The Washington Post National Weekly - January 15, 2017

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, 2017

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The content of his presidency From health care to Cuba, Obama will leave behind a record of liberal achievement PAGE 12

Politics Intel agencies’ tough call 4

Nation More towns can’t drink water 9

5 Myths Kleptocracy 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE FIX

Booker makes his play for 2020 BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

S

en. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made history Wednesday: He testified against the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general in the Trump administration.

But it wasn’t the fact that Booker broke with Senate tradition that was the truly newsworthy thing for political junkies. It was the way Booker described his decision to serve as a witness in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here’s the key passage: In the choice between standing with Senate norms or standing up for what my conscience tells me is best for our country, I will always choose conscience and country . . .

Sound like anyone else you know?

That Booker used the occasion of Sessions’s confirmation hearing to deliver an impassioned plea for the rights of women, African Americans and LGBT Americans, and that he did it in such strikingly similar terms to the way in which outgoing President Obama has talked about these same groups, is not an accident.

Booker is widely seen as one of the (relatively few) rising stars within the Democratic Party.

At 47, Booker is far younger than other Democrats being mentioned as potential 2020 candidates, most notably Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — who will be in their 70s by the time the next presidential election rolls around.

He has largely downplayed his interest in such a race. But there’s no mistaking his interest in a national candidacy given the rhetoric he chose to oppose Sessions. “I will always choose conscience and country” is the most obvious campaign-y line, but there were several other moments during Booker’s appearance before the Judiciary Committee in which you can hear hints of what could well be the basis of his 2020 message.

And if Booker’s testimony on Wednesday is

KLMNO WEEKLY

MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) take part in the second day of the attorney general confirmation hearing for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on Wednesday.

any indication, his presidential campaign will have strong echoes of Obama’s messaging: calls to our better angels tempered by an awareness of the demons that still dog us. That, as judged

by Obama’s continued popularity among Democrats even as he prepares to leave office, is a sound strategy.

Whether Booker will be able to execute on it remains very much to be seen. Early returns are mixed. Booker’s speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention was well delivered and well received. But his 2013 special-election victory after the death of Sen. Frank Lauten-

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 14

berg was far from inspiring and raised real questions about his readiness for the national spotlight. His Twitter messages with a stripper were, um, odd. And even more troubling was Booker’s kind of, sort of acknowledgment that he had made up a drug dealer named “T Bone,” whom he often referenced during past campaigns as a real person.

The debate over whether Booker will be able to step up to the challenge of a national race in the same way Obama did is for another day.

What we learned today is that he’s very, very interested in giving it a try. n

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY HEALTH BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Obama holds a strategy discussion in the Rose Garden of the White House in October 2014.

Photograph by PETE SOUZA, The White House

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POLITICS

Making the call to talk about dossier

JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES

Intel chiefs agreed to brief Trump on allegations but seemed to be unprepared for fallout

BY G REG M ILLER, E LLEN N AKASHIMA AND K AREN D E Y OUNG

A

s the nation’s top spies prepared to brief President Obama and President-elect Donald Trump on Russian interference in the 2016 election, they faced an excruciatingly delicate question: Should they mention the salacious allegations that had been circulating in Washington for months that Moscow had compromising information on the incoming president?

Ultimately, they concluded they had no choice. A 35-page dossier packed with details of supposed compromising personal information, alleged financial entanglements and political intrigue was already in such wide circulation in Washington that every major news organization seemed to have a copy.

“You’d be derelict if you didn’t” mention the dossier, a U.S. official said. To ignore the file, produced by a private-sector security firm, would only make the supposed guardians of the nation’s secrets seem uninformed, officials said,

adding that many were convinced that it was only a matter of time before someone decided to publish the material.

Their decision appears to have hastened that outcome, triggering coverage of politically charged allegations that news organizations had tried to run down for months but could find no basis for publishing until they were summarized and included alongside a highly classified report assembled by the nation’s intelligence services.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that the decision had been unanimous to attach the two-page sum-

From left, FBI Director James B. Comey, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan testify before a Senate panel this month.

mary of the dossier to a sweeping report on Russian election interference commissioned by the White House and briefed to Obama, Trump and congressional leaders.

A U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the nature of the summary “was fully explained” to Trump on Friday and “put into context.”

But U.S. intelligence officials appear to have been caught off-guard by the fallout, including a blistering attack by Trump, who accused spy agencies of engaging in Nazilike tactics to smear him.

In an effort to contain the dam-

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POLITICS age, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said he spoke with Trump on Wednesday and “expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press.”

Clapper said in a statement issued late Wednesday that he told Trump that the allegations had come from a “private security company,” that U.S. spy agencies had “not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable.”

“However, part of our obligation is to ensure that policymakers are provided with the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security,” Clapper said.

Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Chief James B. Comey and National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers all concurred that both Obama and Trump should know that U.S. spy agencies were aware of the claims about compromising information on Trump and had investigated or explored them to some degree.

U.S. officials emphasized that the summary was merely an annex to the main report, that the allegations it contained have never been substantiated and did not appear in the main body of the report or influence its conclusions that Russia sought to sabotage the 2016 race and help elect Trump.

But linking a collection of unsubstantiated allegations to a classified report that is supposed to convey the intelligence community’s firmest conclusions about Russian election interference has blurred the distinction between corroborated intelligence and innuendo.

Former U.S. intelligence officials described the inclusion of the summary — drawn from “opposition research” done by a political research firm — as highly unusual.

“It would be extraordinary if not unprecedented to bring to the attention of a president and president-elect a private document for which you had no reason to believe the allegations made in it,” said Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA and a supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Spokesmen for the CIA, FBI and the director of national intelligence declined to comment.

The handling of the matter also seemed to deepen the level of distrust between Trump and the intel-

MATT DUNHAM/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“I think it was disgraceful. . . .

That’s something that Nazi Germany would do and did do.”

President-elect Donald Trump, accusing intelligence agencies of leaking the information

ligence community, whose work he has repeatedly disparaged since his election victory two months ago.

In a news conference in New York, Trump blasted U.S. intelligence agencies and accused them of employing Nazi-like tactics to discredit him.

“I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful, that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false and fake, out,” Trump said, referring to a burst of headlines over the past two days about the dossier. “That’s something that Nazi Germany would do and did do.”

The material in the dossier was assembled by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, whose security and investigations firm was hired to assist a political research firm in Washington that was initially working for Trump’s opponents in the Republican primaries but later offered its services to Democrats, according to individuals familiar with the matter. Steele’s role was first reported Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal. Since 2009, he and another former British intelligence officer have jointly operated a Britain-based firm called Orbis Business Intelligence. He could not be

reached for comment.

The dossier was provided to multiple news outlets, including The Washington Post, which pursued numerous leads, including overseas, but could not substantiate its allegations.

The document was also at some point delivered to the FBI. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) acknowledged in a public statement Wednesday that late last year he had “received sensitive information that has since been made public” and, unable to assess its accuracy, delivered the file to Comey.

Other officials said that the FBI had obtained the dossier even before McCain’s involvement and that U.S. officials had met with Steele, the former British spy, at least twice — once in August and again in mid-October, after Clapper had released a public statement accusing Russia of interfering in the election.

Those meetings were part of a broader effort by the FBI and other agencies to evaluate the claims about Russia and compromising material on Trump. The dossier also included claims of ongoing, unexplained contacts between members of Trump’s inner circle and allies of the Kremlin. The sta-

According to those familiar with the matter, Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, compiled the unsubstantiated dossier on President-elect Donald Trump after Orbis Business Intelligence, above in London, was hired to help a political research firm.

KLMNO WEEKLY

tus of that inquiry is unclear.

In Senate testimony Tuesday, Comey said that “we never confirm or deny a pending investigation.”

The line drew a reaction of disbelief from some lawmakers who have been sharply critical of Comey’s decision during the election to discuss the bureau’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use.

“The irony of your making that statement here I cannot avoid,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).

Although Comey was one of only four senior officials involved in the decision to include the two-page summary, some in Washington were quick to see that move as another political misstep by the FBI chief — calling arguably unnecessary attention to allegations against a major political figure.

U.S. officials have offered conflicting accounts of what the meetings with Steele accomplished. A senior official said Tuesday that while the allegations in the twopage summary could not be corroborated, it was included in part because the sourcing was seen as reliable.

Others disputed that and said that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate Steele’s claims without getting detailed information about his sources in Russia, information he is seen as unlikely to be willing to share.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official also questioned his ability to maneuver in Russia and gain access to high-level officials with ties to the Kremlin or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“How did this former British intelligence officer talk to all these Russian officials and not get arrested for espionage?” the former official asked. Steele’s identity and association with his investigations firm are public, and are almost certainly known to Russian counterintelligence.

Some details would seem relatively easy for the FBI to assess, including meetings between close associates of Trump and Putin allies.

But a senior law enforcement official acknowledged that other claims — including sweeping characterizations of relationships and rivalries inside the Kremlin — are more elusive.

“This is not something we can validate or check out,” the official said. “It’s the view of people in Russia. It’s not like we can go out and determine its veracity.” n

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POLITICS

Talk of moving embassy evokes pleas

BY W ILLIAM B OOTH AND C AROL M ORELLO

Jerusalem

A

s inauguration day draws near, U.S. allies in the Middle East, alongside Palestinian leaders and American diplomats, are warning President-elect Donald Trump to forget his campaign promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

A top government minister in Jordan, Israel’s pro-Western neighbor, said the embassy move from Tel Aviv to the contested city of Jerusalem would have “catastrophic consequences,” inflaming religious passions and rallying extremists in the region.

The Palestinians have also called the move “a red line” that would dash hopes for a two-state solution to their long-running conflict with the Israelis.

Palestinian leaders are now pleading with Trump not to do it.

They asked mosques around the world to offer prayers this past Friday against the move.

“This is a message of protest,” said Mohammad Shtayyeh, a senior Palestinian official and former peace negotiator.

“The call for prayer is to say we don’t accept this,” he said, signaling how quickly the issue had moved from the diplomatic realm to the sectarian street.

The Palestinians also want churches to ring their bells Sunday in protest of the proposed move.

Shtayyeh said that if Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, the Palestine Liberation Organization would consider revoking its recognition of the state of Israel. If such a threat is carried out, it would mark the collapse of the 1993 Oslo accords.

