The Washington Post National Weekly - May 14, 2017

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THE PEACE OF POOL Now rid of ISIS, Iraqis in eastern Mosul ‘seek joy’ in reopened billiard halls.

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Politics Fury over Comey, then chaos 4

Nation Black Lives Matter alters focus 8

5 Myths The Mafia 23

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KLMNO WEEKLY

ANALYSIS

One number protects Trump BY

P HILIP B UMP

D

onald Trump’s unorthodox candidacy blossomed into an unorthodox presidency. His sudden firing of FBI Director James B. Comey was an accelerant to the smoldering question of Russia’s role in the election. After various people emerged from the White House to insist that the termination had nothing to do with the investigation being conducted by the FBI, Trump on Thursday announced to all of America that, no, that was a big part of it. When the interview in which he said that became public, it took only minutes for observers to wonder how this didn’t constitute obstruction of justice, given that Trump was essentially firing someone looking into what his campaign had done. And once you start wandering into the territory of crimes or misdemeanors, others will rapidly venture one step further and start speculating about impeachment.

Those engaging in such speculation, though, are warned: There’s one little number that makes such a move unlikely. That number is 84 percent, Trump’s job approval rating among Republicans in the most recent weekly average from Gallup.

Why’s that one number so important? Allow me to explain.

On Thursday, shortly before the interview with Trump aired, NBC’s political team released numbers from a poll conducted with the firm SurveyMonkey. A majority of Americans disagreed with Trump’s decision on Comey, it turns out, with 54 percent saying that Comey’s termination was inappropriate.

A majority also said that allegations that the campaign was in contact with Russian actors was a serious issue, and not a distraction.

But notice how those figures break down by party. On the Comey question, majorities of Democrats and independents think that the move was inappropriate — but three-quarters

KLMNO WEEKLY

of Republicans are fine with it.

On the question of whether the allegations are serious, there’s a similar split. Republicans think it’s a distraction. Everyone else disagrees.

The initial excuse for the firing offered by the White House was that it was rooted in criticism from a deputy attorney general of Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. While a plurality of Americans believed that the firing

84%

Percentage of Republicans who approve of the job President Trump is doing, according to Gallup was a function of Trump’s concern about the Russia investigation, Republicans largely accepted the White House’s original argument.

That pattern — Republicans being enthusiastic, while independents are skeptical and Democrats furious — is consistent across views of Trump. What’s more, this pattern holds on nearly every issue.

Having Republican voters broadly approving of Trump’s initiatives is important to Hill Republicans for a variety of reasons, including that they want policy measures such as health care and tax reform to pass, too.

Keeping Hill Republicans happy is important for Trump, too, because they control the relative few points of leverage over his presidency.

If there is to be an independent investigation of the possible links between Trump’s campaign and Russia, either Trump needs to ap-

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. 31

point someone — unlikely — or Hill Republicans have to leverage their control of Congress to create a robust independent body, to change the law or to bring pressure against Trump.

Those are the only options, and all come down to the will of Trump or members of his party. If things were to progress to the point of impeachment, same deal: A Republican Congress would need to move the process forward.

At this point, it’s not simply a coincidence that Republicans approve of what Trump is doing and of what is happening in Congress.

Quinnipiac asked how a House candidate’s demonstration of support for Trump might affect a voter’s support. Overall, it was a liability — but among Republicans, support for Trump was seen as either unimportant or as a boon.

If Republican members of Congress are confident that their party’s voters will support them if they ally with Trump, that’s all that many will need to hear.

Trump’s current favorable numbers actually aren’t very good for Trump. In the 2016 election, nearly a third of the votes he got were from independents — enough to give him the slight edge he needed to win the electoral college. If his support from independents stays as soft as it is now, it’s hard to see how he wins a second term.

But that’s not the Hill Republicans’ problem. If Trump stays popular with Republicans, if that popularity continues to rub off and if conservative news outlets continue to help keep all of that in place, there’s little political incentive for Republicans in safe (or safe-ish) seats to call for an independent investigation, much less an impeachment.

If that 84 percent approval starts to sag significantly? Trump moves from political asset to political liability. And nothing in this world moves as quickly as a politician looking for distance from something unpopular. n © The Washington Post

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

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER Iraqi boys play billiards at Captain pool hall in April in Mosul, Iraq. Activities such as billiards had been forbidden under the Islamic State. Photograph by ALEX POTTER for The Washington Post.

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POLITICS

Inside the decision to fire Comey

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s growing fury with the FBI director led to a swift dismissal — and then chaos

BY P HILIP R UCKER, A SHLEY P ARKER, S ARI H ORWITZ AND R OBERT C OSTA

E

very time FBI Director James B. Comey appeared in public, an ever-watchful President Trump grew increasingly agitated that the topic was the one that he was most desperate to avoid: Russia.

Trump had long questioned Comey’s loyalty and judgment, and he was infuriated by what he viewed as the director’s lack of action in recent weeks on leaks

from within the federal government. By last weekend, he had made up his mind: Comey had to go.

At his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., Trump groused over Comey’s latest congressional testimony, which he thought was “strange,” and grew impatient with what he viewed as his sanctimony, according to White House officials. Comey, Trump figured, was using the Russia probe to become a martyr.

Back at work Monday morning in Washington, Trump told Vice President Pence and several sen-

ior aides — Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, among others — that he was ready to move on Comey. First, though, he wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly.

Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House.

The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said

President Trump decided last weekend that FBI Director James B. Comey should be fired. Officials have said his dissatisfaction with Comey had been building for months.

Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey.

The pair quickly fulfilled the boss’s orders, and the next day Trump fired Comey — a breathtaking move that thrust a White House already accustomed to chaos into a new level of tumult, one that has legal as well as political consequences.

Rosenstein threatened to resign after the narrative emerging from the White House on Tuesday evening cast him as a prime mover of the decision to fire Comey and that the president acted only on

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POLITICS his recommendation, said the person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Justice Department officials declined to comment. On Thursday, Trump said in an NBC interview it was his idea to fire Comey, and he would have done so regardless of Rosenstein’s recommendation.

The stated rationale for Comey’s firing delivered Wednesday by principal deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was that he had committed “atrocities” in overseeing the FBI’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, hurting morale in the bureau and compromising public trust.

“He wasn’t doing a good job,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.

“Very simple. He wasn’t doing a good job.”

But the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans, and even an interview with Trump, paint a conflicting narrative centered on the president’s brewing personal animus toward Comey. Many of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations.

Trump was angry that Comey would not support his baseless claim that President Barack Obama had his campaign offices wiretapped. Trump was frustrated when Comey revealed in Senate testimony the breadth of the counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s effort to sway the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

And he fumed that Comey was giving too much attention to the Russia probe and not enough to investigating leaks to journalists.

The known actions that led to Comey’s dismissal raise as many questions as answers. Why was Sessions involved in discussions about the fate of the man leading the FBI’s Russia investigation, after having recused himself from the probe because he had falsely denied under oath his own past communications with the Russian ambassador?

Why had Trump discussed the Russia probe with the FBI director three times, as he claimed in his letter dismissing Comey, which

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cials grew increasingly dissatisfied with the FBI’s actions on that front. Comey’s appearances at congressional hearings caused even more tension between the White House and FBI, as Trump administration officials were angered that the director’s statements increased, rather than diminished, public attention on the Russia probe, officials said.

In his Tuesday letter dismissing Comey, Trump wrote: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” People familiar with the matter said that statement is not accurate, although they would not say how it was inaccurate. FBI officials declined to comment on the statement.

PHOTOS BY JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

could have been a violation of Justice Department policies that ongoing investigations generally are not to be discussed with White House officials?

And how much was the timing of Trump’s decision shaped by events spiraling out of his control — such as Monday’s testimony about Russian interference by former acting attorney general Sally Yates, or the fact that Comey the previous week requested more resources from the Justice Department to expand the FBI’s Russia probe?

In the NBC interview Thursday, Trump said of his decision, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and

Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ” In the weeks leading up to Comey’s firing, Trump administration officials had repeatedly urged the FBI to more aggressively pursue leak investigations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Administration officials sometimes sought to push the FBI to prioritize leak probes over the Russia interference case, and at other times urged the bureau to investigate disclosures of information that was not classified or highly sensitive and therefore did not constitute crimes, these people said.

Over time, administration offi-

White House press secretary Sean Spicer, top, was informed of the decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey just one hour before the news was announced Tuesday.

Spicer threw together an impromptu gaggle with reporters near the White House in near darkness.

Above, a copy of the termination letter that President Trump sent to Comey’s office.

‘Essentially declared war’ Within the Justice Department and the FBI, the firing of Comey has left raw anger, and some fear, according to multiple officials.

Thomas O’Connor, the president of the FBI Agents Association, called Comey’s firing “a gut punch.

We didn’t see it coming, and we don’t think Director Comey did anything that would lead to this.’’

Many employees said they were furious about the firing, saying the circumstances of his dismissal did more damage to the FBI’s independence than anything Comey did in his three-plus years in the job.

One intelligence official who works on Russian espionage matters said they were more determined than ever to pursue such cases. Another said Comey’s firing and the subsequent comments from the White House are attacks that won’t soon be forgotten.

Trump had “essentially declared war on a lot of people at the FBI,” one official said. “I think there will be a concerted effort to respond over time in kind.”

In a message to FBI staff late Wednesday, Comey wrote: “I have long believed that a President can fire an FBI Director for any reason, or for no reason at all. I’m not going to spend time on the decision or the way it was executed. I hope you won’t either. It is done, and I will be fine, although I will miss you and the mission deeply.”

He added that “in times of turbulence, the American people should see the FBI as a rock of competence, honesty, and indecontinues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

pendence.”

Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump, said the FBI director misunderstood the president: “James Comey made the mistake of thinking that just because he announced the FBI was investigating possible collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, he had unfettered job security. In my opinion, the president should have fired Comey the day he was sworn in.”

George Lombardi, a friend of the president and a frequent guest at his Mar-a-Lago Club, said: “This was a long time coming.

There had been a lot of arguments back and forth in the White House and during the campaign, a lot of talk about what side of the fence [Comey] was on or if he was above political dirty tricks.”

Dating to the campaign, several men personally close to Trump deeply distrusted Comey and helped feed the candidate-turnedpresident’s suspicions of the FBI director, who declined to recommend charges against Clinton for what they all agreed was a criminal offense, according to several people familiar with the dynamic.

The men influencing Trump include Roger J. Stone, a self-proclaimed dirty trickster and longtime Trump confidant who has been linked to the FBI’s Russia investigation and Keith Schiller, a former New York police officer who functioned as Trump’s chief bodyguard and works in the West Wing as director of Oval Office operations.

“What Comey did to Hillary was disgraceful,” Stone said. “I’m glad Trump fired him over it.”

In fact, it was Schiller whom Trump tasked with hand-delivering a manila envelope containing the president’s termination letter to Comey’s office at FBI headquarters Tuesday afternoon. Trump’s aides did not appear to know that Comey would be out of the office, traveling on a recruiting trip in California, according to a White House official.

A chaotic response Within the West Wing, there was little apparent dissent over the president’s decision to fire Comey, according to the accounts of several White House officials.

McGahn, the White House counsel, and Priebus, the chief of staff,

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged strategy for how to announce and explain the decision. walked Trump through how the dismissal would work, with McGahn’s legal team taking the lead and coordinating with the Justice Department.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and her husband, Jared Kushner — both of whom work in the White House — have frequently tried to blunt Trump’s riskier impulses but did not intervene to try to persuade him against firing Comey, according to two senior officials.

Trump kept a close hold on the process. White House press secretary Sean Spicer and communications director Michael Dubke were brought into the Oval Office and informed of the Comey decision just an hour before the news was announced. Other staffers in the West Wing found out about the FBI director’s firing when their cellphones buzzed with news alerts beginning around 5:40 p.m.

The media explosion was immediate and the political backlash was swift, with criticism pouring in not only from Democrats, but also from some Republicans.

Trump and some of his advisers

did not fully anticipate the ferocious reaction — in fact, some wrongly assumed many Democrats would support the move because they had been critical of Comey in the past — and were unprepared to contain the fallout.

When asked Tuesday night for an update on the unfolding situation, one top White House aide simply texted a reporter two fireworks emoji.

“I think the surprise of a great many in the White House was that as soon as this became a Trump decision, all of the Democrats who had long been calling for Comey’s ouster decided that this was now an awful decision,” Dubke said.

“So there was a surprise at the politicization of Democrats on this so immediately and so universally.”

Trump’s team did not have a full-fledged communications strategy for how to announce and then explain the decision. As Trump, who had retired to the residence to eat dinner, sat in front of a television watching cable news coverage of Comey’s firing, he noticed another flaw: Nobody was defending him.

Deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president on Fox News on Tuesday night and at the press briefing Wednesday.

White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on CNN on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

The president was irate, according to White House officials.

Trump pinned much of the blame on Spicer and Dubke’s communications operation, wondering how there could be so many press staffers yet such negative coverage on cable news — although he, Priebus and others had afforded them almost no time to prepare.

“This is probably the most egregious example of press and communications incompetence since we’ve been here,” one West Wing official said. “It was an absolute disaster. And the president watched it unfold firsthand. He could see it.”

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Trump bears some responsibility for the turmoil because he kept the decision secret from some key aides.

“You can’t be the quarterback of the team if the rest of the team is not in the huddle,” Gingrich said.

“The president has to learn to go a couple steps slower so that everyone can organize around him.

When you don’t loop people in, you deprive yourself of all of the opportunities available to a president of the United States.”

For more than two hours after the news broke, Trump had no official spokesman, as his army of communications aides scrambled to craft a plan. By nightfall, Trump had ordered his talkers to talk; one adviser said the president wanted “his people” on the airwaves.

Counselor Kellyanne Conway ventured into what White House aides call “the lions’ den,” appearing on CNN both Tuesday night and Wednesday morning for combative interviews. Sanders went Tuesday night to the friendly confines of Fox News Channel, but Wednesday parried questions from the more adversarial hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Spicer, meanwhile, threw together an impromptu news conference with reporters in the White House driveway, a few minutes before he taped a series of short television interviews inside the West Wing, where the lighting was better for the cameras. The press secretary stood alongside tall hedges in near darkness and agreed to answer questions with the cameras shuttered.

“Just turn the lights off,” Spicer ordered. “Turn the lights off. We’ll take care of this.” n © The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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Health-care bill already roiling Senate

BY R OBERT C OSTA AND S EAN S ULLIVAN

S

en. Ted Cruz, a defiant loner whose feuds with Republican Party leaders have made him a conservative favorite, suddenly felt an itch to collaborate.

It was late March, just after the dramatic collapse of House Republicans’ initial attempt to pass a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health-care system. Cruz (R-Tex.) sent notice to party colleagues that he wanted to convene a working group to keep alive the GOP’s pledge to undo the law known as Obamacare.

Now, in the days since the House reversed itself and approved a health-care bill, that group, which presently numbers 13, is at the center of a fragile connection between hard-liners and leadership that may be the Senate’s best chance to pass its own version. The strategy, according to interviews with two dozen Republican senators and aides, is to bring together lawmakers with starkly different views, let them talk — and keep them talking until consensus is reached, in a process that could drag on for months.

There’s one big problem: Many of the key Republican senators who could stand in the way of a successful health-care vote are not in the group. And some of them are forming their own coalitions, suggesting that the path to 50 votes in a chamber with only 52 Republicans remains deeply challenging.

According to several Republicans close to the discussions, the three biggest issues yet to be reconciled are the scope of coverage for people with a preexisting injury or illness, health-care tax credits and Medicaid. Many differences remain among members of the working group itself.

Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who hail from states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, have repeatedly expressed concerns about being able to provide adequate protections for people who have re-

CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Republicans are facing divisions in the ranks and a vote margin that leaves little room for dissent ceived coverage through the entitlement program or may be eligible to receive it in the future.

“I’m sure people will be talking about it,” Gardner said when asked about the idea of lengthening the timeline in the House bill for rolling back the expansion of Medicaid.

Others, including Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), have signaled that they want an uncompromising assault on Obamacare that goes further in shredding regulations than many Senate Republicans are willing to venture.

And there are other differences among Republicans. For starters, the group is made up of 12 white men plus Cruz, whose father is from Cuba, and has generated critical headlines and television coverage for not including any of the five female Republican senators.

Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), in particular, could become thorns in negotiations, in part

because of their desire to restore funding for Planned Parenthood, which the House proposal would gut.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) grew visibly frustrated Tuesday with questions from reporters about why there were no women in the working group. They sought to de-emphasize that organization as one of many tackling health care in the Senate.

McConnell said that, in addition to the smaller gathering, the discussion in Tuesday’s regularly scheduled lunch for all Republican senators was also almost entirely about health care. Such lunches, open to the broader Senate GOP, are likely to continue to be focused on health care in the weeks ahead, he added.

“The working group that counts is all 52 of us, and we’re having extensive meetings,” McConnell said.

With that narrow advantage in

Sen. Ted Cruz (RTex.), seen at a committee hearing this month, convened a Senate working group in March to tackle a health-care bill.

the Senate and under the assumption that all Democrats will align against them, Republicans can lose only two of their own votes and still pass a health-care bill (with a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Pence).

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, penned a letter to GOP leaders Tuesday urging them to “drop the current partisan effort to repeal and replace health care reform through reconciliation” and find common aims to work on together, including lowering the cost of prescription drugs.

Cruz’s group began with six members and quickly started meeting, according to four Republicans familiar with the group’s discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity. By early May, as the House revived and passed its legislation, Cruz had forged an unlikely bond with a fellow member, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a Senate veteran and close McConnell ally.

The pair went to McConnell and said they would like to expand the working group as the House legislation headed to the Senate. McConnell agreed, and the expanded circle started to meet in McConnell’s suite.

Observers say there is an advantage for McConnell in trying to keep Cruz and his allies close to the process, where they may be more likely to accept compromise.

“McConnell recognizes that it’s better to have Cruz and Lee on the inside and not on the outside criticizing,” said James C. Capretta, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has briefed congressional Republicans on health care for years.

Last week, Cruz resisted setting specific guidelines on what needs to be in the final Senate product to secure his support.

Asked Monday whether he would accept anything less than the regulatory waivers in the House bill, Cruz said, “I don’t think it’s productive to be drawing lines and ultimatums during the conversations.” n © The Washington Post

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NATION

Transitioning from protests to policy

BY J ANELL R OSS AND W ESLEY L OWERY

O

utside the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge, where police shot and killed Alton Sterling, a crowd gathered this month to hold a vigil and protest the Justice Department’s decision not to charge the officer. They held signs and gave speeches. They prayed and cried.

It was a vastly different scene from the one that had played repeatedly on cable news after Sterling’s death last July, when activists blocked intersections, riot police arrived in armored vehicles and about 200 demonstrators were arrested.

In recent years, policing has been among the nation’s most visible issues as people outraged by the use of force and racial disparities in punishment took to the streets under the Black Lives Matter banner. But activists say the movement’s efforts have entered a new phase — one more focused on policy than protest — prompted by the election of President Trump.

