And those who were in the crowd June 4, 1965, say what they heard on still feels relevant today.
“I think anyone could give that speech today, and with few exceptions, not recognize that it was something that was related to a 50-year-old occasion,” said Judith Winston, a Howard student at the time who was there. “It’s a speech that in many sad ways has the same resonance today that it had 50 years ago.”
Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a voting rights bill that was on its way to getting passed, Johnson told the crowd of mostly African-Americans gathered in the quadrangle that those laws were not enough.
“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want and do as you desire, and choose your leaders please,” he said. It was time for the next and the “more profound stage of the battle for civil rights…”
The speech is known as the intellectual framework for affirmative action. Johnson spoke of a widening gulf between blacks and whites in unemployment, infant mortality and economic opportunity. “It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates,” he said.
“It was good to hear him speak of those things and to realize that he really understood, and not only understood but really wanted to do something about it,” said Pricilla Harris Wallace, graduate of Howard’s School of Social Work. Half a century later, Wallace says she is still waiting for things to change, “We’ve made progress along the way, but when you look at things and where we should be as far as race is concerned, economics and other things of that nature, I feel that we’ve gone backwards.”

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92: Laughing Matters Jun 11, 2015

Show notes

Host: Dick Meyer
I’ve gotten interested in humorlessness.
I’ve come to believe that politics has become less funny, more humorless. I think this is certainly true of professional politicians and their henchmen and henchwomen. I think it is true of pundits and talking heads.
Most important, I think it is true of regular civilians who like to talk – and argue – about politics over dinner or at a bar. Stridency is up; the capacity to take teasing is down. At least that’s my hunch. There is no national gag-o-meter to measure such things.
The absence of laughter and humor is something to worry about. So on this week’s podcast, we paid a visit to Dr. John Morreall, now retired from William & Mary University in Virginia, a scholar of the philosophy of humor and author of several books on the subject.
As a consultant, he has helped businesses and leaders learn to use humor as a helpful tool. Morreall is also a very funny guy, but I’m funnier.
Morreall agrees that politics has gotten more humorless to the extent it has gotten more ideological, polarized and doctrinaire. But he isn’t even mildly concerned about the national funny bone.
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Dr. John Morreall's website: http://humorworks.com
This week's sponsors: MarketingProfs (Marketing Bootcamp) http://mprofs.com/decodedc &
Earnest (Student Loan Refinance) http://meetearnest.com/decode
Music by: Thijs Bos http://soundcloud.com/thijs-b-1
Nicolai Heidlas http://soundcloud.com/nicolai-heidlas
Trazer http://soundcloud.com/trazermusic
Madnap http://soundcloud.com/madnap
Botlesmoker http://bottlesmoker.asia
The Gregory Brothers http://thegregorybrothers.com
Yoshi (ETMC2) http://soundcloud.com/etmc2

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91: Congress and...the mafia? Jun 05, 2015

Show notes

It’s no secret that members of Congress spend much of their time raising money. But here’s something you probably didn’t know: A huge chunk of the money they haul in is not spent on their campaigns. It’s funneled directly to the political parties in the form of dues.
On the latest DecodeDC podcast, host Andrea Seabrook explains how Congress works a little like another organized group when it comes to money, power and loyalty — the mafia. There are no Don Corleones, of course, in the strict sense of the name, and there’s nothing illegal. Still, members are expected to pay up.
Seabrook talks to former members of Congress and other players in the Washington political game about the hundreds of thousands of dollars members must collect to satisfy the party leadership. It is an enormous amount of political power — even by Washington standards — to have streams of money flowing up, up, up into the control of a few at the top of the party.

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90: Narwhal vs. Orca May 27, 2015

Show notes

Once upon a time in the fairytale land of politics, there was an epic clash of magical beasts.
On one side, the sea-unicorn called the narwhal. With a wave of his single tusk, he could muster thousands of volunteers, knock on millions of doors and direct a laser-beam of votes on behalf of Barack Obama.
On the other side, the narwhal’s natural enemy, the orca, tasked with unearthing voters across the realm for challenger Mitt Romney. This may sound too fantastical to believe, but it’s actually closer to reality than you think.
The presidential race of 2012 did indeed see such a contest, between the President’s Project Narwhal team and Mitt Romney’s Project Orca. But the contest wasn’t waged on Middle Earth, it was waged online, by Silicon Valley hackers wielding the power of…database computing.
For many, the showdown between the two digital camps came to symbolize the growing and dominant role technology has come to play in today’s politics. But that story is, well, a fairy tale, according to the man behind Project Narwhal.
“It wasn’t technology. The answer was that we had a great field team and we had good volunteers and our grassroots was on point ,” says Harper Reed, former Chief Technology Officer for President Obama’s 2012 campaign. “We raised all the money and the finance team did this really great work. Technology just helped a little bit to make some of that stuff faster.”
On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook sits with Harper Reed to recount a story that ended up being too good to be true, about a Narwhal, an Orca, and the real magic behind campaigns that help a candidate’s dreams come true.

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89: Revisiting 'Under the Radar' May 22, 2015

Show notes

There’s been a major development in the wake of a Scripps News Investigation featured in a DecodeDC podcast last December.
Congress has now passed legislation that requires the Department of Defense to register sex offenders directly with an FBI database available to civilian law enforcement agencies and the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website prior to an offender’s release from a military prison.
A Scripps News Investigation found hundreds of convicted military sex offenders flying under the radar who did not appear on the sex offender registries created to alert the public and prevent repeat crimes.
Of 1,312 cases, at least 242 were not on any public U.S. sex offender registry.
In this podcast, DecodeDC Andrea Seabrook talks with Mark Greenblatt, Scripps News Investigative Correspondent, about the story behind the investigation.

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