Advocates for the embassy move say that Trump should not be cowed by threats of violence.

Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, has said the move would send “a strong message against the delegitimization of Israel and of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.”

In Israel, speculation is rife that

JACK GUEZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Amid prayers and protests, Arab allies and others predict violence if Trump shifts site to Jerusalem a move could happen on May 24, the national holiday of Jerusalem Day, which marks the city’s reunification after the 1967 war.

But some U.S. diplomats, including former Middle East peace negotiators, say the move would do little to advance U.S. interests in the region.

“It was and is a symbol of American policy, which has always been that the status of Jerusalem should be resolved through negotiations, and any effort to move it unilaterally would be disruptive and dangerous for everyone,” said Philip Wilcox, the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem from 1988 to 1991.

“It’s playing with fire,” Wilcox warned. “It would quite likely incite acts of Palestinian violence and terrorism, not only there but everywhere. It would alienate other Muslim states and make our role in trying to preserve some stability and peace more difficult.

It would alienate the internation-

al community. And all it would accomplish is the goodwill of the Israeli right wing.”

Every U.S. administration has wrestled with the embassy issue since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Israel captured the eastern, Arab half of Jerusalem from Jordan in six days of fighting.

Israel considers Jerusalem its “eternal, undivided capital.” In election after election, U.S. presidential candidates have vowed to relocate the U.S. Embassy, then demurred once in office. Every embassy in Israel is in Tel Aviv.

But Trump’s transition team has signaled that he may actually carry out his promise. Trump’s bankruptcy attorney, David Friedman, the designated U.S. ambassador to Israel, has said he expects to take up his post in Jerusalem.

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway called it a major focus.

Jerusalem is like no place else, its history sacred and bloody. The city has been seized, razed, lost

The U.S. Embassy for Israel is located in Tel Aviv, but President-elect Donald Trump has talked about moving it to Jerusalem.

Other presidential candidates have made similar vows, but Trump’s transition team has indicated he may carry out his promise.

and fought over for 3,000 years. It is not only a center of three world religions, but it also remains a disputed city today, divided between the occupied Palestinian villages and refugee camps in the east and the Jewish neighborhoods in the west.

For most countries, the United States included, the final status of Jerusalem awaits a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, who want the eastern half as the capital of a future state of Palestine.

Moving the U.S. Embassy from seaside Tel Aviv would probably be interpreted by many as a tacit acknowledgment that the United States recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the whole city.

Behind the diplomatic optics, the practical needs of a modernday U.S. embassy revolve around security. After a string of embassy bombings elsewhere, Congress embraced the idea of American missions as fortresses to protect diplomats. It passed regulations mandating a 100-foot perimeter.

If Trump decides to relocate the embassy, he has several options.

The most costly would be starting from scratch on a site already leased by the U.S. government.

That could take four years or longer.

Or it could be as simple as erecting a new sign on the U.S. Consulate in West Jerusalem and calling it the embassy.

It could even be a virtual embassy, with the Trump administration announcing that all ambassadorial duties will henceforth be conducted in Jerusalem — and the ambassador could meet people in the lobby of the King David Hotel, for example, if he wished.

Among Israelis, there is broad support for moving the embassy to West Jerusalem.

Alan Baker, an Israeli diplomat and former peace negotiator with the Palestinians, said: “This should not be a problem for the Palestinians, but they are turning it into a problem and turning the whole of Jerusalem into a problem. It’s a tactic of fear, they threaten fire and brimstone, so everyone is afraid.” n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

THE TAKE

A few answers from Trump, but doubts about his readiness linger D AN B ALZ

lary Clinton and thereby aiding Trump.

For the first time, he gave ground on that question, saying that he believed the Russians resident-elect Donald Trump’s first were behind the hacking of the Democratic news conference in six months was a National Committee and the private emails of vintage performance. He was self-asJohn Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. sured, aggressive, combative, at times He also warned Russian President Vladimir willing to offend and at times trying to sound Putin not to engage in such activities when he conciliatory. What it added up to was a reis president. minder of the challenges he will face in gainBut with each step in that direction, he ing and maintaining full public trust once he is quickly walked back the other way. While he sworn in as president. said the Russians were behind the hacking, he No president in memory has come to the said the United States gets hacked all the brink of his inauguration with such a time by foreign entities. Critics worry that smorgasbord of potential problems and he would cozy up to Putin. He said that “if unanswered questions, or with the level of Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that public doubts that exist around his leaderan asset, not a liability.” ship. Though he dealt with the issues diHe declared flatly that he has no busirectly on Wednesday, what he could not anness dealings with the Russians, but again swer — what he cannot answer until he is held out against greater transparency in the Oval Office — is whether he can about his business. He dismissed calls to avoid having these kinds of questions release his tax returns, a posture that puts plague and possibly debilitate his presihim at odds with past presidents who have dency over the next four years. routinely done so.

Trump and his advisers have dismissed He claims that more can be learned by much of the pre-inaugural controversy as examining his financial disclosure statepart of an effort to delegitimize his election ments, but financial tax experts disagree. victory and undermine his presidency While he was willing to accept the inteleven before he takes office. Still, the quesligence findings that the Russians did the tions swirling around him as he came to EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS hacking during the election, he still apthe lobby of Trump Tower were an unprecpears far from calling a truce in an ongoing edented mixture of the personal, the finanPresident-elect Donald Trump speaks during his war with the intelligence community. He cial and the substantive. news conference Wednesday in New York. as much as accused senior intelligence offiHas he been compromised by the Ruscials of leaking to the public. That fraught relasians, the most explosive and newest of allegaHe said he is confident that he can keep his tionship ought to be a matter of grave concern tions? (He denied all as fake news.) Are he and pledge to have Mexico pay for the border wall — to Trump, to the intelligence community his party in conflict over U.S.-Russia relations? he intends to build, even if U.S. taxpayers iniand most important to all Americans.

Will he truly separate himself from his sprawltially foot the bill. He put Congress on notice On Friday, Trump will take the oath of office. ing business empire in a way that avoids conthat replacing Obamacare should go hand-inHe will do so with the public far from confiflicts of interest? Can he and Congress find glove with votes to repeal it. He put drug mandent that he is up to the job ahead. Gallup common ground on repealing and replacing ufacturers on notice that they cannot expect to measured him on several questions asked the Affordable Care Act? Will he live up to the do business as usual when he is in office. He ofabout other presidents as they were entering promises he made as a candidate? fered the same message to companies that office. Trump’s scores were notably low.

The news conference put on display everymove production out of the country.

All presidents come to the Oval Office with thing the country has come to recognize in On those matters, Trump’s performance was questions about their ability to handle the Trump from the presidential campaign. For at once giving no quarter to his tormentors, recomplexities of the job. Obama arrived with those who responded to his message from the minding his core supporters that he will make limited experience on the national stage. start, for those who came to his side later in good on his campaign promises no matter George W. Bush took the oath after a contenthe campaign and for those who didn’t but are what the skeptics may say, and at the same tious recount and controversial Supreme prepared to give him some benefit of the time trying to offer some reassurance to critics Court decision. Trump makes those situations doubt, it was a performance that no doubt who worry about the possibilities for ethical look mild in comparison. went down well. abuses by the businessman turned president.

Public trust is the currency that all presiRight from the start, he swung back hard In other ways, Trump also seemed eager to dents must have to succeed. Trump might well against salacious and unsubstantiated claims show that he has been hearing the criticisms of have helped himself with his performance of personal misbehavior contained in a docuhow he has handled the transition. For weeks Wednesday, but there are enough challenges ment prepared by a former Western intellihe has been dismissive of intelligence findings and questions surrounding him to make what gence officer and now in the hands of the fedthat the Russians mounted a comprehensive is already an enormously difficult job all that eral government. He aggressively chastised campaign to meddle in the election and did so much harder. n BuzzFeed for publishing the entire document with the expressed aim of undermining Hil-

BY

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online and CNN for promoting the story about its existence (though CNN did not publish the document).

On the business side, he introduced Sheri Dillon, a tax attorney, to walk reporters through the steps he is taking to try to assure the public that he will serve its interests as president and not those of the Trump Organization — and to explain why many of the ideas proposed by outsiders arguing for taking bigger steps were impractical and likely to create their own potential conflicts.

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NATION

Cities hail Uber’s data-sharing Info on traffic patterns may make driving better for all, say officials

BY E LIZABETH D WOSKIN AND F AIZ S IDDIQUI

San Francisco

T

he combative ride-hailing giant Uber is extending an olive branch to cities — in the form of data that transit wonks have coveted for years.

The San Francisco-based company shared a vast trove of transportation data this past week that it said local officials could use to help cut down on commute times and improve traffic flow. The data, on a public website that shows the time it takes to travel between neighborhoods in various cities, is derived from the company’s extensive logs of trips taken by millions of Uber riders each day.

The timing of the data release — which was launched on a website and called “Uber Movement” — coincided with another fight over data that the company is engaged in in New York. Uber is blocking New York City officials’ efforts to collect drop-off times and locations from its drivers — a move the city says will enable it to determine whether drivers are working too many hours but Uber says violates passenger privacy.

In addition to the New York City fight, Uber is sparring with cities around the world on issues ranging from self-driving cars to working conditions for its network of freelance drivers.

Sharing data could help build some goodwill in cities, said Linda Bailey, executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, which is working to establish a shared data standard for cities where ridehailing companies operate. But it continues a pattern that has proven irksome to regulators — that firms like Uber decide when and what data to release, on their terms, in defiance of cities’ requests for specific sets of information.

“One of the things that has been frustrating to cities is that they see this as a service that’s making use of public right of way, public facilities, and isn’t necessarily giving back on just basic openness,” Bailey said.

MIKE BLAKE/REUTERS

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” she said of the data release, “but there’s still a ways to go for cities to feel like they’re getting more than basic information.”

Still, city planners say they are excited by the possibilities for the new data, including the ability to analyze travel patterns during major traffic disruptions such as the presidential inauguration, sporting events and concerts — and plan for them.