“What people are seeing is that there are less demonstrations,” said Alicia Garza, one of three women credited with coining the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. “A lot of that is that people are channeling their energy into organizing locally, recognizing that in Trump’s America, our communities are under direct attack.”

The issue that galvanized the movement hasn’t subsided. So far this year, police have shot and killed 23 unarmed people, a higher rate than in 2016, when 48 unarmed people were killed all year. Both years, about one in three of those people were black.

Activists say they’re no less aware of those statistics than in years past. But like most of the political left, they were stunned by Trump’s electoral victory in November. And in the months since, they’ve grappled with the role of an antiracism movement at a time when political threats to other groups — immigrants, Muslims and women — have gained urgen-

JONATHAN BACHMAN/REUTERS

Trump’s election prompted Black Lives Matter movement to shift its focus from street marches cy and pushed more progressives into the streets in protest.

In interviews, more than half a dozen leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement said that last year’s presidential election prompted renewed focus on supporting other minority groups as well as amassing electoral power to fight an administration that has pledged to roll back Obama-era efforts to reshape police practices.

Those leaders — who hail from various factions of the decentralized movement of individuals and organizations that have, at times, clashed — said the reality of Trump’s presidency has forced a reconsideration of strategy.

“There was a lot of regrouping that had to happen within our movement and on the broader left to really think strategically,” said Asha Rosa, the national organizing cochair for the Black Youth Project 100.

The first major convening of young black activists during the Trump presidency came in April, when they met in Memphis for

speeches, marches and workshops marking the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech. They were joined by representatives of organized labor, the Fight for $15 minimum-wage effort, and a smattering of immigrant-advocacy and Muslim-rights groups.

The Black Lives Matter network is now one of more than 50 groups that have christened themselves The Majority, a coalition of progressives working on social justice issues, including LGBT rights and Islamophobia.

Even before the election, some of the most prominent activists in the Black Lives Matter movement were expanding their focus to broader political efforts.

Garza helped develop the Women’s March political platform and is an organizer for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a labor organization.

“We are also doing a lot of work to build bridges between other movements and communities

Community members gather during a vigil at the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge after the U.S. Justice Department announced May 2 they would not charge two police officers in the 2016 fatal shooting of Alton Sterling.

caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s agenda,” she added. “It’s a real opportunity for us to build a movement of movements.”

DeRay Mckesson, a Baltimorebased activist whose live tweeting from Ferguson, Mo., during the 2014 protests earned him hundreds of thousands of followers, ran for mayor of Baltimore last year and, after that unsuccessful bid, joined newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez’s transition team.

He has spent much of the year rolling out policy platforms and mobilizing tools, including the Resistance Manual and a project called OurStates, a site that helps people combat Republican policies in their state.

Black Lives Matter’s transition from street protests to policy is not unusual, said Stephen Zunes, a University of San Francisco professor who studies social movements. It’s through such work that a movement’s priorities — like mandatory use of officer body cameras — can become national standards, he said.

“That’s actually the way effective social movements often work or behave,” Zunes said, pointing to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in the wake of the financial crisis as a counterexample.

“What the Occupy people did not learn, or by and large do, is go do the lobbying, the organizing to make change happen. They wound up fetishizing the ‘occupy’ part, and then, by and large, it fizzled.”

Much of the push for policy change is being driven by local chapters of Black Lives Matter, under the national media’s radar, Garza notes.

In Memphis and Atlanta, activists have focused on challenging the “money bail” system, their term for the widespread practice of holding people in jail who are unable to pay even small amounts required by courts to ensure they will show up for trial.

Poor defendants — who stand to lose jobs, apartments and custody of their children as they sit in jail — often plead guilty to lesser crimes without seeing a judge or jury.

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NATION Local Black Lives Matter activists raised more than $33,000 to bail black mothers out of jail just before Mother’s Day, said Mary Hooks, an organizer with Black Lives Matter Atlanta.

The organization also is pushing the city council to make possession of a small quantity of marijuana punishable by a $75 ticket rather than arrest, and it is demanding that Atlanta’s mayor examine how the police force has been “militarized,” Hooks said.

Activists note that these efforts rarely make local news, let alone receive the national attention given to Ferguson protests after the fatal police shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown.

The movement’s impact has been visible in some communities.

In recent controversial encounters between police and unarmed black people, law enforcement has responded faster and with more regret than seen in years past. In suburban Dallas on May 2, an officer was fired three days after he fatally shot a 15-year-old boy sitting in a car. The officer was later charged with murder.

In North Charleston, S.C., former officer Michael Slager — who was charged with fatally shooting Walter Scott in the back after a traffic stop — pleaded guilty to using excessive force recently. And last month in Grand Rapids, Mich., police released bodycamera footage a few weeks after officers held a group of unarmed black boys, ages 12 to 14, at gunpoint.

Activists there say the fact that officers were even wearing body cameras was a result of community pressure. In 2015, community groups and city officials released a report on local policing that included a 12-item to-do list that included equipping every officer with a body camera. Elected officials and the city manager have promised to make a priority of the entire plan.

“Activism looks like a lot of different things: It can look like voting, it can look like protest, it can look like calling your representatives,” said Aditi Juneja, a law student who works with Campaign Zero. “The question shouldn’t be, ‘Will this activism be sustained?’ because for many people the work is very personal and it isn’t going to stop. The question is how it will sustain and how it will continue to manifest.” © The Washington Post

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A strong economy’s missing ingredient: Higher wages A NA S WANSON

ment-to-population ratio for prime-age workers, which measures the proportion of the popuhe economy today has allation between the prime working most everything experts ages of 25 and 54 who are emlook for as a sign of health ployed. That figure stood at — new jobs are popping 78.6 percent in April, still signifiup around the country, the unemcantly below where it was in 2007 ployment rate has fallen to the and for most of 2008. lowest level in a decade, and con“We have recovered a fair sumer and business confidence is amount, but we still have a way to high. But one thing that really go,” Gould said. “If there was less matters for workers has been slack, then employers would have stubbornly absent: strong wage to be offering better pay to attract growth. and retain the workers they The pay that workers take want, and they just don’t have home has risen a little since to yet.” the depths of the recession, Other economists find difbut not much. Once you factor ferent reasons for lagging in inflation, wage growth is so wage growth. Gains in prolow that workers are hardly ductivity — a measure of how better off than they were a much a given worker or mayear ago. Over the past year, chine can produce — have average hourly earnings have been sluggish of late, a worririsen just 2.5 percent, accordsome sign because productiviing to a recent report on April ty gains drive improvements job growth. in wealth and living standards The trend is disappointing over generations.

— and somewhat surprising.

But blaming productivity Given strong job growth and for slow wage growth is not a low unemployment, many full explanation, because economists had been expectDREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES economists in turn debate the ing that wages would be rising reasons behind sluggish promore quickly by now.

Bloomingdale’s workers and others rally ductivity. Some fault measureAs the economy continues for wage increases and better healthment issues. Some point a finto heat up and companies crecare benefits April 18 in New York. ger at government policies ate more job opportunities, that have failed to encourage inemployers should eventually have are still actively looking for one. vestments in machinery and techa harder time finding the caliber Economists argue that the harsh nology. Others say it could just be of workers that they want. To conditions of the recession perbecause of natural ebbs and flows attract good workers, companies suaded many Americans to give in innovation. in theory have to start offering pay up looking for work altogether.

In addition to trends in proincreases.

Young people moved back in with ductivity, weak growth in wages But in practice, wage growth their parents, workers went on might reflect the difficulty workhas remained relatively sluggish. disability and older employees ers have asserting their bargainAs Bernie Bowmal of the Ecoopted for early retirement. ing position in the current envinomic Outlook Group pointed out Some of those people have ronment, Jeremy Lawson, chief recently on American Public Megradually started looking for jobs economist at Standard Life India’s “Marketplace,” 2.5 percent is again as the economy has heated vestments, said. precisely the same wage growth up.

A dramatic decline in unionizaseen in 2009, when the jobless Elise Gould, a senior economist tion in recent decades has left rate stood at 10 percent — twice at the left-leaning Economic Polworkers less able to bargain with the current level. icy Institute, said that relatively company owners for pay increasCurrent wage growth “is not sluggish wage growth “tells us es. At the same time, globalization what we would expect at this that there’s still a fair amount of has allowed companies to be more point in a recovery,” said Tara slack left in the labor market. The mobile than ever. If labor gets too Sinclair, an economist at George unemployment rate is missing expensive in one location, compaWashington University and a senpart of the story of workers connies can simply move. n ior fellow at the jobs site Indeed. tinuing to be sidelined.”

“We would think employers Gould points to the employ© The Washington Post

BY

T

would be competing with each other and that we would see that competition reflected in wages.”

No one knows precisely why wage growth has lagged, but economists have several explanations.

Since the recession, the unemployment rate has not been a great indicator of how much slack is left in the labor market.

That’s because the unemployment rate, which was a low 4.4 percent in April, counts only workers who do not have a job but

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WORLD

Peace deal leads to cocaine boom N ICK M IROFF Tumaco, Colombia BY

F

rom a military helicopter high above the rolling hills of southern Colombia, the green rows of hearty plants look a bit like the vineyards of Napa.

But that’s not zinfandel down there.

Bushy fields of illegal coca blanket the countryside, ripe with the raw ingredients of the biggest cocaine boom in history.

Seventeen years and $10 billion after the U.S. government launched the counternarcotics and security package known as Plan Colombia, America’s closest drug-war ally is covered with more than 460,000 acres of coca.

Colombian farmers have never grown so much, not even when Pablo Escobar ruled the drug trade.

The peace accord signed last year by the Colombian government and leftist FARC rebels to end their 52-year war committed the guerrillas to quit the narcotics business and help rural families switch to legal crops. But the cash benefits available through the peace deal appear to have created a perverse incentive for farmers to stuff their fields with as many illegal plants as possible.

