Decodedc

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

Political campaigns are about a lot of things: message, money, organization and of course, more money. But campaigns are also about storytelling. Stories help candidates connect with voters, putting a human face on dry policy debates. Some politicians are born storytellers, while others need some help. That’s where strategists like Burns Strider come in. Strider is a long-time Democratic operative who has worked on more than 100 campaigns, including as the head of faith outreach for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. On the latest DecodeDC podcast, guest host Michelle Cottle chats with Strider about political storytelling, which he sees as the heart and soul of American politics. “A candidate’s job is to share themselves with the American people. And the stories, the narrative has to be real. It has to be honest. It has to be told,” says Strider. Strider’s storytelling craft extends beyond just the candidates. Lately, he’s been helping train a pro-Hillary Clinton army of workers at the grassroots l

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

The Supreme Court’s term has ended with two supreme-sized rulings, one affirming a right to same-sex marriage, the other upholding the Affordable Care Act. Overall, the conventional rap on the term has been that it was a decidedly liberal year for the conservative Roberts court. That’s true but simplistic, according to Stuart Taylor Jr., whom we brought in to decode the court’s most recent pronouncements on this week's podcast. Taylor graduated from Harvard Law School and went on to cover the Supreme Court for the National Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, The American Lawyer and other publications. He's also the co-author of “Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It” and “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud.” Taylor’s take is that the Chief Justice John Roberts’ court is much more aligned with mainstream public opinion than people give it credit for. There are four consi

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

It isn’t often that the president of the United States opens up about America’s history of racism or about how African Americans have suffered because of it - or about how white America must accept responsibility for these wrongs. But that is exactly what happened 50 years ago this month when President Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at Howard University in Washington, D.C. And those who were in the crowd June 4, 1965, say what they heard on still feels relevant today. “I think anyone could give that speech today, and with few exceptions, not recognize that it was something that was related to a 50-year-old occasion,” said Judith Winston, a Howard student at the time who was there. “It’s a speech that in many sad ways has the same resonance today that it had 50 years ago.” Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a voting rights bill that was on its way to getting passed, Johnson told the crowd of mostly African-Americans gathered in the quadrangle that those laws were not enough. “You do n

Host: Dick Meyer I’ve gotten interested in humorlessness. I’ve come to believe that politics has become less funny, more humorless. I think this is certainly true of professional politicians and their henchmen and henchwomen. I think it is true of pundits and talking heads. Most important, I think it is true of regular civilians who like to talk – and argue – about politics over dinner or at a bar. Stridency is up; the capacity to take teasing is down. At least that’s my hunch. There is no national gag-o-meter to measure such things. The absence of laughter and humor is something to worry about. So on this week’s podcast, we paid a visit to Dr. John Morreall, now retired from William & Mary University in Virginia, a scholar of the philosophy of humor and author of several books on the subject. As a consultant, he has helped businesses and leaders learn to use humor as a helpful tool. Morreall is also a very funny guy, but I’m funnier. Morreall agrees that politics has gotten more humorless to the extent it ha

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

Once upon a time in the fairytale land of politics, there was an epic clash of magical beasts. On one side, the sea-unicorn called the narwhal. With a wave of his single tusk, he could muster thousands of volunteers, knock on millions of doors and direct a laser-beam of votes on behalf of Barack Obama. On the other side, the narwhal’s natural enemy, the orca, tasked with unearthing voters across the realm for challenger Mitt Romney. This may sound too fantastical to believe, but it’s actually closer to reality than you think. The presidential race of 2012 did indeed see such a contest, between the President’s Project Narwhal team and Mitt Romney’s Project Orca. But the contest wasn’t waged on Middle Earth, it was waged online, by Silicon Valley hackers wielding the power of…database computing. For many, the showdown between the two digital camps came to symbolize the growing and dominant role technology has come to play in today’s politics. But that story is, well, a fairy tale, according to the man behind Pr

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

In Baltimore it was Freddie Gray. In Ferguson it was Michael Brown. on Staten Island it was Eric Garner. And in many other places, poor black men and boys have died in confrontations with police. On this week’s DecodeDC podcast, we talk with author, journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson, who says the social unrest we’ve seen in some of these places shouldn’t be shocking at all—it’s absolutely predictable. “What we’re seeing right now when we look at Ferguson or we look at Baltimore in this moment, we have to remind ourselves that this is a screenshot at the end of a very long running movie that is still not over,” Wilkerson said. Wilkerson spent 15 years researching and writing her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” The book is among the most important ethnographies of the 20th century experience, which is the story of nearly 6 million African Americans who migrated out of the South. Wilkerson’s book describes the Great Migration and the families who sought live

For the past 20 years, Dr. M Sanjayan has devoted his life to environmental policy and the protection of wildlife. After decades in the environmental movement, Sanjayan has come to realize that you can’t separate humans from the natural environment around them. That’s a pretty radical idea in the environmental movement and a theme that pervades his new PBS series, "Earth: A New Wild." On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook speaks with Sanjayan about his television series, his views on preservation and what Washington can and must do about its environmental policy. “When I started in the environmental movement I thought my whole goal was to take things back to some point in the past. Then, during graduate school I thought my whole plan was to stop the train wreck and leave enough pieces that something could be rebuilt,” Sanjayan tells DecodeDC host Andrea Seabrook. “Now I think my whole purpose is to really remind people that we’re part of nature and start to explain and understand all the ways in which