Uber Movement shows data for four cities — the Washington metro area, Boston, Manila and Sydney — with dozens more to be added soon, Andrew Salzberg, Uber’s head of transportation policy, said in an interview with reporters at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. (Uber operates in about 450 cities worldwide.) Because the data is historical, a transit official could use it to examine how a subway closure or hosting a large convention affects congestion, he said.

“As vehicles move within a city, we’re collecting this constant stream of data,” Salzberg said.

“Some of this data is treated as digital exhaust, when in fact it’s immensely valuable.”

Officials with the D.C. Transportation Department praised the release, calling the data another “puzzle piece” to the city’s urban transit network. About 30,000 Uber drivers navigate the D.C. re-

gion, but transportation officials are limited in what they know about the travel patterns of those drivers and passengers.

The Transportation Department culls data from sources such as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (people’s entrances and exits are logged), Capital BikeShare and the D.C. Department of For-Hire Vehicles.

GPS signals from the city’s bus system, for example, were crucial in planning improvements to the 16th Street bus corridor, which has faced challenges of overcrowding and delays for years, they said. D.C. officials have been working with Uber for months, preparing for the data release, and say the information could prove useful as soon as the Jan. 20 inauguration.

“It’s a major disruption on the system,” Stephanie Dock, a research program administrator with the D.C. Transportation Department, said of the inauguration. Uber’s data, she said, “helps us . . . understand how the system overall responded — helps us think forward to the next four years, where we’ll do this once again.”

The traffic-monitoring app Waze also began sharing with regulators in Sydney, Los Angeles and other cities several years ago.

Uber Movement also reflects a shift in strategy for the ride-hailing giant. Historically, the company has been more interested in

using its data trove for marketing than for the public good. Several years ago, at a launch party, the company touted “God View,” a real-time map in which the company tracked the flow of Uber rides as people moved throughout New York City. (Uber took the feature down after complaints that the site violated people’s privacy.)

The company also tracked people’s sexual escapades, releasing data about one-night stands (Uber has since taken it’s “Rides of Glory” post off its website.)

Today, Salzburg’s team aims to partner with cities around the world. The team, which was created a year ago, has worked with cities including Summit, N.J. The city teamed with Uber to offer $4 rides from people’s homes to a train station, helping to — at least temporarily — stave off the need to build a parking garage.

But the partnership goes only so far.

Uber’s move underscores a new power dynamic emerging among technology companies, researchers and governments. Technology companies, from Uber to Facebook, hold growing stores of data about user behavior, and officials and academics want access to it. They believe it contains valuable insights that could benefit the public.

The challenge for the public interest is that many technology companies will share data only on their terms, said Allan Fromberg, deputy commissioner for public affairs for the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Home-sharing start-up Airbnb has been in similar fights over data-sharing with New York and other cities.

Companies like Uber see their data as valuable assets in their competition with rivals such as Lyft, according to Bailey, who said such information is crucial to understanding how to improve in their markets. But cities have a claim to some of the data that is in the public interest, she said.

“Just thinking about ‘how can we better manage traffic in the 21st century?’ Absolutely, this data is necessary and should be provided,” Bailey said. n

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NATION

KLMNO WEEKLY

Flint, Mich., was just the beginning BY

B RADY D ENNIS

I

n the tiny town of St. Joseph, La., a local preacher has temporarily suspended baptisms, figuring that if officials don’t want people drinking the tainted water, he ought not to be plunging them into it, either.

“I just don’t feel comfortable immersing people in that water,” Pastor Donald Scott told the Advocate, a Baton Rouge newspaper, recently. “I’m pretty sure God understands.”

For years, the mostly poor, mostly black, rural seat of Tensas Parish in northeastern Louisiana has struggled with aging infrastructure and deteriorating water quality. The system is plagued with leaks. Often, what flows from households’ taps is brown and smelly, the result of high levels of iron and manganese, and residents have grown accustomed to regular notices to boil their water.

But in recent weeks, the problems have deepened significantly.

In mid-December, the state’s governor declared a public health emergency there after tests showed elevated lead levels in a private residence and at City Hall.

Health officials now say they have detected lead levels exceeding the federal “action level” of 15 parts per billion in nearly 100 of the town’s homes and businesses — or more than 20 percent of those tested.

Residents, who have been told to steer clear of their taps, are living off bottled water provided by the state. And while lawmakers have set aside funding for much of the estimated $8 million it will take to fix the town’s pipes, change won’t come quickly.

“This could take a year or longer,” Jimmy Guidry, a Louisiana state health officer who’s been overseeing the water monitoring in St. Joseph, said in an interview Thursday.

The issues in St. Joseph — crumbling infrastructure, a paltry budget and overwhelmingly lowincome residents at risk of being poisoned by their own water — are increasingly the problems of towns and cities across the United

BILL FEIG/ADVOCATE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

A Louisiana town’s undrinkable water reflects a problem with lead affecting millions nationwide States.

“How do you pay for maintaining or replacing aging infrastructure?” Guidry asked. “Flint, Michigan, brought a lot of attention to this. This is not Flint, as far as [the scale of ] the lead levels we’re seeing. But I think this is going to become more and more of a problem for society.”

It already is.

An analysis late last year by Reuters found that Flint, where nearly 100,000 people have gone almost three years without access to safe water after an ill-fated decision to switch the city’s supply source to the Flint River, is not an aberration. The news service found thousands of other spots around the country with leadcontamination rates double those in Flint, though not all were caused by water problems. Last spring, USA Today examined federal data and found that nearly 2,000 water systems spanning all 50 states had tested for excessive

levels of lead in recent years.

Those systems collectively provide water to about 6 million people.

Nationwide, an estimated 6 million or more lead pipes remain in use by more than 11,000 community water systems serving as many as 22 million Americans.

While some cities, such as Lansing, Mich., and Madison, Wis., have replaced all their aging lead pipes, doing so is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking — and one many communities simply cannot afford.

“For every Lansing and Madison, there are thousands of other cities that simply have not kept up with the problem,” Erik Olson, health program director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Post last year.

While the greatest concentration of lead service lines is in the Midwest, such pipes remain throughout the country. The American Water Works Associa-

Elvadus Fields Jr., the new mayor of St. Joseph, La., talks on Dec. 29 about residents having to use bottled water because of high concentrations of lead in their drinking water.

tion says the cost of replacing them could exceed $30 billion, and neither homeowners nor municipalities are eager to spend that money. But “as long as there are lead pipes in the ground or lead plumbing in homes, some risk remains,” David LaFrance, the group’s chief executive, told The Post. “As a society, we should seize this moment of increased awareness about lead risks to develop solutions for getting the lead out.”

How much the next White House might be inclined to help tackle the problem remains to be seen. President-elect Donald Trump has talked repeatedly about the need to invest in the nation’s infrastructure, though often he has focused on more-visible projects such as roads, bridges and airports.

Still, during his campaign, Trump pledged to make clean water “a high priority.” He proposed developing long-term water infrastructure plans with state and local officials, while tripling funding for revolving-loan programs to help state and local governments upgrade their drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.

As a candidate, Trump vowed to “ensure quality water all across America” and to provide “clean air and clean water for all of our people.”

But whether Congress will fund a massive infrastructure effort — and whether Trump’s commitment will stay strong — is a question mark.

In St. Joseph, a town of less than 1,200 that is perched along the Mississippi River, few people are waiting on help from Washington.

Officials are trying to get the lead out and to overhaul a system that has been deteriorating for years.

Until that happens, residents will have to cook, bathe and drink only bottled water.

“The truth is, this should have been fixed years ago,” the new mayor, Elvadus Fields Jr., told the Advocate.

Fields recently unseated a fourterm incumbent by a handful of votes, in an election that the paper said “revolved around anger about the continuing water crisis.” n

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Elevator makers in a race to the top As China’s skylines reach for the clouds, its cities see prestige in the fastest ascent

A DAM T AYLOR Shanghai BY

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levator rides are not usually worth documenting.

But when you step into the elevator at Shanghai Tower, people often pull out cameras.

As the doors close, a screen at the elevator’s front lights up to show you the car’s location as it rises toward the building’s newly opened observation deck. A neatly dressed attendant informs passengers that the elevator has now reached a top speed of 18 meters per second, about 40 mph.

“This is really fast,” one passenger said during a recent packed ride up the tower.

It is, in fact, the fastest elevator in the world.

At a ceremony in Tokyo in early December, the Shanghai Tower elevators and the company that made them, Mitsubishi Electric, were officially awarded the title

by Guinness World Records. Yet many passengers may not even experience the top speed. To do so, you have to travel in a soupedup elevator car with a Mitsubishi technician who can flick a switch, making the speedometer on the screen turn red: 20.5 meters per second (45.8 mph).

China is experiencing an elevator boom. Over the past decade, the vast majority of elevators installed around the world have been placed in China, where rapid urbanization has met with a desire for ambitious “super-tall” skyscrapers. It has been estimated that by 2020, 40 percent of all elevators will be in China.

And when it comes to speed, the rest of the world can’t keep up.

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the only skyscraper in the world taller than Shanghai Tower, but its elevators go barely half the speed. The fastest elevator in the West, installed at 1 World Trade Center in Manhattan, runs at a paltry 23 mph. Shanghai Tower’s elevator goes even faster than the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, a Disney haunted-elevator amusement-park ride that hurls thrillseekers at 39 mph.

Elevators installed in China The number of elevators installed in China has surged dramatically over the past 10 years, easily outstripping the number of elevators in the United States.

5M

4.3 million Elevators in China, 559% more than in 2005.

4 3 2 1 0

652,000

900,000 Elevators ’05 ’06 ’07 ’08 ’09 ’10 ’11 ’12 ’13 ’14 ’15 in the U.S.

China dominates the new elevator industry Figures from 2014 show that almost 70 percent of all elevators and escalators installed around the world are in China.

Rest of the world 25%

China 69%

North America 3% Japan and South Korea 3% Sources: Shanghai Elevator Trade Association and National Elevator Industry, Credit Suisse

Look at a list of the world’s fastest elevators now, and five out of the top 10 are in China.

But China’s vast elevator market is slowing. As it slows, elevator companies are becoming more cutthroat — at every level.

Companies such as Mitsubishi are in competition for huge contracts with companies from all over the world. Another Japanese elevator company, Hitachi, came close to winning the Shanghai Tower contract. It was awarded one in Guangzhou instead and then announced plans to beat Mitsubishi’s speed with its own 44.7-mph elevators.