The result is a cocaine market so saturated that prices have crashed and unpicked coca leaves are rotting in the fields, according to Luis Carlos Villegas, Colombia’s defense minister. “We’ve never seen anything like it before,” he said.

He and other top officials concede that the end of the war with the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, has made the drug fight more difficult, not less. The days when U.S.-funded aircraft doused coca plantations with herbicide are over. A problem that could once be attacked with blunt military force has morphed into a sociological, state-building challenge.

“Frankly, we don’t believe violence is the right instrument to rid Colombia of coca,” Villegas

DANIELA QUINTERO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Colombian farmers given incentives to quit drug business, but lure of cash has opposite effect said.

He and other Colombian officials have developed what is perhaps the most comprehensive, well-researched anti-narcotics strategy ever attempted, offering cash incentives for entire communities to switch to alternative crops, while sending eradication crews to rip up the plants of those who refuse.

But the government says its strategy needs more time to succeed. U.S. lawmakers are growing impatient. Colombia produced a whopping 710 metric tons of cocaine last year, according to U.S. government estimates, up from 235 metric tons in 2013.

When Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos travels to Washington to meet with President Trump on Thursday, his country’s coca binge is likely to be a sore point. Trump has cited drug smuggling as a growing national security threat and a justification for a wall along the Mexican border.

At a time when much of the

nation’s drug fight has shifted to the opioid-abuse crisis, U.S. cocaine use is soaring. U.S. officials say the flood of cheap Colombian product is so large that it has quietly created its own demand.

U.S. cocaine overdose deaths are at a 10-year high, and between 2013 and 2015 the number of young Americans who said they used cocaine for the first time increased by 61 percent, according to the latest report from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The FARC funded its half-century insurgency partly on drug profits. It taxed coca growers and traffickers, or it sold cocaine directly to the Mexican cartels that control access to the world’s biggest drug market, the United States.

But with the vast majority of the FARC’s 7,000 fighters ready to lay down their weapons, the guerrilla group has essentially gotten out of the drug trade, top U.S. and Colombian officials say.

Colombian police destroy a coca plantation in Tumaco in March.

The FARC’s demobilization has set off a deadly scramble for control of Colombia’s multibillion-dollar cocaine business, pitting trafficking gangs against one another and the country’s smaller communist rebel group, the ELN, or National Liberation Army.

Under the terms of Colombia’s peace accord, the FARC has pledged to work with coca farmers in the remote communities long under its control, helping them to plant alternative cash crops such as coffee, bananas and cacao. But it’s likely to be at least several months before ex-combatants are ready to join those programs.

In the meantime, the Colombian government insists that it is fighting the coca boom on all fronts. Colombian security agencies that work closely with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration are seizing record amounts of cocaine — 115 metric tons through the first four months of 2017.

Persuading farmers to stop growing so much coca might be a bigger challenge. Colombian officials have begun showing up in their communities with cash payments for those who voluntarily pull up their coca and enter a two-year program to transition to legal crops.

Areas that faithfully comply will receive technical and commercial support, and funding for public works such as roads, clinics and athletic fields.

The catch? The entire community has to be coca-free for families to get their monthly payments. Experts say that this sort of peer-pressure method is the only one that works, because if there is coca around, the trafficking gangs will never leave.

Bo Mathiasen, who leads the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia, said the government has a narrow window of opportunity to prevent new armed groups from muscling in to areas where the FARC has withdrawn.

“The challenge is for the state to have a permanent presence in rural areas,” Mathiasen said. n ©The Washington Post

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WORLD

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South Korea takes a quick turn north A NNA F IFIELD Seoul BY

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he first words and actions of South Korea’s new president show his determination to revive the South Korean “sunshine policy” of engaging North Korea rather than isolating it, a move that would put South Korea at odds with the United States, where President Trump has vowed to use “maximum pressure” to force the North to give up its nuclear weapons program, and with an international community that is largely supportive of tougher sanctions.

Moon Jae-in said Wednesday that he would be willing to hold talks in Washington and Pyongyang in efforts to ease the North Korean nuclear crisis, wasting no time in embarking on a new approach to dealing with Kim Jong Un’s regime.

The offer of shuttle diplomacy came shortly after Moon was sworn in as president after winning a snap election triggered by the impeachment of conservative leader Park Geun-hye.

Moon had vowed on the campaign trail to resume engagement with North Korea, a sharp change from the hard-line approach taken by South Korea’s past two governments — and by the international community — in response to the North’s nuclear tests and missile launches.

“I will endeavor to address the security crisis promptly,” Moon said at the National Assembly in Seoul. “If needed, I will immediately fly to Washington. I will also visit Beijing and Tokyo and even Pyongyang under the right circumstances.”

Reinforcing his stance, Moon appointed two top aides with experience in dealing with North Korea.

He nominated Suh Hoon, a former intelligence official who arranged the two inter-Korean presidential summits held in the 2000s, to lead the National Intelligence Service.

Suh lived in North Korea for two years beginning in 1997 to

HONG HAE-IN/YONHAP VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

On his first day in office, President Moon Jae-in says he’s willing to hold talks with North Korea run an energy project that was part of a 1994 denuclearization deal with North Korea. He met Kim Jong Il, the North’s leader at the time, during North-South summits in 2000 and 2007.

Moon also appointed as his chief of staff a former lawmaker who, as a student, went to North Korea to meet the state’s founder, Kim Il Sung.

The sunshine policy was started in 1998 by Kim Dae-jung, a former pro-democracy activist who became South Korea’s first liberal president.

The policy got its name from an Aesop fable in which the wind and the sun compete to make a traveler take off his coat. The sun gently warms the traveler and succeeds, the moral of the fable being that gentle persuasion works better than force.

Kim Dae-jung engaged Pyong-

yang by laying the groundwork for a tourism project at a mountain on the North Korean side of the border that South Koreans were allowed to visit. After his summit with Kim Jong Il, families who were separated when the peninsula was divided were allowed to meet for reunions. Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his efforts.

His successor, Roh Moo-hyun, continued the policy, opening a joint industrial park near the inter-Korean border where North Koreans would work in South Korean-owned factories, helping both sides. Roh went to Pyongyang for his own summit with Kim Jong Il near the end of his tenure in 2007.

Moon, who had started a law firm with Roh, served as his chief of staff in the presidential Blue House and was involved in North

South Korean President Moon Jaein waves from a car after his inauguration ceremony Wednesday in Seoul.

Moon said he was open to visiting rival North Korea under the right conditions to talk about Pyongyang’s nuclear tests and missile launches.

Korea policy during this time.

But the two conservative presidents who succeeded Kim and Roh abandoned the sunshine policy, instead promoting direct and multilateral sanctions to punish North Korea for its nuclear ambitions.

After North Korea’s fourth nuclear test last year, Park closed the joint industrial park, declaring that the money was going directly to the North Korean regime. In the 12 years that the complex was in operation, North Korea had made a total of about $560 million from the site, her government said.

During his campaign, Moon said he would seek to reopen the industrial park and tourism projects, and would be willing to meet Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang if necessary.

But reviving inter-Korean cooperation will be difficult, analysts say.

For starters, the world is a very different place now than it was in 1997.

Then, North Korea did not have a proven nuclear weapons program. Now, it has conducted five nuclear tests, and Kim Jong Un seems determined to develop missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads to the United States.

Plus, North Korean attacks on South Korea — including the sinking of the Cheonan naval corvette in 2010 and the shelling of a South Korean island, which together killed 50 people — have sapped South Korean goodwill toward the North.

Increasingly strict sanctions have been imposed through the United Nations in response to North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile launches, and both the United States and South Korea have imposed direct prohibitions on dealing with North Korea.

Even raising the specter of a sunshine-policy approach will complicate the international community’s efforts to make North Korea give up its nuclear program, said David Straub, a former State Department official who worked on North Korea. n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

O ut f ro m b eh ind the 8 Ba ll

BY LOVEDAY MORRIS in Mosul, Iraq

I

nside the Captain pool hall in eastern Mosul there are few signs that a war still rages in this city or that earlier this year the Islamic State was in control here.

A gathering place for pool and snooker lovers since the 1990s, the smoke-filled room tiled with grimy beige marble exudes a faded charm, one mirrored in its customers, now back at the tables after being deprived of their favorite pastime for more than two years.

Shortly after the Islamic State took control of Mosul in the summer of 2014, hitting brightly colored balls with a well-chalked cue was among the many activities the group ruled un-Islamic and a distraction from jihad, and it ordered the halls to be shut down.

With the militants now expelled from the city’s east, Captain is one of more than a dozen pool halls that have reopened as residents try to bring back a sense of Mohammed Fathi normalcy to their lives. and other locals New clubs have also play pool at opened up, betting that Captain in Mosul, residents will indulge Iraq, where in some of the pleabilliards clubs sures that were banned have reopened by the militants. after militants “We don’t seek winleft the city’s ning, we seek joy,” said eastern side. the owner, Faris al-Abdali, an international snooker referee, as he finished up a game. “The wheel of life is turning again, but it’s slow.”

No one flinches at the sounds of distant explosions that occasionally ring out above the music, also banned in the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, along with the cigarettes and water pipes that fuel the clientele.

Mosul is divided, with Iraqi forces still fighting a grueling battle against the Islamic State on the other side of the Tigris River, which cuts through the heart of one of Iraq’s largest cities. After a seven-month war, the militants are besieged in the few districts they still control, along with hundreds of thousands continues on next page

ALEX POTTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

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COVER STORY

“T he w h eel of li fe is tur ning a ga in, b u t i t ’ s sl o w . ” Far is a l -A bd a l i, ow ne r o f a po o l h al l from previous page

of residents trapped alongside them, short on food and living under daily bombardment.