“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari is a book that has more ideas per rectangular page than anything I have read in years. I was lucky enough to have a long conversation with Harari for this week’s podcast. Harari is a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Sapiens” was published in Hebrew in 2011 and has since been translated into 26 languages. It is a challenging, serious book, and it is a best seller all over the world. I suspect that is because the questions Harari asks are so unlike the traditional ones in history. Harari isn’t so concerned with the rise and fall of civilizations, wars, great figures and discoveries but with how it all affected or changed the well-being of homo sapiens – not the species as a whole, but the daily lives and contentment of us humans. Did the invention of planting actually improve life? What about bridges, gunpowder or antibiotics? These are weird questions for historians and they are what make “Sapiens” such an incredibly fun, almost misc

No matter where you stand on the issue of same-sex marriage, Tuesday's historic oral arguments at the Supreme Court represented the next step in what will be an unprecedented moment to define - or redefine - the institution of marriage. On a special episode of DecodeDC, host Andrea Seabrook examines the most powerful moments from the hearing. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A little thing called marriage is about to have a big day in court. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on state bans against same-sex marriage. This is such a huge case that DecodeDC recently teamed up with the Scripps television station in Cincinnati, WCPO, for a multi-platform event to explore the changing face of marriage. On this week’s DecodeDC podcast, we bring you highlights from that event, from the incredible history of marriage to the dramatic shifts in public opinion about same-sex couples to the legal arguments that are now before the U.S. Supreme Court. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When someone asks what the most important event in Washington is every year, you’d hope that the answer would involve a key piece of civic action or an instance of Americans making their voices heard. In reality, D.C’s biggest event is an altogether different affair - a weeklong extravaganza of lavish parties where journalists rub shoulders with the very people they’re supposed to hold accountable. It all leads up to one night in particular, the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, or as it has come to be known within insider circles — Nerd Prom. As a reporter for Politico, Patrick Gavin used to cover those insiders. Now, after 10 years of covering the dinner and Washington politics he’s made a documentary about the correspondents dinner, “Nerd Prom: Inside Washington’s Wildest Week”. On this week’s podcast, DecodeDC goes inside Nerd Prom with Gavin to figure out what the dinner is really for. Host Andrea Seabrook and producer Rachel Quester take you to the film’s premiere and speak with Gavin abou

Unless you’ve been trapped in a monastery over the past month, you’ve witnessed the fire and brimstone storms over so-called religious freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas. Coverage of the push for these religious freedom laws tends to focus on how they have emerged as pushback against gay marriage. They are that, but the backstory is more complicated. These laws deserve some serious decoding and on this week’s podcast, we turn to Robert Jones, the director of the Public Religion Research Institute, for help. Jones is a sociologist and a scholar of public attitudes about religion. At the Public Religion Research Institute, he and his colleagues conduct large polls to track changes in religious attitudes about public issues. Jones traces this conflict of values at the center of ‘religious freedom laws’ back to the late 1970s, when the Christian right organized itself into a real political powerhouse. Groups epitomized by Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority pushed an aggressive agenda that was conservative, ant

The Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act. Medicare. Vietnam. The 1960s were a transformational time for America and at the center of much of it was Lyndon B. Johnson. This year marks the 50th anniversary for landmark legislation that would not have been possible without one of Washington’s most heralded legislators. On this week’s podcast, host Andrea Seabrook sits down with Julian Zelizer, author of “The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress and the Battle for the Great Society.” Zelizer says yes, Lyndon Johnson was an incredible legislator. But in order to really understand how he was able to move massive change through Congress, we have to look at the broader social and political context of the time. It’s this bigger picture, says Zelizer, that can give us clues on how to break through today’s Washington gridlock. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For spring break, we are going to take you on the ultimate insider’s tour of the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. Your guide: Senate historian Donald Ritchie, who will retire in May after nearly 40 years in the Senate Historical Office. The office serves as the Senate's “institutional memory,” according to its Website, collecting information on important dates, precedents and statistics. But it is so much more. Movie set designers, mystery writers and biographers have depended on Donald Ritchie to answer the serious and the trivial questions about everything from carpet color to whether this is actually the most do-nothing Congress. We asked Ritchie for a tour of some of his favorite places in the Senate – and some of our's too – such as: --Lyndon Johnson’s Senate office, nicknamed “the Taj Mahal” for its ornate decorations. --The Old Senate Chamber, where the Senate met from 1810 to 1859. When senators first gathered there, there were 32 of them. By the time they moved out in 1859, there were 64 -- and no mo

It isn’t every day that Democrats and Republicans are on the same side of anything, so it may come as a surprise that the nation of Ukraine has not only brought them together, but brought them together in opposition to the White House. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle feel the United States should send lethal weapons to help Ukraine in its fight against Russia. The White House does not. Only minutes before the 113th Congress was about to adjourn in December, the Ukraine Freedom Support Act passed unanimously. Four days later President Barack Obama signed it into law, authorizing $350 million in lethal and nonlethal military assistance to Ukraine. But while the bill allowed the United States to send weapons to Ukraine, it didn’t force the administration to send them – and it hasn’t. Ukraine is still waiting. The U.S.-Russian relationship is complicated – real complicated. On the one hand, there are disagreements and clashes between the two countries over Ukraine’s sovereignty. On the other hand, they need