In the end, Mitsubishi installed new hardware on one of the elevators in Shanghai Tower, snatching the record back from Hitachi shortly after it was lost.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Mitsubishi representatives said that the demands of the client, a consortium with links to the Shanghai municipal government, had prompted the decision.

“For Shanghai city, it’s their pride,” said Ko Tanaka, the former head of Mitsubishi’s China business. “They must be number one.”

The need for speed The world’s first safety elevator was installed by the American company Otis in 1857 in a hotel in New York City. It traveled five floors at a speed of less than half a mile per hour.

According to Lee Gray, an associate professor of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, speeds improved as elevators moved from potentially explosive steam engines to more-

efficient hydraulic systems and on to electric traction systems.

For much of the 20th century, the fastest elevators were installed in American cities. Then the speed race moved to Asia.

Why Japanese firms have dominated high-speed elevators is a matter of debate. Some have reasoned that it is because of the technology shared with highspeed “bullet” trains, which Hitachi and Toshiba also make. Others have suggested that it may be because Japanese consumers are notorious for insisting upon smooth elevator rides. (Comfort and noise issues with ultrafast elevators are considerable; the elevators in the Pan Am Building in New York were infamous for “howling.”)

What is certain is that these elevators can cost fantastic amounts of money. They need to be tested in enormous, custombuilt towers.

They have to be pressurized to make their rapid ascent comfortable. According to Mitsubishi, 40 people worked exclusively on the Shanghai Tower elevators.

Mitsubishi and Hitachi would not say how much their elevators cost, but Jim Fortune, an American elevator consultant, estimated each installation at up to $3 million. It would be hard for any elevator company to make any profit on installing these showstopper elevators, Fortune suggested: “It’s all for . . . bragging rights or to get that maintenance contract.”

Many in the elevator industry say that although the technology is impressive, faster speeds do not serve a real purpose. But high speeds may be valuable as marketing tools, turning elevators into unlikely tourist attractions. And in an industry with its ups and downs, publicity can be important.

China’s elevator gold rush The elevator industry may have never been as unforgiving as it is now.

Why? China.

Over the past two decades, China has rapidly urbanized. To boost urban density, hundreds of

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WORLD thousands of elevators and escalators have been installed each year. There are now more than 4 million units in the country — more than four times the number in the United States. Just over a decade ago, there were barely 700,000.

There has also been a focus on super-tall buildings — 100 stories or more — in the Chinese market.

In a country where there are more than 160 cities with a population larger than 1 million, such a building can help a faceless city stand out. “They want to build these signature buildings just so people would know where they are,” Fortune said.

Analysts say China accounts for 60 to 80 percent of new installations globally each year.

No one else compares. The second-largest elevator market, India, is less than one-tenth the size.

But there is also a feeling that the glory days of the market are over — and that record-setting elevators such as those installed in Shanghai Tower may mark the end of an era. China’s economic growth has slowed dramatically over recent years, dropping from more than 10 percent to 6.7 percent in the most recent quarter.

Slowing down When will the speed record be beaten? Mitsubishi says that it has no plans to break its own record. Toshiba, which until recently held the record with the Taipei 101 Tower, said that it’s not focusing on ultrahigh-speed elevators anymore.

How much further the record can be pushed is unclear. One recent study suggested that 51.4 mph would probably be the limit before passengers get sick.

Traveling down quickly is even more difficult: Go too fast and the body thinks it’s falling. Elevators in both the Shanghai Tower and the CTF Finance Tower go down at 22.3 mph, close to the limit.

Most important, even the most advanced elevator still needs a big building to go in.

Right now it’s unclear where such buildings will be. Although many say that India could one day be the next China, Rizk Maidi, an analyst with German bank Berenberg, doubts it will ever be as ambitious.

“I don’t think we’ll see a repeat of the Chinese boom,” he said. n

KLMNO WEEKLY

Brexit fallout may include produce that’s left to rot K ARLA A DAM London

the June 23 referendum.

“They do not have to come and work in the U.K.,” Whately said.

“They are in demand across the t is a quintessentially Britwhole European Union.” ish scene: watching the anSome say that more should be nual Wimbledon tournadone to hire locals, including inment while munching on creasing wages. But farmers say British strawberries and cream. that Britons cannot be enticed to But farmers here are warning pick plums and potatoes. It is not that fruit and vegetables — includjust that the work can be ing their beloved strawbertough and low-paid, it is ries — could be left to rot in that the jobs are temporary the fields this summer beand moving from farm to cause Eastern Europeans farm is an unappealing lifeare reluctant to work on style for those wanting to British farms after the Brexplant roots in a community. it vote.

Britain had once offered Britain’s immigration temporary visas for seasonpolicy will be one of the cenal agricultural workers but tral themes of the Brexit nescrapped the program three gotiations, which are exyears ago after Bulgarians pected to last up to two and Romanians were given years. And many industries full access to Britain’s labor that rely on foreign labor — market. When asked if they from construction to cleanwould consider introducing ing — are anxious about a new work visa for seasonal continued access to migrant agricultural work, Britain’s workers after Britain leaves Home Office said in a statethe European Union.

CARL COURT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES ment that Britain “needs a But the agricultural industry says it is already strug- Eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon is a fair and controlled immigling with a worker deficit. tradition, but the Brexit vote could hurt produce. gration policy and that is exactly what this governA recent survey by the ment will deliver.”

National Farmers Union (NFU), that these kind of reports spread Andrea Leadsom, Britain’s enan industry lobby group, found quickly among immigrant comvironment secretary, recently sugthat 47 percent of the companies munities. gested that the government will that provide agricultural labor “It’s enough to have a few people work with farmers to ensure there said they did not have enough that have bad experiences, and aren’t any shortfalls. workers to meet demand between they put it on Facebook or Twitter, Farmers say that a solution June and September of last year. and it’s enough to push so many needs to be found well before the Britain’s horticulture sector is people away,” said Estera Amesz, two-year negotiations that will hugely reliant on its 80,000 seaco-founder of AG Recruitment, a precede Britain’s withdrawal from sonal workforce, the vast majority British agency that recruits agrithe E.U. of whom come from Eastern Eucultural workers from the E.U. She “We have had Polish staff who rope. The industry is calling on the said that at their office in Romania, have been coming for a long time, government to introduce tempothere are 40 percent fewer people some 18 years, but they are not rary work visas for foreign workinquiring about jobs on British sure if they will continue coming ers from countries outside the farms than this time last year. back next season,” said Ali Capper, E.U., such as Ukraine or Bosnia.

Helen Whately, a British politiwho runs an apple and hops farm “Every strawberry at Wimblecian who chairs the all-party parin England’s West Midlands. don last year was picked by an liamentary group for fruit and Capper, who is also the head of Eastern European. If we don’t vegetable farming, said during a NFU’s horticulture and potatoes want shortages going forward, we recent parliamentary debate on board, said that European mineed to get a new visa scheme the subject that Britain risks losgrants want long-term certainty, sorted now,” said John Hardman, ing out on foreign labor because and if they don’t come this year, director of HOPs Labour Soluforeigners are “feeling a lot less “there’s a real possibility that we tions, one of Britain’s largest rewelcome” and because of the will have crops rotting in the cruiters of migrant farm labor. weaker pound — it is about 11 field.” n Speaking from an airport in Ropercent down on the euro since BY

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mania, where he recruits many of the 12,000 seasonal workers his company helps to bring from Eastern Europe, Hardman said that Britain is becoming a harder sell because of the devalued currency and perceptions of xenophobia.

After the vote last summer, there was a spike in anti-immigrant assaults and recruiters say

COVER STORY

Dr e ams of w h a t wo u l d be a n d r eal it y o f w h at w a s

W

BY DAVID MARANISS

hen Barack Obama worked as a community organizer amid the bleak industrial decay of Chicago’s far South Side during the 1980s, he tried to follow a mantra of that profession: Dream of the world as you wish it to be, but deal with the world as it is.

The notion of an Obama presidency was beyond imagining in the world as it was then.

But, three decades later, it has happened, and a variation of that saying seems appropriate to the moment: Stop comparing Obama with the president you thought he might be, and deal with the one he has been.

At the end of his White House tenure, Obama has worked through the final months before his presidency slips from present to past, from daily headlines to history books.

That will happen at noon Friday, but the talk of his legacy began much earlier and intensified as he rounded the final corner of his improbable political career.

Of the many ways of looking at Obama’s presidency, the first is to place it in the continuum of his life. The past is prologue for all presidents to one degree or another, even as continues on next page

President Obama boards Air Force One in Kingston, Jamaica, in 2015.

PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE

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COVER STORY

from previous page

the job tests them in ways that nothing before could. For Obama, the line connecting his life’s story with the reality of what he has been as the 44th president is consistently evident.

The first connection involves Obama’s particular form of ambition. His political design arrived relatively late. He was no grade school or high school or college leader. Unlike Bill Clinton, he did not have a mother telling everyone that her first-grader would grow up to be president. When Obama was a toddler in Honolulu, his white grandfather boasted that his grandson was a Hawaiian prince, but that was more to explain his skin color than to promote family aspirations.

But once ambition took hold of Obama, it was with an intense sense of mission, sometimes tempered by self-doubt but more often self-assured and sometimes bordering messianic. At the end of his sophomore year at Occidental College, he started to talk about wanting to change the world. At the end of his time as a community organizer in Chicago, he started to talk about how the only way to change the world was through electoral power. When he was defeated for the one and only time in his career in a race for Congress in 2000, he questioned whether he indeed had been chosen for greatness, as he had thought he was, but soon concluded that he needed another test and began preparing to run for the Senate seat from Illinois that he won in 2004.

That is the sensibility he took into the White House. It was not a careless slip when he said during the 2008 campaign that he wanted to emulate Ronald Reagan and change “the trajectory of America” in ways that recent presidents, including Clinton, had been unable to do. Obama did not just want to be president. His mission was to leave a legacy as a president of consequence, the liberal counter to Reagan. To gauge himself against the highest-ranked presidents, and to learn from their legacies, Obama held private White House sessions with an elite group of American historians.