But since the city’s eastern side was fully recaptured earlier this year, life has gradually returned. Students are back in school and attempting to catch up on years of missed education. Shops have reopened, with mannequins in newly replaced store windows showing off colorful clothing that was banned under the militants.

Still, mortars fired from the other side of the river shake the fragile peace, along with occasional car bombs, while new waves of families from the west arrive every day to seek refuge.

The traumatized population knows the militants are not far away.

Abdali was apprehensive when he reopened his doors two months ago. He posted a lookout on the street to keep an eye out for suspicious

activities. He worries that his club could be a target for a bomb attack.

“I was very nervous. We still don’t have full trust in the army,” he said, recalling how government soldiers deserted the city en masse in the face of the Islamic State’s attack nearly three years ago.

Abdali had just returned from refereeing an international snooker tournament in the United Arab Emirates when the militants took control. He said he argued with them when they turned up at his business and told him to shut down. A week later they arrested him. He spent 37 days in an Islamic State jail, all but two in pitch-dark solitary confinement.

“I’m still suffering from that psychologically,” he said.

Abdali, 56, learned to play snooker in the 1970s — Korean construction workers who worked with his father had a table and taught

Iraqi federal police offiers take a break at Captain, one smoking a water pipe and both checking their cellphones. Life is beginning to return to normal in eastern Mosul.

him.

Pool and snooker took off in Mosul in the 1980s, Abdali said, becoming popular among students in the university city. There were more than 400 pool halls in the city before the Islamic State’s rule, he added.

Abdali opened Captain in 1997, after running another of the city’s popular pool halls. A wooden ship’s wheel hangs on one wall, in line with its nautical theme, and tarnished brass trophies are displayed on a shelf on another.

He fondly recalls when national tournaments were held at the club and he had a large staff who wore formal uniforms.

The city’s pool hall owners began to struggle long before the Islamic State took control. The group and its predecessor, al-Qaeda, demanded extortion money as they tightened their grip. Since 2005, Abdali had paid $200 a month in protection money to keep Captain

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COVER STORY

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PHOTOS BY ALEX POTTER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

B oy s w h o g at h er e d to p lay p o ol swa pp e d st o r ie s of t h e ir e x p loi ts und e r t h e m il it a n t s. open.

“We had no choice,” he said. “If you didn’t, they’d put a bomb outside.”

Complaints to the corruption-riddled Iraqi authorities were pointless, he said. Now, for the first time in decades, he can operate without paying bribes to the extremists. He hopes that it will last and that life will fully return.

For the moment, people still worry about coming out at night, and a curfew in the area means customers can stay only until 8 p.m. On the other side of the street is the campus of the University of Mosul, once one of the most respected educational institutions in the region, its ruins now a reminder of the mammoth task of rebuilding the city.

The Iraqi government stopped paying public workers in Mosul in 2015 to cut off funding to the Islamic State, leaving many residents

without an income for two years. Salaries have not been restarted, although some workers, such as teachers, have returned to their jobs in the city’s east.

Without income, many residents are scraping together money for food and can’t afford extras like pool and snooker, Abdali said. Still, some of his regulars are back.

Salim Younes, a wiry former Iraqi air force pilot, comes most days. Dressed in a bright white tracksuit with purple, blue and neon green flashes, his favorite game is the pool variant “three ball,” which is met with some bemusement by the younger customers — one of whom dismissed it as a “ ’70s game.”

Younes said life has been on “standby” until now. “Step by step we will get there.”

Boys who gathered to play pool swapped stories of their exploits under the militants.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old who serves

Cars sit outside Captain. People still worry about coming out at night in Mosul, and a curfew in the area means customers can stay only until 8 p.m.

drinks, secretly sold cigarettes, and he spent time in Islamic State prisons after being caught. The last packet he sold was for 32,000 dinars, about $25. A packet now sells for just 500 dinars.

Mohammed Fathi, a 37-year-old gym teacher, shows videos of children at the soccer club he ran under the militants.

“I was doing this so they’d go in another direction, away from Islamic State,” he said.

Many still have relatives trapped in Islamic State areas on the other side of the river. There, the fight has been more ferocious, with entire neighborhoods flattened, making rebuilding more of a challenge.

“The joy has returned, but it’s not complete yet,” Fathi added. “Not until the western side is finished. As for the future, we don’t know what will happen.” © The Washington Post

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SPORTS

Fewer cities want in on these Games BY

R ICK M AESE

A

s the International Olympic Committee embarked this past week on tours of the two cities competing to host the 2024 Olympics, there’s growing sentiment that a consolation prize will be looming. To the victor: the 2024 Summer Games.

And to the runner-up: Wait four years and host the 2028 Olympics.

While the arrangement could be viewed as a testament to the strength of the bids put forth by Los Angeles and Paris, it also reveals a stark reality about hosting an Olympics in the 21st century: Costs are exorbitant, economic benefits are dubious, and fewer and fewer cities bother even throwing their hats in the ring.

Chris Dempsey knows this better than most. He helped create a blueprint of sorts that in relatively short order has invited scrutiny of the process, helping galvanize skeptical populations, prompting cities across the world to pull out of consideration, and forcing the IOC to acknowledge flaws.

Just 31/2 years ago, Dempsey was debating with buddies whether Boston should pursue the 2024 Games and whether it would actually benefit the city. The Olympics’ recent track record isn’t great: cost overruns, empty stadiums left behind, corruption scandals.

Dempsey helped lead the grassroots movement No Boston Olympics that prompted the city to pull out of the bidding process for the 2024 Games. He then consulted with similar activists in Hamburg, Rome and Budapest, and those cities also eventually bailed. So pointed are his arguments that he’s also contributed to opposition research. Organizers in Calgary, Alberta — which hosted the Games in 1988 — considering a bid on the 2026 Winter Games brought him in to hear the concerns and make sure they grasp the opposing viewpoints.

“I truly believe the experience in Boston is and should be instructive for people on both sides of the Olympic debate,” said Dempsey, who this month released the book “No Boston Olympics: How and

CHARLES KRUPA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Olympics are close to selecting a 2024 host, but it hasn’t been much of a competition Why Smart Cities Are Passing on the Torch.”

While civic and business leaders prepared Boston’s bid, Dempsey and a couple of friends began studying recent Olympic history and the actual impact left behind for host cities. When the U.S. Olympic Committee decided in January 2015 to put forth Boston as the U.S. candidate best suited to host the 2024 Games, Dempsey said his living-room protest ramped up significantly.

Dempsey became one of the frontmen for the growing opposition, using the platform to highlight his basic thesis about the Olympics: It’s surely lucrative for the IOC but can be disastrous for host cities. While bid organizers tend to paint optimistic projections, No Boston Olympics felt it publicized more realistic and likely outcomes. When Boston ultimately pulled its bid in July 2015 — the USOC selected Los Angeles as a replacement — Dempsey thought his work was done.

Then his phone started ringing.

Groups from Hamburg, Rome and Budapest, cities also pursuing the

2024 Games, all had some variation of the same question: How’d you do it?

“I wanted to be helpful in explaining how the IOC process is set up that tends to lead to these really negative outcomes for the host cities,” Dempsey said. “Even though the IOC and its sponsors do great and the TV contracts are profitable, it’s still the case where these host cities have bad outcomes.”

Dempsey began spreading the Boston blueprint. Share the facts.

Take advantage of the Internet and social media. Garner media attention. He talked about logos and signs and messaging.

“It was a super-encouraging thing to learn that a small but well-prepared team could pull it off, without having hundreds of thousands of dollars, or a political party behind them,” said Tamás Csillag, one of the Budapest organizers.

The Hungarian opponents collected more than 250,000 signatures and forced a referendum on the issue. Local government leaders were so nervous that they de-

Boston residents hold up placards against the Olympic Games coming to their city in 2024 during a July 2015 public forum. Boston later withdrew from consideration as host city.

cided to cancel the bid entirely in February, leaving only Paris and Los Angeles in the 2024 race. The IOC will vote to determine the 2024 host in September.

While Dempsey and the Boston activists might have created a template for dissent, the LA2024 committee hopes its bid offers a blueprint for other cities moving forward. Its plan calls for no structures that will be built specifically for the Olympics and a $5.3 billion budget that would be significantly lower than the price tags attached to recent Olympic Games. And perhaps key, it has widespread public support.

“Just at every touch point, the community of Los Angeles in the largest possible sense is entirely supportive and embraces the idea of hosting an Olympic Games in 2024,” said Casey Wasserman, the LA 2024 chairman. “We are an oasis of optimism.”

Wasserman said the legacy of the successful 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles has buoyed enthusiasm around the region to play host once again. An independent poll found that 88 percent of Los Angeles residents support the bid.

While that very well might help Los Angeles secure the 2024 Games — or perhaps the 2028 Olympics — it’s not yet clear whether the lasting impact of this process will be on the bids that cities submit or the opposition that organizes around them.

The IOC’s evaluation committee’s decision could send a lasting message about what a successful bid should look like. Even as the IOC acknowledges the current bidding process might have problems, not everyone is optimistic that the paucity of bidding cities will prompt the organization to make any meaningful changes.

“I don’t see an incentive structure for the IOC to be any different tomorrow or five years from now or 10 years from now than it is today,” Dempsey said. “As long as they have at least one bid, the Games will go on, they’ll still be profitable and still have these lavish events.” n ©The Washington Post

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LIFESTYLE Life Male or female: Buy a good basic cookbook, one that has all the weights and measures, substitutes, and a lot of tips. Don’t be afraid to try something new.

Cooking can be a hobby, an art or just a basic skill.

