Safra Working Papers

Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney raised an issue in a column this weekend that I feel should be taken seriously. The background story is that two of the current D.C. mayor's campaign aides confessed to having paid a mayoral candidate, and offered him a job in the coming administration, for him to relentlessly criticize the then mayor, who was running for re-election.

It should come as little surprise to people involved in local government that a New York Times article about bullying among ten- and eleven-year-olds has a great deal of relevance. I said for years about my town's government that its major participants were like ten-year-old boys on a playground, taunting, playing games of intimidation, spreading false rumors, keeping communal secrets, excluding whoever doesn't go along, and staying loyal to those in control so that they aren't excluded themselves

If you had no knowledge of government ethics, and you were asked what, on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, was the most frequent form of unethical behavior in municipal government, you might say 'passing rumors along.' That's the meat and the potatoes of every organization's conversations, and it's only the most self-controlled of us who don't partake in producing, consuming, and passing along rumors, at least occasionally. We know rumor mongering is wrong, even as we do it. But rarely does it have devastating consequences (we assure ourselves, if we think about it at all).

There is lobbying, and then there is lobbying. One of the most difficult things about regulating lobbying is defining what it means to lobby. And according to an op-ed piece last week in the New York Times by journalism professor Thomas D.