It is now becoming increasingly possible to argue that he has neared his goal. His decisions were ineffective in stemming the human wave of disaster in Syria, and he has thus far failed to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to make anything more than marginal changes on two domestic issues of importance to him, immigration and gun control. But from the Affordable Care Act to the legalization of same-sex marriage and the nuclear deal with Iran, from the stimulus package that started the slow recovery from the 2008 recession to the Detroit auto industry bailout, from global warming and renewable energy initiatives to the veto of the Keystone pipeline, from the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and the killing of Osama bin Laden to the opening of relations with Cuba, the liberal achievements have added up, however one judges the policies.

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

President Obama, first lady Michelle and their daughters, Malia, second from left, and Sasha, introduce their new dog, Bo, to the White House press corps on April 14, 2009.

Obama did not just want to be president.

His mission was to leave a legacy as a president of consequence, the liberal counter to Reagan.

This was done at the same time that he faced criticism from various quarters for seeming aloof, if not arrogant, for not being more effective in his dealings with members of Congress of either party, for not being angry enough when some thought he should be, or for not being an alpha male leader.

A promise of unity His accomplishments were bracketed by two acts of negation by opponents seeking to minimize his authority: first a vow by Republican leaders to do what it took to render him a one-term president; and then, with 11 months left in his second term, a pledge to deny him the appointment of a nominee for the crucial Supreme Court seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon. Obama’s White House years also saw an effort to delegitimize him personally by shrouding his story in fallacious myth — questioning whether he was a foreigner in our midst, secretly born in Kenya, despite records to the contrary, and insinuating that he was a closet Muslim, again defying established fact. Add to that a raucous new techno-political world of unending instant judgments and a decades-long erosion of economic stability for the working class and middle class that was making an increasingly large segment of the population, of various ideologies, feel left behind, uncertain, angry and divided, and the totality was a national condition that was anything but

conducive to the promise of unity that brought Obama into the White House.

To the extent that his campaign rhetoric raised expectations that he could bridge the nation’s growing political divide, Obama owns responsibility for the way his presidency was perceived. His political rise, starting in 2004, when his keynote convention speech propelled him into the national consciousness, was based on his singular ability to tie his personal story as the son of a father from Kenya and mother from small-town Kansas to some transcendent common national purpose. Unity out of diversity, the ideal of the American mosaic that was constantly being tested, generation after generation, part reality, part myth. Even though Obama romanticized his parents’ relationship, which was brief and dysfunctional, his story of commonality was more than a campaign construct; it was deeply rooted in his sense of self.

As a young man, Obama at times felt apart from his high school and college friends of various races and perspectives as he watched them settle into defined niches in culture, outlook and occupation. He told one friend that he felt “large dollops of envy for them” but believed that because of his own life’s story, his mixed-race heritage, his experiences in multicultural Hawaii and exotic Indonesia, his childhood without “a structure or tradition to support me,” he had no choice but to seek the largest possible embrace of the world. “The

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COVER STORY

MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

The White House was bathed in multicolored lights to honor the Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage in 2015.

only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes, make them mine, me theirs,” he wrote.

He carried that notion with him through his political career in Illinois and all the way to the White House, where it was challenged in ways he had never confronted before.

With most politicians, their strengths are their weaknesses, and their weaknesses are their strengths.

With Obama, one way that was apparent was in his coolness. At various times in his presidency, there were calls from all sides for him to be hotter. He was criticized by liberals for not expressing more anger at Republicans who were stifling his agenda, or at Wall Street financiers and mortgage lenders whose wheeler-dealing helped drag the country into recession. He was criticized by conservatives for not being more vociferous in denouncing Islamic terrorists, or belligerent in standing up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

His coolness as president can best be understood by the sociological forces that shaped him before he reached the White House. There is a saying among native Hawaiians that goes: Cool head, main thing. This was the culture in which Obama reached adolescence on the island of Oahu, and before that during the four years he lived with his mother in Jakarta. Never show too much.

Never rush into things. Maintain a personal reserve and live by your own sense of time.

This sensibility was heightened when he developed an affection for jazz, the coolest mode of music, as part of his self-tutorial on black society that he undertook while living with white grandparents in a place where there were very few African Americans. As he entered the political world, the predominantly white society made it clear to him the dangers of coming across as an angry black man. As a community organizer, he refined the skill of leading without being overt about it, making the dispossessed citizens he was organizing feel their own sense of empowerment. As a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, he developed an affinity for rational thought.

Differing approaches All of this created a president who was comfortable coolly working in his own way at his own speed, waiting for events to turn his way.

Was he too cool in his dealings with other politicians? One way to consider that question is by comparing him with Clinton. Both came out of geographic isolation, Hawaii and southwest Arkansas, far from the center of power, in states that had never before offered up presidents. Both came out of troubled families defined by fatherlessness and alcoholism.

Both at various times felt a sense of abandonment. Obama had the additional quandary of trying to figure out his racial identity. And the

At various times in his presidency, there were calls from all sides for him to be hotter.

KLMNO WEEKLY

two dealt with their largely similar situations in diametrically different ways.

Rather than deal with the problems and contradictions of his life head-on, Clinton became skilled at moving around and past them. He had an insatiable need to be around people for affirmation. As a teenager, he would ask a friend to come over to the house just to watch him do a crossword puzzle. His life became all about survival and reading the room. He kept shoeboxes full of file cards of the names and phone numbers of people who might help him someday. His nature was to always move forward. He would wake up each day and forgive himself and keep going. His motto became “What’s next?” He refined these skills to become a political force of nature, a master of transactional politics. This got him to the White House, and into trouble in the White House, and out of trouble again, in a cycle of loss and recovery.

Obama spent much of his young adulthood, from when he left Hawaii for the mainland and college in 1979 to the time he left Chicago for Harvard Law School nearly a decade later, trying to figure himself out, examining the racial, cultural, personal, sociological and political contradictions that life threw at him.

He internalized everything, first withdrawing from the world during a period in New York City and then slowly reentering it as he was finding his identity as a community organizer in Chicago.

Rather than plow forward relentlessly, like Clinton, Obama slowed down. He woke up each day and wrote in his journal, analyzing the world and his place in it. He emerged from that process with a sense of self that helped him rise in politics all the way to the White House, then led him into difficulties in the White House, or at least criticism for the way he operated. His sensibility was that if he could resolve the contradictions of his own life, why couldn’t the rest of the country resolve the larger contradictions of American life? Why couldn’t Congress? The answer from Republicans was that his actions were different from his words, and that while he talked the language of compromise, he did not often act on it. He had built an impressive organization to get elected, but it relied more on the idea of Obama than on a long history of personal contacts. He did not have a figurative equivalent of Clinton’s shoebox full of allies, and he did not share his Democratic predecessor’s profound need to be around people. He was not as interested in the personal side of politics that was so second nature to presidents such as Clinton and Lyndon Johnson.

Politicians of both parties complained that Obama seemed distant. He was not calling them often enough. When he could be schmoozing with members of Congress, cajoling them and making them feel important, he was often back in the residence having dinner with his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters, or out golfing with the same tight group of high school chums and White House suborcontinues on next page

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COVER STORY

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Obama, center, and others walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 2015 for the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” At right, Obama talks in 2016 about Newtown and other mass killings.

from previous page

dinates.

Here again, some history provided context.

Much of Obama’s early life had been a long search for home, which he finally found with Michelle and their girls, Malia and Sasha.

There were times when Obama was an Illinois state senator and living for a few months at a time in a hotel room in Springfield, when Michelle made clear her unhappiness with his political obsession, and the sense of home that he had strived so hard to find was jeopardized.

Once he reached the White House, with all the demands on his time, if there was a choice, he was more inclined to be with his family than hang out with politicians. A weakness in one sense, a strength in another, enriching the image of the first-ever black first family.

A complex question The fact that Obama was the first black president, and that his family was the first African American first family, provides him with an uncontested hold on history. Not long into his presidency, even to mention that seemed beside the point, if not tedious, but it was a prejudice-shattering event when he was elected in 2008, and its magnitude is not likely to diminish. Even as some of the political

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

rhetoric this year longs for a past America, the odds are greater that as the century progresses, no matter what happens in the 2016 election, Obama will be seen as the pioneer who broke an archaic and distant 220-year period of white male dominance.

But what kind of black president has he been?

His life illuminates the complexity of that question. His white mother, who conscientiously taught him black history at an early age but died nearly a decade before her son reached the White House, would have been proud that he broke the racial barrier. But she also inculcated him in the humanist idea of the universality of humankind, a philosophy

It was a prejudiceshattering event when he was elected in 2008.

that her life exemplified as she married a Kenyan and later an Indonesian and worked to help empower women in many of the poorest countries in the world. Obama eventually found his own comfort as a black man with a black family, but his public persona, and his political persona, was more like his mother’s.

At various times during his career, Obama faced criticism from some African Americans that, because Obama did not grow up in a minority community and received an Ivy League education, he was not “black enough.”

That argument was one of the reasons he lost that 2000 congressional race to Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther, but fortunes shift and attitudes along with them; there was no more poignant and revealing scene at Obama’s final State of the Union address to Congress than Rep. Rush waiting eagerly at the edge of the aisle and reaching out in the hope of recognition from the passing president.

As president, Obama rarely broke character to show what was inside. He was reluctant to bring race into the political discussion, and never publicly stated what many of his supporters believed: that some of the antagonism toward his presidency was rooted in racism.

He wished to be judged by the content of his presidency rather than the color of his skin.

One exception came after February 2012, when Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed in Florida by a gun-toting neighborhood zealot. In July 2013, commenting on the verdict in the case, Obama talked about the common experience of African American men being followed when shopping in a department store, or being passed up by a taxi on the street, or a car door lock clicking as they walked by — all of which he said had happened to him. He said Trayvon Martin could have been his son, and then added, “another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.”

Nearly two years later, in June 2015, Obama hit what might be considered the most powerful emotional note of his presidency, a legacy moment, by finding a universal message in black spiritual expression. Time after time during his two terms, he had performed the difficult task of trying to console the country after another mass shooting, choking up with tears whenever he talked about little children being the victims, as they had been in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Now he was delivering the heart-rending message one more time, nearing the end of a eulogy in Charleston, S.C., for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine African Americans killed by a young white gunman during a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is unlikely that any other president could have done what Barack Obama did that day, when all the separate parts of his life story came together with a national longing for reconciliation as he started to sing, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. . . .” n

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HEALTH

KLMNO WEEKLY

A shot in the arm for flu prevention BY

M ARLENE C IMONS

T

he most vexing thing about the annual flu vaccination is that it’s annual.