— Vennie Anderson, 71, Crestview, Fla.

Get involved with a political campaign, a special interest coalition, something bigger than yourself while you’re starting out and have the energy. You’ll make a difference in the world, open opportunities and meet people who will matter to you down the line.

— Gary Goldberg, 28, Chesapeake Beach, Md.

Don’t feel that you have to follow the status quo and the 40-year retirement plan. Maybe instead of a spouse, a house, two cars and a stable career you would rather live all over the world doing different jobs, having many lovers, amazing experiences and unregulated happiness.

— Latasha Taylor, 41, Bowie, Md.

Have many “experienced” adults to go to when you don’t know what to do. Ask questions when it’s overwhelming or you’re unsure of what to do, or anytime.

You may be an adult, but you don’t know everything. And you shouldn’t expect you’ll know everything.

— Sheila Robinson, 48, Paducah, Ky.

I wish someone told me that I didn’t have to have it all figured out right after I graduated. It’s okay to make mistakes.

— Tabia Robinson, 22, New York

Travel Travel for at least a month (on a budget) before you take your first big job.

— Todd Cameron, 48, Long Beach, Calif.

Take some time off, because you’ll never be more free than you are once you graduate. You might be excited to start your job and start making money (as I was), but you’ll never have more than a couple weeks to dedicate to travel once you start working. Take off for six months or a year and go live in a foreign country.

MARTINA PAUKOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

What is one thing you wish you knew before graduating from college?

I

n the coming weeks, many graduates will experience true independ­ ence for the first time — new jobs, new apartments, maybe even preparing for loan payments. Readers from all over the country and abroad have shared some helpful tips for grads — and any adult, for that matter — with some similar themes. Here are several responses we’ve received, edited for space and clarity.

— Andrea Mobley, 24, Sterling, Va.

Career I heard about the importance of networking in college but didn’t feel comfortable doing it much myself. I’ve learned that you have to get over that fear and get out of your comfort zone.

Make connections at companies you love, even if they don’t have openings at the moment. You never know how they can help get your dream job down the line.

— Dana Stewart, 30, New Jersey

I wish I had known that being good at your job isn’t always enough to get noticed and build a successful career. You are your own best professional advocate, and you must build a professional

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after graduation, and certainly before the age of 25. Almost all were divorced before 30 (or shortly after). They were marrying before they understood the real world, or the challenges of life, or thought that marriage was a panacea as opposed to a journey with a committed partner. I married closer to 30 after experiencing several failed relationships. My wife and I have been married more than 30 years with two grown children. A little maturity and experience in life can realistically shape your goals and life expectations, and enable you to choose your mate with a sober mind.

— Stanley Cousins, 61, Laurel, Md.

Never marry someone unless you live with them first — trust me.

— Diana Wilson, 57, Aptos, Calif.

Don’t live with a boyfriend, marry him. Otherwise, you’ll regret it when you retire and realize you are not eligible for Social Security spousal benefits because you weren’t married for 10 years.

— Patricia Montgomery, 67, New Mexico

Money Live like a poor college student and work a second (or third if you can) job for another three or four years. You are already used to being this busy; keep the momentum going. Having a safety net that can also serve as a rainy-day fund will pay off heavily for a down payment, a nicer car or a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to travel.

network that you can take with you from job to job.

— Johana Rosa, 32, McLean, Va.

— Caroline Samson, 29, Alexandria, Va.

The miracle of compound interest is such that the earlier you start, the better the payoff. It took me 12 years after graduation to start putting money away for retirement, and now I wish I had started sooner. You can start small, but you should start early.

And if you start young, you can be more aggressive with your investments.

Many people will tell you to “do what you love,” but don’t misinterpret that to mean that you should turn your passions into a career. The things I love didn’t pay me enough to live on, and I was less passionate about them once they became my job. Instead, focus on finding a career that gives you the time and money to do the things you love as hobbies.

— Melinda Snow, 32, Alexandria

Relationships Don’t be so quick or in a rush to get married. Most of my college friends were getting married soon

— Judith Schutz, 58, Toronto

Start saving the maximum for retirement with your second paycheck, and keep it up no matter what (buying a house, having kids). n — Bill Hensley, 56, Oklahoma City ©The Washington Post

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BOOKS

Lessons on presidential campaigning N ONFICTION

l

REVIEWED BY

D AVID P LOUFFE

I THE ROAD TO CAMELOT Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign

By Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie Simon & Schuster.

433 pp. $28

n 1960, John F. Kennedy captured the White House by brilliantly executing a bold, outsider’s strategy. Ever since his razor-thin victory, Democratic operatives — and more than a few Republican ones — have studied his tactics in detail, turning his campaign into a nearly sacred text.

As a former presidential campaign manager, I thought I knew everything about the Kennedy magic on the campaign trail. But to my great surprise, Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilkie’s new book, “The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign,” brings much new insight to an important playbook that has echoed through the campaigns of presidential aspirants as disparate as Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

The authors take us step by step on the road to the Kennedy victory, leaving us with an appreciation for the maniacal attention to detail of both the candidate and his brother Robert, the best campaign manager in American political history.

The Kennedy presidential campaign kicked off unofficially years in advance, with a focus on defying traditional party politics, building a strong grass-roots organization and bringing new voters into the process. As Kennedy once told his speechwriter Ted Sorensen: “In every campaign I’ve ever been in, they’ve said I was starting too early — that I would peak too soon or get too much exposure or run out of gas or be too easy a target. I would never have won any race following that advice.”

In the years leading up to 1960, the Kennedy operation retained the names of everyone who came into its orbit. Working outside established party channels, it set up local Kennedy “clubs” in all key states for the primaries and the general election. A half-century later, this model was reflected in Obama’s creation of a community organization from the bottom up.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Candidate John F. Kennedy meets New Jersey voters in September 1960.

Through his grass-roots operation, Kennedy was able to collect delegates without bowing to the party’s power structure. As Oliphant and Wilkie put it, Kennedy “harvested delegates . . . by making person-to-person connections rather than pandering to party bosses.”

Kennedy’s approach to speaking out against the party establishment served as a kind of precursor to the outsider campaigns of Obama and Trump. Both candidates had to battle the efforts of entrenched party stalwarts to bolster the prospects of insider rivals.

At key moments, the Obama and Trump teams warned party bosses that any shenanigans that subverted the will of the people as expressed in the results of primaries and caucuses posed longterm consequences.

Kennedy’s chief presidential rival, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, was happy to play the insider’s role during the campaign, ceding the insurgency to Kennedy. In Oliphant and Wilkie’s telling, Larry O’Brien, a Kennedy

political strategist, was amazed that the senator from Massachusetts was left unchallenged at the grass-roots level. “Kennedy was able to work unopposed toward the nomination for months, at least as far as grass-roots American politics was concerned,” O’Brien said. “The Washington columnists kept writing about what a political genius Lyndon Johnson was, and we kept locking up delegates.”

While uncertain of victory, the Kennedy team was sure of the strategy and principles it had laid out to guide its outsider quest. Any long-shot campaign must have a theory behind its case for victory and must make every decision through that prism. The campaign also must stick to its theory, no matter how improbable it seems and how much ridicule it encounters from the political establishment. That lesson was absorbed by both Obama and Trump. Obama’s gambit to base his primary strategy in large part on turnout among young voters and to contest states such as Indiana, North

Carolina and Virginia in the general election met with great skepticism and even ridicule. Likewise, Trump’s goal of breaking the great Midwestern blue wall was given next to no chance of succeeding.

Whether his campaign firmly believed it could accomplish that objective, Trump operatives chased it relentlessly, knowing that it was his one, narrow path to victory.

Oliphant and Wilkie are strongest in shining a new and relevant light on the lead-up to the 1960 campaign and on the primary process. The general election, pitting Kennedy against Richard Nixon, has been covered much more intensively and in great detail over the years, so readers familiar with that epic battle will relive it in these pages rather than learn much new. n Plouffe was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, White House senior adviser and is now president of policy and advocacy at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

An old tale infused with new life, fury

How Letterman changed late night

F ICTION l REVIEWED

N ONFICTION

T

BY

R ON C HARLES

he descendants of Zeus were the world’s first tabloid stars. If you can believe the lying media of ancient Greece, things went to Hades pretty soon after Tantalus murdered his own son and fed him to the gods. That special recipe was eventually passed down to a grandson — so much for the benefits of eating dinner with family.

These glamorous people endured rape, murder, incest, cannibalism and more.

All this mischief seems like a lot of excitement for Colm Tóibín, an Irish writer whose novels have largely tilted toward the other side of the thrill meter. A gorgeous stylist, Tóibín captures the subtle flutterings of consciousness better than any writer alive.

But he spoke in a different register in “The Testament of Mary,” a monologue that earned three Tony Award nominations on Broadway and later, when released as a novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. Here, the elderly mother of Jesus is simmering with rage over the fate of her son. Cross that woman with Greek mythology, and you get something like Clytemnestra, the furious matriarch who dominates Tóibín’s new novel, “House of Names.”

This isn’t just a captivating retelling; it’s a creative reanimation of these indelible characters who are still breathing down our necks across the millennia. And far from feeling constrained by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, Tóibín ventures into the lacunae of the old legends and pumps blood even into the silent figures of Greek tragedy.

He endows Clytemnestra with a hybrid voice that sounds both strangely modern and ancient. “I have been acquainted with the smell of death,” she says in the opening line, and you too will know that “sickly, sugary smell” by the end of this extraordinary story of carnage. “Murder makes us ravenous,” she goes on, “fills the soul with satisfaction that is fierce and

then luscious enough to create a taste for further satisfaction.”

She delivers these lines while smiling over a pair of her victims left rotting in the sun, then immediately recalls the crime that provoked her wrath.