You have to get it every year, and many people don’t do so.

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that only 2 out of 5 Americans have received the shot so far this flu season.

Wouldn’t it be easier if a flu shot were a once-in-a-lifetime event, or even once or twice in a decade?

Public health officials see that as a potential game-changer.

“If we had an effective universal vaccine, it would take a huge dent out of health-care costs [and] disruption of work, school attendance and social activities,” says William Schaffner, a professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “It could change the entire way we prevent influenza.”

The idea no longer seems so elusive, says Barney Graham, deputy director of the vaccine research center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Modern molecular technology enables scientists “to design things at atomic resolution,” which “really wasn’t possible until the last few years,” says Graham, who is trying to develop what scientists call a universal, or long-lasting, vaccine.

Several groups of scientists, including Graham’s, have reported progress toward a vaccine that could protect against flu permanently with a single injection or with a shot given every five to 10 years.

Either approach would be a big advance over current practice, which requires health officials to predict major flu viruses nine months in advance so manufacturers can adjust the vaccine each year. With a universal vaccine, “we wouldn’t have to worry about that,” Schaffner says. “Each year we could go after people who hadn’t been vaccinated before. It could be a year-long, daily vaccination activity, not just focused in the fall.”

The hope is that such a broadspectrum vaccine also could pro-

JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Advances in technology are putting us closer to goal of not needing to get a vaccine every year tect against rare but potentially deadly pandemics. “It would be the single most important thing we can do in public health today,” says Michael Osterholm, a professor of public health and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

While flu can strike anyone, it is most dangerous for the very young, the elderly and the chronically ill. Globally, seasonal flu epidemics produce 3 million to 5 million cases of serious disease every year, resulting in 250,000 to 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization.

Symptoms include fever, dry cough, headache, muscle and joint pain, severe malaise, sore throat and runny nose.

The two major types of seasonal influenza viruses that can infect humans are A and B. Type A virus-

es, which are constantly changing, are the ones usually responsible for yearly epidemics. Scientists classify type A viruses into subtypes based on the combinations of the two molecules that cover the surface of the virus, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase.

Vaccines work by stimulating the production of antibodies against pieces of the virus. A universal vaccine would need to provoke antibodies that bind to “conserved” regions of the virus — that is, areas that stay the same and are common to most flu viruses. Currently, seasonal vaccines are designed to respond to the hemagglutinin head, which changes every year.

Researchers are using different strategies that target the common areas. Two groups working separately, for example, are focusing on hemagglutinin’s stem, or stalk, which, unlike the head, doesn’t

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden receives a flu shot from B.K. Morris during an event about the flu vaccine on Sept. 17, 2015, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

change. To do so, each team had to first figure out how to stabilize the stalk after lopping off the head.

(The head is removed because it draws key immune system cells — those needed to make antibodies — away from the stem.) Each using a different approach, the teams have found a way to anchor the stem once the head is eliminated.

Another team built an entirely new virus in the lab by using recombinant DNA techniques, then designed a vaccine based on its conserved elements. “We hope that by doing that, our immune system will remember the conserved regions . . . so that changes in the head won’t matter,’’ says Peter Palese, chair of the microbiology department at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

Finally, another group has developed an experimental multiyear vaccine based on the genetic sequences of flu strains that have appeared in the past century. These researchers believe it is unrealistic to assume that any experimental vaccines, including theirs, will last a lifetime without requiring an update; thus, they are reluctant to predict the effectiveness of their own beyond five to 10 years — but even that would be an improvement over having to get an annual shot.

“We can go back in history and make vaccines that protect against all the variants for the last 100 years,’’ says Ted Ross, director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology at the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine.

“That doesn’t mean we can do 100 years in the future, but we still can prevent a lot of disease. We just don’t know when and if one approach will have longer staying power than another. We’ll find out.”

While animal studies of various prospective vaccines are promising, it probably will be years before researchers start testing them in humans. Still, public health officials are excited. The idea of a universal vaccine seemed a pipe dream until recently. “But now, or very soon, it may no longer be a flight of fancy,” Schaffner says.

“Some very impressive scientific efforts are underway to make this real.’” n

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BOOKS

The women of Harvard’s observatory N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

E ILEEN P OLLACK

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THE GLASS UNIVERSE How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

By Dava Sobel Viking.

324 pp. $30

e forget how recently astronomers figured out what the stars are made of, what makes them shine, how distant they are, how they are born, and whether they remain immutable or evolve and die.

Thanks to Dava Sobel, the author of “Longitude” and “Galileo’s Daughter,” we can now chart the illumination of these mysteries, most of which were solved not only by peering through telescopes on cold, dark nights, but also by patiently plotting the luminosity of the dots on the glass plates photographed through those lenses. As you also might glean from the title of Sobel’s most recent foray into the history of science, “The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars,” much of that labor was done by women.

That Harvard employed — though didn’t always pay — female astronomers to count the stars was largely a marriage of money and convenience. Much of the funding came from female donors; Anna Draper’s husband, Henry, was an early master of stellar photography, and when he died in 1882, she funneled her inheritance to Harvard.

By coincidence, the director of the observatory, Edward Charles Pickering, had inherited a staff of six female assistants. Although it was considered unseemly to subject women to the fatigue of using a telescope at night, women could, in the light of day, sometimes in their own parlors, process the data gathered by the male astronomers.

Given that the observatory received no financial support from Harvard, the use of cheap female labor made sense. Some women needed the job. Others were so desperate to occupy their minds, they volunteered. Such work, Pickering hoped, might “justify the current proliferation of women’s

NORTH WIND PICTURE ARCHIVES VIA AP IMAGES

The Harvard Astronomical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., in 1851.

Its director, Edward Charles Pickering, hoped to demonstrate that women could carry out original research.

colleges” and demonstrate that women, rather than following the lead of male scientists, could carry out original research.

By 1886, the staff had burgeoned to 14. In 1903, 10 more women joined what by then had become known as “Pickering’s harem.”

As Sobel ably documents, the women racked up many firsts: first woman to hold a title at Harvard; first woman to earn a PhD in astronomy; first woman to become a full professor at Harvard (shockingly, this didn’t happen until 1956). And yet, her dutiful recounting of the facts often lacks a larger perspective. Inventing a system by which to rank the brightness of the stars, while useful, seems less impressive than coming up with a theory to explain those differences. Even when Cecilia Payne used her knowledge of atomic structure to theorize as to what the stars were made of — something none of the men at Harvard were equipped to do — she allowed a male colleague to

shake her confidence in her discovery.

For most of the book, we can’t tell whether Sobel’s point is that the women were being abused or provided a nurturing space in which they could prove their intellectual prowess.

Not until the end does Sobel reveal that “The Glass Universe” has been intended as a defense of Pickering. “When the female computers of the Harvard College Observatory come up in present-day conversation,” she explains, “they are often portrayed as underpaid, undervalued victims of a factory system. Pickering stands accused of giving them scut work that no man would stoop to do.” And yet, Sobel writes, in those early days, astronomy was boring work for men as well as women. If Pickering paid women low salaries, he was hardly alone in that practice.

He welcomed women into his classes and trained female astronomers who went on to lead departments at Wellesley and Smith. Not only did he give his assistants

credit for their discoveries, Pickering helped them publish their findings under their own names and worked behind the scenes to get them prizes and professorships.

As a defense of Pickering, “The Glass Universe” is fairly convincing. But that purpose seems too narrow to justify the book as a whole. Like the women who contented themselves with classifying the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars, Sobel seems more concerned with conveying raw data than theorizing about her findings. Even by the book’s end, we don’t feel as if we know these women as individuals.

Still, if you persist, you will be rewarded with wonderfully intimate moments in which the lady astronomers entertain themselves playing rummy and jackstraws, sing for each other, and feed each other fudge, dates stuffed with peanuts and hot cocoa.

Best of all, you will become privy to Payne’s story — how she went boating with her “Heavenly twin,” Adelaide Ames, only to witness her dear friend’s drowning; how Payne nearly succumbed to grief; how she fell in love with a man who did not love her back; how she tried to shake her sadness by traveling to Europe and, against all advice (this was 1933), visited a contingent of astronomers in the Soviet Union; how she sank even deeper into despair; how she encountered a Russian refugee who begged for help in escaping to the United States; how she managed to get this refugee a job as her assistant; and how she scandalized the department by eloping with the man (not only was he poor, he was shorter than his bride by half a head!). Happily, neither the scandal nor the marriage ended Payne’s career as an astronomer. n Pollack is author of “The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club” and the novel “A Perfect Life.”

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Haunting story pulls readers close

Evasively retelling life in the Smiths

F ICTION

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REVIEWED BY

M ANUEL R OIG- F RANZIA

arly on in “Fever Dream,” Samanta Schweblin’s mesmerizing debut novel, a young mother tells a friend about a calculation she is forever making and remaking.

She calls it the “rescue distance.”

“That’s what I’ve named the variable distance separating me from my daughter,” Amanda explains, as she watches her child tottering perilously toward a swimming pool.

But Amanda’s obsession with the rescue distance doesn’t ease her fears. It amplifies them. The more she measures, the shorter the distance becomes. She likens it to a rope, pulling ever tighter, tugging at her maternal preoccupations, tormenting her. “The rope is so taut now I feel it in my stomach,” Amanda says while struggling to explain her primal anxiety.

Amanda is a woozy chronicler of her demons, for she tells her story while lying on her deathbed, felled by some toxic, man-made menace. Her recollections are prompted, with growing urgency, by a friend’s child, David, who sits at her bedside and pushes her into an agonizing self-exploration, all the while reminding her that she soon will be gone.

David — Schweblin hints — might be a hallucination, a product of the fevered state that gives the novel, nimbly translated by Megan McDowell, its title. But his existence or nonexistence doesn’t really matter because the emotions he elicits are so chillingly real and familiar.

Schweblin, who was born in Argentina and lives in Germany, was hailed by Granta several years ago as one of the best young Spanish-language writers. “Fever Dream,” a slim novel that was originally published in Spanish in 2014 as “Distancia de Rescate,” represents a new phase in the career of Schweblin, 38, who had previously dazzled her literary admirers with collections of her deftly constructed short stories.

In the hands of a less talented writer, “Fever Dream” might have veered into the realm of the predictably macabre. Amanda and her daughter are incapacitated by a mysterious substance leaching into the ground and the water at the countryside vacation spot where she and her family have sought respite from the grime of the city. Before long, horses and ducks and dogs are staggering around in wobbly death throes.

Misshapen children appear in the gloom of remembrance.

Schweblin, though, is an artist of remarkable restraint, only dabbing on the atmospherics, while focusing her crystalline prose on the interior lives of the two mothers, Amanda and Carla, as well as the vagaries of memory.

Schweblin renders psychological trauma with such alacrity that the conceit of a poisoned environment feels almost beside the point.

When Amanda arrives at the vacation home, she can’t sleep.

“Before all else,” she says, “I have to know what is around the house.

Whether there are dogs, and if they’re friendly, whether there are ditches, and how deep they are.”

Comfort is derived from controllable, manageable locales. David’s mother lives in a nearby home swaddled by wheat fields, a perimeter she appreciates “because it makes our yard smaller, more intimate.”

The protective urge consumes Amanda, and Schweblin pulls the rope closer and closer until the rescue distance is almost gone.

After reading “Fever Dream,” I wanted Schweblin to let the rope out more. Not because “Fever Dream” isn’t an almost perfect short novel — because it most certainly is. But because I wanted to see what Schweblin could do when she went deeper into the place where she so skillfully had taken me. n Roig-Franzia is a writer for The Washington Post.

I

FEVER DREAM

By Samanta Schweblin Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell Riverhead. 183 pp. $25

SET THE BOY FREE The Autobiography

By Johnny Marr Dey Street. 480 pp. $28.99

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REVIEWED BY

M ICHAEL L INDGREN

n May of 1983, a propulsive bit of doomy guitar-pop called “Hand in Glove” began appearing on radio playlists across England: The Smiths’ assault on a British music scene dominated by soggy synth-pop was on. The band of working-class lads from down-at-heels Manchester made four towering albums of blasted romanticism before abruptly splitting, breaking the hearts of a fan base of fanatical loyalty and devotion. The pintsized engine of the band’s shimmering sound was guitarist Johnny Marr, who tells his story in the breezy, often scattered autobiography “Set the Boy Free.”

The rock-star memoir is a notoriously uneven genre. For every Bruce Springsteen who writes thoughtfully and perceptively about his life, there are a dozen more erstwhile rockers whose books are cheap cash-ins or vanity projects. Unfortunately “Set the Boy Free” tilts toward the latter, although not without some redeeming qualities. Born into a lively clan of Anglo-Irish immigrants, Marr gives an account of his band’s early days that is colorful and slangy, if not terribly revealing.

The book is best when he sticks to musicianly shop-talk. An authentically brilliant composer with a quicksilver ear and an uncanny instinct for instrumental hooks, Marr learned how to put songs together by studying the girl-group records of the early 1960s, and the sonic signature of the Smiths’ songs proves, in his telling, to be a product of hard work, good luck and an inventive approach to recording.

The black hole at the center of this memoir, from which no light escapes, is Marr’s relation with the Smiths’ singer Morrissey, whose androgynous looks and soaring croon made the band catnip to a legion of self-identified misfits and loners. Theirs was a working relationship of uncommon fecundity and emotional complexity, yet Marr often seems to be circling the topic

warily. Of their fateful first meeting in 1982 — a ground-zero moment in the history of British rock — Marr remembers mostly what they both were wearing (1950s Levis with bike boots for Marr, suit trousers and a baggy cardigan for Morrissey) and what record they listened to first (“You’re the One,” by the Marvelettes). Likewise, the breakup of the band in 1987, which in some quarters has attracted slightly less analysis than, say, the Zapruder film, gets from Marr just two brusque and not particularly edifying paragraphs.

This odd evasiveness is not confined to all things Morrissey. Much of Marr’s story is shadowed by an elliptical defensiveness, conveying the disorienting quality of an argument of which one only hears one side. Of his personal habits, he writes, with studied banality, “I relished the opportunity to dive into the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and everything that came with it. . . . It was a fun thing to do and no one could say I wasn’t living the dream.”

The second half of the book traces a post-Smiths life that has been a predictable, if frantic, roundelay of collaboration — with the Pretenders, the Talking Heads, The The, Modest Mouse and the Cribs, as well as various bands of his own. Here, too, an unintentional melancholy seeps in. Marr was 23 when the Smiths broke up; his five years in one of the world’s most famous bands now make up less than a tenth of his lifespan. Think of yourself 23 and then imagine that everything you have accomplished since then is polluted with a vague tang of the anticlimactic. It is not a fate I would wish on anyone.

When Marr concludes that “I’ve had the best job in the world” and says that “I love my work and I’ve always appreciated the good luck that’s come with it,” one hopes he means it. n Lindgren is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

2017 is the year of the bot — with its benefits, pitfalls VIVEK WADHWA is a distinguished fellow and professor at Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley and a director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke.

In the 2013 movie “Her,” Theodore Twombly, a lonely writer, falls in love with a digital assistant designed to meet his every need. She sorts emails, helps get a book published, provides personal advice and ultimately becomes his girlfriend. The assistant, Samantha, is A.I. software capable of learning at an astonishing pace.

Samantha will remain in the realm of science fiction for at least another decade, but less­functional digital assistants, called bots, are already here. These will be the most amazing technology advances we see in our homes in 2017.

Among the bestsellers of the holiday season were Amazon.com’s Echo and Google Home. These bots talk to their users through speakers, and their built-in microphones hear from across a room. When Echo hears the name “Alexa,” its LED ring lights up in the direction of the user to acknowledge that it is listening. It answers questions, plays music, orders Amazon products and tells jokes. Google’s Home can also manage Google accounts, read and write emails, and keep track of calendars and notes.

(Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Google and Amazon have both opened up their devices to thirdparty developers — who in turn have added the abilities to order pizza, book tickets, turn on lights and make phone calls. We will soon see these bots connected to health and fitness devices so that they can help people devise better exercise regimens and remember to take their medicine. And they will control the dishwasher and the microwave, track what is left in the refrigerator and order an ambulance in a case of emergency.

Long ago, our home appliances became electrified. Soon, they will be “cognified”: integrated into artificially intelligent

systems that are accessed through voice commands. We will be able to talk to our machines in a way that seems natural. Microsoft has developed a voice-recognition technology that can transcribe speech as well as a human and translate it into multiple languages. Google has demonstrated a voice-synthesis capability that is hard to differentiate from human. Our bots will tell our ovens how we want our food to be cooked and ask us questions on its behalf.

This has become possible because of advances in artificial intelligence, or A.I. In particular, a field called deep learning allows machines to learn through neural networks — in which information is processed in layers and the connections between these layers are strengthened based on experience. In short, they learn much like a human brain. As a child learns to recognize objects such as its parents, toys and animals, neural networks too learn by looking at examples and forming associations. Google’s A.I. software learned to recognize a cat, a furry blob with two eyes and whiskers, after looking at 10 million examples of cats.

It is all about data and example; that is how machines — and humans — learn. This is why the tech industry is rushing to get its bots into the marketplace and

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly in 2013’s “Her.” His futuristic A.I. assistant is still science fiction for now, but technological advances are making bots more integrated into everyday life.

are pricing them at a meager $150 or less: The more devices that are in use, the more they will learn collectively, and the smarter the technology gets. Every time you search YouTube for a cute cat video and pick one to watch, Google learns what you consider to be cute. Every time you ask Alexa a question and accept the answer, it learns what your interests are and the best way of responding to your questions.

By listening to everything that is happening in your house, as these bots do, they learn how we think, live, work and play. They are gathering massive amounts of data about us.

And that raises a dark side of this technology: the privacy risks and possible misuse by technology companies. Neither Amazon nor Google is forthcoming about what it is doing with all of the data it gathers and how it will protect us from hackers who exploit weaknesses in the infrastructure leading to its servers.

Of even greater concern is the dependency we are building on these technologies: We are beginning to depend on them for knowledge and advice and even emotional support.

The relationship between Theodore Twombly and Samantha doesn’t turn out very

well. She outgrows him in intelligence and maturity. And she confesses to having relationships with thousands of others before she abandons Twombly for a superior, digital life form.

We surely don’t need to worry yet about our bots becoming smarter than we are. But we already have cause for worry over one-sided relationships. For years, people have been confessing to having feelings for their Roomba vacuum cleaners — which don’t create even an illusion of conversation. A 2007 study documented that some people had formed a bond with their Roombas that “manifested itself through happiness experienced with cleaning, ascriptions of human properties to it, and engagement with it in promotion and protection.” And according to a recent report in New Scientist, hundreds of thousands of people say ‘Good morning’ to Alexa every day, half a million people have professed their love for it, and more than 250,000 have proposed marriage to it.

I expect that we are all going to be suckers for our digital friends.

Don’t you feel obliged to thank Siri on your iPhone after it answers your questions? I do, and have done so. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Roof’s regrettable remorselessness KATHLEEN PARKER writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary In 2010.

charleston, s.c.

If Death lingers in courtroom corridors awaiting sentences, this historic city’s federal courthouse was surely a top destination. On Tuesday, the Reaper’s patience was rewarded with the jury’s return of the death sentence for Dylann Roof.

Roof, who insisted on representing himself during the sentencing phase of his 33-count murder trial, was found guilty last month for the slaughter of nine black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in June 2015.

Roof’s self-lawyering is still mystifying, considering he had at his disposal one of the nation’s best death-penalty lawyers, David Bruck, who did represent Roof during the guilt phase that ended last month. Bruck was allowed only to advise Roof during the penalty phase but briefly addressed the judge Tuesday when Roof requested that Bruck address objections.

While the government’s case seemed airtight in covering all the requirements for the death sentence, Roof’s remarks Tuesday took less than five minutes.

Wearing slacks and a blue cable-knit sweater — his bowl-cut hair obviously recently shaped — Roof approached the lectern with a single, yellow, letter-size sheet of paper for his closing argument.