We already know the general outline of her grievance, but her seething recitation feels fated and suspenseful: With his ships stalled in the harbor, Clytemnestra’s husband, Agamemnon, sacrificed their daughter to the gods to make the winds blow again. When he returned home victorious, she wreaked her revenge.

The novel’s action picks up here when Clytemnestra is teetering atop a precarious kingdom. With Agamemnon dead, she must contend with rebellious subjects, a conniving new lover and her surviving children, Orestes and Electra.

Despite the passage of centuries, this is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on her gender. She orders murders and feigns weakness. Her power must always be exercised clandestinely. Orestes comes to despise his mother’s “chirping voice, the jokey inconsequentiality of her tone.” But he also understands her strategic personality. “She had learned to sound stupid,” he says. “Beneath all her simpering and insinuation, there was fury, there was steel.”

Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range, not just in tone but in action. He creates the arresting, hushed scenes for which he’s so well known just as effectively as he whips up murders that compete, pint for spilled pint, with those immortal Greek playwrights. Tóibín’s reverence for the ancient texts is perfectly married to his modern sensibility — a union even Clytemnestra could celebrate. n Charles is the editor of The Washington Post’s Book World.

F HOUSE OF NAMES

By Colm Tóibín Scribner. 275 pp. $26

LETTERMAN The Last Giant of Late Night

By Jason Zinoman Harper. 344 pp. $28.99

l

REVIEWED BY

D AN Z AK

or me, it was the dialing music. “Paul, can we have some dialing music?” David Letterman would ask, and his band leader would twinkle a melody on the keyboard as the host plopped a rotary phone on his desk and began calling whomever: CBS chief Les Moonves; an office drone named Meg in a building across the street; his mom, Dorothy, in her kitchen in Indiana. The dialing music was the Letterman ethos in a single moment: a shiny shellac of needless formality over the absurdity that defined his latenight comedy show.

On television, Letterman was both genial and depraved. There was also something remote and unknowable about Letterman. He was a nimble entertainer and a world-class grump, a complete stranger with one of America’s most recognizable faces.

Jason Zinoman, in his definitive and enjoyable biography “Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night,” demystifies the host. A comedy columnist for the New York Times, Zinoman walks the line between reportage and criticism, and shifts between historian, clinician and fanboy without grinding the clutch too much. His studious research is spiced by an enduring appreciation of Letterman’s work and salted by the cataloguing of the host’s less-savory traits and behavior: hypochondria, philandering, depression, mean-spiritedness, the occasional bout of creepiness and a terminal case of insecurity.

So what makes Letterman “the last giant,” as opposed to his eternal rival Jay Leno, who beat him to the “Tonight Show” desk? There are two answers. The first is that Letterman is simply funnier. The second answer is formal in nature.

The book maps, move by move, how Letterman’s 33-year run reinvented late-night television.

“He created a new comic vocabulary that expanded our cultural sense of humor,” Zinoman writes, “and made a persuasive case for

the daily talk show as an ambitious art form.”

The distinction between art and entertainment is embodied by Merrill Markoe, who is the oftforgotten mother of Letterman’s career. Markoe, a writer, met Letterman in 1978 at the Comedy Store, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and became a profound comic influence (and, for years, his girlfriend). She adored formal experimentation and was less keen on satire than on writing and producing comedy that baffled, disoriented and colored outside the lines. The couple created “The David Letterman Show,” a live morning program on NBC that lasted four months but established the foundation for their late-night run.

Markoe was responsible for segments like “Viewer Mail,” “Small Town News” and “Stupid Pet Tricks.” She pushed the host to do remotes, which sent Letterman out of the studio and into unpredictable public situations.

Like an anthropologist, Zinoman plots Letterman on a continuum, describing — without sounding like an encyclopedist — how “Tonight Show” hosts Jack Paar and Steve Allen set the stage for him; how Letterman first thrived as the dark, ironic counterpoint to Reagan’s “morning in America”; and how this, in turn, prepared the world for the incisive comedy of “The Simpsons,” Garry Shandling, “Seinfeld,” Tina Fey — and for any art or artist that thrives on the inane and the self-referential.

Zinoman’s great achievement is rendering Letterman as utterly human, even subhuman at times, and charting his show as an irregular comic pilgrimage — if not toward comic excellence than at least toward comic insolence. The “last” in the subtitle rings truest: Letterman and company were pioneers, and new territory only gets discovered once. n Zak is an author and a reporter for The Washington Post.

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

Comey debacle only magnifies Russia mystery DAVID IGNATIUS writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to The Post’s PostPartisan blog.

President Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James B. Comey will intensify focus on the issue Trump has been so eager to dismiss — his knowledge of contacts between Michael Flynn and other associates and Russia.

White House arguments that Trump sacked Comey for mishandling the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails are implausible, but no more so than some of the arguments the Trump team has made about Flynn’s firing in February. Sources say the White House has been talking about firing Comey since before the inauguration; why they pulled the trigger now is unclear, but FBI agents, including those who dislike Comey, were said to be dazed and upset Tuesday night.

The Comey putsch heightens the mystery at the center of the Flynn case: Why didn’t Trump react sooner to warnings about Flynn’s involvement with Russia?

Why didn’t Trump listen to President Barack Obama’s caution against hiring him? Why did Trump wait 18 days before removing his national security adviser after urgent advice that Flynn could be “blackmailed”?

After Comey’s dismissal, critics are likely to examine more sharp-edged theories of the Flynn case and other Russia matters. One obvious possibility is that Trump didn’t take action earlier because he already knew about Flynn’s Dec. 29 discussion with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions, and knew that Flynn had misrepresented the Kislyak call to Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

Flynn’s discussion with the Russian ambassador at such a sensitive time, when the United States was punishing Russia for hacking the 2016 election, was arguably a violation of the Logan Act, which bars private meddling during a confrontation with another country. It was “problematic” behavior, as

former acting attorney general Sally Yates said in her riveting testimony Monday.

But the Kislyak call wasn’t a hanging offense, and it probably wasn’t even a prosecutable one.

Trump could have said back on Dec. 29 that Flynn had talked with Kislyak in hopes of averting Russian reprisals for U.S. sanctions announced that day.

Trump certainly wasn’t shy about crediting President Vladimir Putin on Dec. 30 for his “great move” in not retaliating. Is it really plausible that Trump hadn’t talked to Flynn before posting that tweet?

Trump has been digging a hole for himself from the beginning on Russia-related issues. It’s an odd pattern of behavior. Trump may have done nothing improper involving Russia, but why does he act so defensive?

In a book called “Spy the Lie,” a group of former intelligence officers explain the behavioral and linguistic cues that indicate when someone is being deceptive. Interestingly, many of these are evident in Trump’s responses to questions about Russia’s covert involvement in U.S. politics.

The authors’ list of tipoffs

ERIC THAYER/GETTY IMAGES

FBI Director James B. Comey testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee during an oversight hearing May 3. He was fired Tuesday.

includes “going into attack mode,” “inappropriate questions,” “inconsistent statements,” “selective memory” and the use of “qualifiers,” such as “frankly,” “honestly” and “truthfully.” The authors’ point is that people who are innocent answer questions simply and directly.

Comey’s firing takes the country closer to the dangerous collision that has been looming since allegations began about possible connections between Trump and his associates and the Russian covert influence operation Comey has been investigating since July.

Trump will now appoint a new FBI director whose mission will include investigating Trump himself. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, having recused himself from the Russia investigation, will now face criticism that he reneged on his promise by recommending the firing of the person leading the probe.

The most delicate role in this dark tale is the one played by Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. He has been widely

praised as a solid prosecutor. But his long, rambling letter supporting Comey’s removal was closer to a civics essay than a lawyerly statement. It cited a grab bag of op-eds and public statements to scold Comey.

For a newcomer to a top role at the Justice Department, Rosenstein was strangely insistent: “The FBI is unlikely to regain public and congressional trust until it has a Director who understands the gravity of the mistakes and pledges never to repeat them. Having refused to admit his errors, [Comey] cannot be expected to implement the necessary corrective actions.”

Will the next FBI director truly be free to pursue the investigation that Comey began?

Will a bureau already riven by political divisions and backbiting truly regain confidence and public trust? Can the Justice Department oversee the Russia matter? Congressional pressure is building for an independent counsel — which is the most sensible way to restore a measure of public confidence after this debacle. n

SUNDAY, MAY 14, 2017

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Trump is right on lumber imports JIMMY CARTER was the 39th president of the United States. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

I agree with the recent decision of the White House and the Commerce Department to impose anti-subsidy duties against Canada’s unfairly traded softwood lumber imports. This belated enforcement of U.S. trade laws will help millions of private timberland owners, American forestry workers and members of their local communities by leveling the playing field in the timber industry.

Timber sales are a major source of income for my own family, and we have suffered financially for many years from an unfair advantage enjoyed by our major competitor in this vital market.

With moderate adjustments in management, there is enough timberland in the United States to supply the total American market with lumber. Without adjusting any U.S. timber policies, and if we are able to compete on a level playing field against Canada, our production of lumber could satisfy more than 84 percent of total U.S. demand, according to Western Woods Products Association data. This would leave the remaining 16 percent to be supplied by imports, but now about 32 percent of our lumber is being imported from Canada.

Canada enjoys an inherent

advantage in that the vast majority of its standing timber is owned by provincial governments, which are free to dump their timber at practically no cost in order to stimulate their forest industry. At the same time, most of America’s timber is privately owned, and market forces impose a minimum price at which farm owners can continue in business.

There has been a long-lasting dispute about importing Canadian softwood, which has gone through an increasingly crucial phase during the past 35 years. About 70 percent of Canada’s softwood lumber exports came to the United States in 2015. One indication of the recent changes in market forces is that the number of Canadian-owned sawmills in our country has exploded to more

than 40 in the past decade — partially because of lower labor costs in the United States.

The latest Softwood Lumber Agreement expired on Oct. 12, 2015, and Canadian producers now have almost unrestricted access to the U.S. softwood lumber market. Last month, the Trump administration announced plans to impose average duties of 20 percent on most Canadian lumber, charging that these lumber companies are subsidized by the government.

To remain in effect, however, the duties need to be finalized by our Commerce Department and then confirmed by the U.S. International Trade Commission after an investigation that includes testimony from both sides. This enforcement of U.S. trade laws is consistent with our international commitments.

The members of my family own about 1,800 acres of timberland, and the softwood (pine) tracts are mostly planted as seedlings (from 550 to 900 per acre) that even in our warm climate need to grow for at least 25 years before becoming large enough to sell for lumber. Unless in urgent need of cash income, we usually wait at least 10 additional years before harvesting and replanting. After this 35-year period, we sell our

softwood timber — usually less than 100 acres a year — in a competitive and open process to Canadian sawmills to make lumber.

With logs selling at the present price of $25 per ton, we can expect to realize a net income of about $875 per acre, or just $25 a year over 35 years, plus some secondary income for pulp wood and other products.

Largely because of Canada’s unfair trade, the prices we receive today are the same as when I was in office over 35 years ago, although expenses from planting seedlings, thinning, removing unmarketable trees, periodic controlled burning and timber severance taxes are much greater.

While there are many benefits to harmonious bilateral relationship between the United States and Canada, our neighbor to the north must still play by the rules and stop engaging in its unfair trade practices. We must either enforce U.S. trade laws with tariffs or insist on an effective and lasting bilateral softwood trade agreement that allows our industry to survive, provide jobs for workers and sustain vibrant forestry communities across our country. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY OHMAN FOR THE SACRAMENTO BEE

Now comes challenge for Macron E.J. DIONNE JR writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on The Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog.

The voters of France acted responsibly and decently last Sunday.

But they also sent a warning.

France’s new president-elect is Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old centrist whose 2-to-1 victory over the National Front’s Marine Le Pen offered yet another sign that the rise of President Trump is not the harbinger of a new and unhinged form of nationalism. For now, the center is holding, pluralism is hanging on, and the far right is being held in check. As they had in recent elections in Austria and the Netherlands, the friends of liberal democracy prevailed while Trump, who publicly tilted toward Le Pen, suffered another rebuke.

The fact that hackers went after Macron’s campaign and dumped emails publicly just before the vote underscored the election’s international stakes. Russia strongly favored Le Pen and subsidized her party while ultraright groups across the West saw a Le Pen victory as a chance to break up an alliance system that includes the European Union and NATO. The latest cyberattack increases the urgency of understanding Russia’s role in the 2016 election in the United States.

Macron ran as a confident and unflinching advocate of pluralism and openness, and he will become, instantly, a major global voice for those values. But he will have to govern a deeply torn nation in a surly mood. Le Pen’s share of the vote, while not

as high as her supporters had hoped and her detractors had feared, was still a major breakthrough for what had once been a pariah party long dismissed as a neofascist movement rooted in unsavory aspects of French history. Like Trump, Le Pen rallied voters in once prosperous but now ailing industrial towns. Macron swept France’s prospering and cosmopolitan big cities.

The creator of a political party that is only a year old, Macron faces significant challenges reflected in an unusually large number of blank protest ballots.

He will have to take on or work around the country’s established parties in June’s legislative elections. He will also have to

BY DANZIGER FOR THE RUTLAND HERALD

square the many circles of his neither-left-nor-right campaign platform. He promised both a more flexible regulatory climate for business and solid social protections for a 21st-century economy. Macron is both a former investment banker and a moderate social democrat.

Demonstrating how these two sides of him fit together will define his presidency.

One test will be whether he is willing and able to nudge Germany toward a less austere and constraining economic approach to southern Europe.

Macron was endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and their similarities are striking: youth, a hopeful attitude toward the future, a vaguely progressive spirit of moderation and a welladvertised desire to overcome traditional divides.

Less remarked upon is their shared political luck. When Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004 — the job that, along with his Democratic National Convention speech that year, propelled him to the national stage — two of his strongest rivals were forced out of the running by sex and marital scandals.

Macron would probably not even have made it to Sunday’s

runoff but for the troubles of two key competitors: François Fillon, the candidate of the mainstream right, was caught in a scandal involving paid no-show jobs for his family. The more moderate Socialist alternative, former prime minister Manuel Valls, lost his party’s primary, opening new room in the political center.

But it took more than luck for the new French president to accomplish something most students of French politics thought impossible: From scratch, he built his own political party of the center, Republic on the Move (formerly En Marche, or Onward).

Macron grasped that the old left/right divide is an increasingly imperfect construct for the new fissures in a Western politics organized around openness, pluralism and a transnational approach on the one side, and nationalism, more closed economies and a rejection of pluralism on the other.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of creating a “Third Way” in politics between an old left and a new right. Under far more trying circumstances, Macron’s victory gives the Third Way a second chance — and liberal democracy a much-needed reprieve. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

The Mafia BY

G EORGE A NASTASIA

The Tribeca Film Festival ended last month with screenings of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II” to celebrate the 45th anni­ versary of the first film. In many ways, the movies have served as training films for second­ and third­generation Italian American gangsters. The movies have also reinforced several myths.

MYTH NO. 1 The Mafia doesn’t deal drugs.

As far back as Lucky Luciano, the mob has been in the drug business. In 1959, Vito Genovese — who gave his name to one of the five New York families — was imprisoned on drug charges, as was his low-level crime family soldier Joe Valachi. Drugs have generated billions of dollars in income for the mob over the decades. The “Pizza Connection,” for instance, was a Sicilian Mafia heroin ring that dominated the trade in New York and other East Coast cities between 1975 and 1984, bringing an estimated $1.6 billion worth of heroin into the United States, according to federal authorities.

FBI documents do indicate that bosses such as Paul Castellano and Vincent “the Chin” Gigante in New York and Angelo Bruno in Philadelphia banned members of their organizations from getting involved in narcotics. But that wasn’t based on a moral opposition to drug dealing.

Rather, it stemmed from the realization by those bosses — who already had more money than they could count — of the tremendous legal jeopardy that came with narcotics as the federal government amped up the war on drugs in the early 1970s.

MYTH NO. 2 Omerta, the code of silence, is a sacred rule.

That code was broken decades ago, when Valachi, the Genovese crime family associate, told a Senate subcommittee in 1963 that the syndicate called itself “Cosa Nostra,” or “Our Thing.” Over the

next 20 years, a half-dozen members became government cooperators. By the late 1980s, omerta was shattered. In city after city, members of the mob began to realize that they could get out from under their criminal problems by cutting deals with federal prosecutors and heading for the witness stand.

In part, this was a result of the Americanization of the Mafia.

Doors that had been closed to Italian immigrants in the 1910s and 1920s because of prejudice and bigotry were kicked open two generations later. Many of those who now make the Mafia a career choice are driven primarily by economics. And when they found themselves under indictment and facing 20 years to life, they made a business decision: How do I cut my losses?

MYTH NO. 3 The Mafia’s initiation rite is a secret ceremony.

In 2011, mob boss Joseph Massino joined an ever-growing list of “men of honor” who have openly discussed — usually in courtrooms, but also in books and in television interviews — the secret rite. Today, accurate reenactments can be seen in mob movies, and FBI documents provide detailed accounts of the process. The ceremony usually takes place before a celebratory dinner and is conducted by the boss or the underboss of the crime family. It begins with a formal, almost baptismal-like questioning of the candidate, whose trigger finger is pricked with a pin. The blood is then wiped on a religious card

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

New York police officers escort Mafia hit man Tomasso “the Ox” Petto, second from left, in 1903, after his arrest on murder charges.

depicting a saint. The card is crumpled, cupped in the initiate’s hands and set on fire, while the inductee swears an oath to live and die for the crime family, pledging to “burn like this saint” if he betrays anyone in the organization.

MYTH NO. 4 Anyone who testifies against the Mafia will be killed.

The Witness Security Program means it’s safe to break with the Mafia. Cooperating witnesses and their families have an opportunity to walk away from the life. Run by the U.S. Marshals Service since 1971 and commonly but incorrectly referred to as the Witness Protection Program, the service provides relocation, a new identity and a financial stipend to help a witness get reestablished in another part of the country. The program has set up new lives for more than 8,600 witnesses (not all of them Mafiosi) and 9,900 of their family members.

The stipend doesn’t last forever — it usually ends after about a year. The downside, and one reason some cooperators eventually opt out, is that witnesses and their families can never return to visit with friends and relatives they have left

behind, a hardship that many find too difficult.

MYTH NO. 5 The Mafia never interacts with other organized-crime groups.

Today the American Mafia is no longer the monolithic underworld power that it was in the days of Luciano and Al Capone.

Michael Franzese, a Colombo family capo, described the Russian mobsters he dealt with in the 1980s in a multimilliondollar gasoline tax fraud scheme as “the best partners I ever had.”

Mafia figures in various cities have been linked to the methamphetamine trade with the Pagans motorcycle gang. And leaders of the Lucchese and Colombo crime families dealt on a regular basis with Leroy “Nicky” Barnes, a notorious heroin trafficker out of Harlem.

At the end of the day, the Mafia isn’t about pride, it’s about money — how to get it, how to keep it and how to make more of it. n Anastasia is an author and former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who has written extensively about organized crime and the American Mafia. He wrote this for The Washington Post.

SUNDAY, MAY 14, 2017

24

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