Barely audible — and his pauses

were longer than his sentences — he made essentially two suggestions seemingly aimed at creating doubt about his alleged hatred of black people and his intent in carrying out his mission, which he himself previously identified as wanting to incite racial violence.

“I think it’s safe to say nobody in their mind wants to go into a church and kill people,” he began.

Then he contradicted other confession statements in which he said he had to do what he did.

“In my [FBI confession] tape, I told them I had to do it. . . .

Obviously that’s not true. Nobody made me do it. What I meant when I said that was I felt like I had to do it, and I still feel like I had to do it.”

Clarity isn’t his strong suit.

Next, Roof challenged the

prosecution’s claim that he’s filled with hatred, one of the statuterequired aggravating factors in capital cases. He referred to his confession when an FBI agent asked him if he hated black people. Roof’s reply was: “I don’t like what black people do.”

To the jury, he posited, “If I was really filled with as much hate as I allegedly am, wouldn’t I just say, ‘Yes, I hate black people’?”

Finally, Roof said it’s fair to say that the prosecutors hate him since they’re seeking the death sentence. Then he tutored the court that people hate because they’ve been misled. He also said that people think they know what hatred it is, but “they don’t know what real hatred looks like.”

Does Roof? Is this because some hate-filled person misled him? Or did he merely look in the mirror?

Not once during his very brief remarks did Roof say he regretted his actions, which might have elicited some empathy from those burdened with determining his fate. Indeed, in a jailhouse journal, he wrote that he isn’t sorry and that he hadn’t shed a tear for the “innocent people I killed.”

Tuesday, as he attempted to take on a battery of lawyers hellbent on ultimate justice, he seemed ever the evil child who, rather than acknowledging the

horror and the agony of what he did, was somehow above the process. Expressionless and aloof, as he had been throughout the trial, he was anything but a sympathetic character and certainly no advocate for his continued access to life.

Throughout the proceedings, my mind kept wandering to an earlier case I covered when Bruck was fighting another death sentence — the trial of Susan Smith, the young mother who in 1994 rolled her car into a Union, S.C., lake, drowning her two small children.

The crime was heinous and the trial heart-rending. At one point during the father’s testimony, Smith threw herself across the defense table, loudly sobbing with the agony of regret and the sorrow of inconsolable loss. Yes, she was responsible for her children’s deaths, but there was no questioning her remorse or doubting that her life in prison would be an endless night of piercing pain.

For death-penalty opponents including me, this seemed a far more just end than death would have been. With Roof, there’s plainly no sense of sorrow now — or to come. In the end, evidence of sincere remorse, which is to say humanity, can be the difference between life and death.n

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OPINIONS

BY MARGULIES

The new ‘surveillance university’ JOSÉ A. CABRANES is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit and was Yale University’s first general counsel. He later served as a trustee of Colgate, Yale and Columbia universities.

Sixty years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren warned our nation that we had a choice. Either “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate,” or “our civilization will stagnate and die.” There was no third option.

Today, we face this choice again. Recent attempts to shame professors for unpopular views and to curtail the due process rights of those accused of misconduct are cause for alarm. Especially when academic freedom is endangered at places such as Yale — long celebrated as a leader on freedom of expression — we know that the erosion of academic freedom has become a national problem.

Academic freedom and the tenure system that protects it can seem unnecessary, even perverse, to the many Americans who lack job security. Why should professors be harder to fire than anyone else?

The short answer is that academic tenure is essential to democracy. A free society “depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition,” as the American Association of University Professors noted in 1940. Tenure allows professors to pursue the truth and teach it without fear of retaliation.

Until recently, attacks on tenure came mostly from the political right. Cold War hardliners pressured universities to crack down on “subversive activities” in the faculty lounge.

Conservative intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr. derided “the superstitions of ‘academic freedom’ ” as protecting only antiChristian and anti-capitalist lunatics.

The tables have turned.

Academic freedom now attracts opposition largely from the left.

Certainly, today’s critics of academic freedom rarely deny that professors should be able to write and teach freely. But they nonetheless insist that professors should exercise such liberty in the shadow of other values, such as civility, sex equality and social justice. While these are worthy ideals, they can become tools for suppressing free expression — just as anti-communism once was.

No one can doubt that we

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY HORSEY FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

should strive for civility. But problems arise when we are told that “uncivil” speech has made a campus “unsafe” — and that university officials should make a campus safe again by punishing uncivil speakers.

To combat these threats to “safety,” campus administrators have morphed into civility police.

On some campuses, “bias response teams” investigate professors’ online comments.

Several universities, including Yale, may soon introduce a smartphone app that lets users anonymously report offensive remarks. These anonymous reports will allow university bureaucrats — and perhaps even the public — to compile a directory of “subversive” professors in the spirit of dictatorial regimes. One can easily imagine dueling “watch lists” compiled by liberal and conservative activists with the shared aim of chilling unwanted speech.

At Yale and elsewhere, reports of sexual misconduct (and soon, perhaps, other offenses as well) end up in the hands of a centralized bureaucracy, which has the self-appointed obligation to retain them indefinitely — and to sift them for patterns of deviationism. The result is a university in which an unknown

percentage of faculty members have been accused of something but don’t yet know it. It’s not hard to see how unscrupulous administrators might come to value the new “surveillance university” as a tool for policing the teaching and research of the professoriate.

I’m not naive. As Yale’s first general counsel, and later a trustee, I know that professors are no more virtuous than the rest of us, and that universities have a right, and often a duty, to detect and punish their offenses. The crucial question is not whether universities should discipline professors, but how.

Nobody can doubt that sexism, along with other forms of pernicious discrimination, can create problems on campuses.

But universities can fight these evils without sacrificing the due process rights that have long guarded professors’ freedom to teach and write.

Our universities today must pay more than lip service to free expression. They must develop and maintain procedures that protect professors’ ability to teach and learn without fear of retaliation. While political alignments may have flipped, the choice remains the same: academic freedom or civilizational decline. n

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FIVE MYTHS

Kleptocracy BY

N ATALIE D UFFY

AND

N ATE S IBLEY

Every country suffers from corruption, but not every country is a kleptocracy. Kleptocracy, or “rule by thieves,” arises when a country’s elite begin to systematically steal from public funds on a vast scale.

They do so by undermining democracy and the legal system, gaining control over vital economic assets (usually the banking and natural­ resource sectors), and ultimately amassing unimaginable wealth.

Could the United States become one? To answer that question, we need to dispel some common myths.

MYTH NO. 1 Kleptocracies exist mostly in the developing world.

A kleptocracy is no longer a corrupt political system in a few poor nations: It is a sophisticated global network whose members include world leaders and powerful business people.

Kleptocrats send money around the world with the click of a button, aided by unscrupulous professionals with the expertise to launder it through anonymous offshore companies and secure it in luxury assets in the West.

According to the International Monetary Fund, as much as 5 percent of the world’s gross domestic product is laundered money, and only 1 percent of it is ever spotted. Illicit cross-border financial flows have been estimated at $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion per year.

The United States has become one of the leading secrecy jurisdictions. Delaware, South Dakota, Wyoming and other states do not require disclosure of corporate ownership, meaning that kleptocrats aren’t parking their assets just in exotic locations like the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands anymore.

U.S. real estate then provides an attractive conduit for securing and legitimizing the laundered funds.

MYTH NO. 2 Kleptocracies are strong.

Kleptocracy doesn’t necessarily make governments

weak. But the skewed priorities of greedy autocratic rulers and the looting of resources that should be used for public services mean that the countries are much weaker than they should be.

A 2016 report showed that developing countries collectively had lost $16.3 trillion to illicit leakages since 1980. While their people struggled, starved and died, exported corruption effectively made these governments net creditors to the world economy.

In the long run, then, kleptocracy doesn’t just weaken governments. It destroys them.

MYTH NO. 3 The United States is already a kleptocracy.

Few would argue that corruption doesn’t exist in the United States, but fewer seriously believe that it is the sole purpose of their government. Unlike the average Russian, Americans haven’t watched their president’s friends loot 5 percent of GDP in the past decade. Unlike onequarter of Ukrainians, the average American hasn’t had to pay a bribe to get officials to do their jobs. And unlike the Chinese, Americans don’t feel impelled to send trillions of dollars overseas illegally.

The United States has strong constitutional safeguards that guarantee democratic participation, free speech and, most important, rule of law.

Prosecutors wield a robust set of

ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS

An estimated 5 percent of Russia’s GDP in the past decade has been lost to corruption among President Vladimir Putin’s cronies.

mechanisms to address official corruption when it does occur.

The United States is far from perfect, but despite the uproar on alternative and social media, it is not a kleptocracy.

MYTH NO. 4 American institutions will shield us from kleptocracy.

Unfortunately, key political, financial and cultural institutions have yet to be firewalled against new methods of interference and infiltration by bad actors. In Washington, wellremunerated K Street firms exploit weaknesses in foreignlobbying laws to advance the interests of violent kleptocracies on the Hill. In the financial world, major U.S. banks are routinely implicated in money laundering scandals and fined huge sums.

We are making some progress.

The Justice Department’s Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative has frozen $2.8 billion in 28 cases since 2010. In July, the Treasury Department announced geographic targeting orders that make it impossible to complete anonymous all-cash purchases of high-value real estate in New York, Miami and four other key jurisdictions. And through the Magnitsky Act and other

sanctions regimes, the U.S. government has made life so difficult for some kleptocrats that relief is consistently cited as a major Kremlin priority.

MYTH NO. 5 Trump is setting himself up to rule as a kleptocrat.

There are reasons for concern.

President-elect Donald Trump’s personality-based populism, his refusal to release his tax returns or place his assets in a blind trust, the prominent roles played by his family during the transition, financial ties between some members of his inner circle and Russia, and his own stance toward the Kremlin have all raised questions about how he intends to conduct himself in office. On the other hand, Trump campaigned on the principle that his enormous personal wealth would insulate him from financial temptations.

U.S. constitutional safeguards and institutions are significantly more robust than those in countries where corruption has taken over. If Trump really wants to establish a kleptocracy, there are easier countries to do it in. n Duffy and Sibley are researchers at Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 15, 2017

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