The White House posted a video on its YouTube account Thursday of the President interviewing The Wire creator David Simon. Obama, as you may already know, is a Wire superfan; he kicks things off by saying to Simon “At the front end, I’ve gotta tell you, I’m a huge fan of The Wire. I think it’s one of the greatest, not just television shows, but pieces of art, in the last couple of decades.” As the official description of this event describes it, these men “sat down to talk honestly about the challenges law enforcement face and the consequences communities bear from the war on drugs.”
The interview with Simon is less of a fanboy-fest and more of an investigation of Simon’s understanding of drug culture based on his time as a reporter in Baltimore during the early 1980s. This was “at a time when people thought they could arrest their way out of a drug problem,” Simon says, when Baltimore was “a drug-saturated city.”
Obama cites the “reduction in violent crime in most big cities in America” as a good sign, but allows that “a consequence of that was this massive trend towards incarceration, even toward non-violent drug offenders.” Obama says he witnessed this from his time in the state legislature, an “explosion” of incarcerations of “disproportionately African-American people” and how prison renders many ex-convicts “functionally unemployable.”
Obama also talks about low participation rates — why, even as more jobs are being created and the economy recovers, people aren’t re-entering the labor force — is due, in large part, to “the young male population with felony histories.”
Simon describes the inspiration for Omar, a man named Donnie Anders (“I never thought I’d be saying his name in the White House”) who spent 17 years in prison and wanted to give back to Baltimore; but, as a convicted murderer, he couldn’t get a job. This is heartbreaking news for POTUS, who affirms that Omar is his favorite character. But he follows up with “good news”: “an increasing realization, on the left but also on the right, politically, that what we’re doing is counterproductive… We’re all responsible for finding a solution to this.”
Why is this interview happening? A couple possibilities: Obama, in his second term, can do whatever, and one of the whatevers he’d like to do is call up the mastermind behind his favorite television show and host his own personal AMA at the White House. It’s good to be king.
The maybe-more-plausible theory is that this is part of a well-documented initiative on the part of the Obama administration to meet constituents where they are, Trojan-horsing conversations about the most vital issues of the day into videos that people are going to share on Facebook. This fits right in with the sort of tactics we’ve seen POTUS and his team employ within the past year: granting interviews to three YouTube stars this January, shilling Obamacare in videos for Funny or Die and Buzzfeed, posting the full text of the State of the Union address on Medium just before Obama’s speech began, breaking a long-held (though arguably obsolete) practice of sending an embargoed copy to the press before releasing it to the public.
Though there are the usual complaints from the old guard that deigning to mingle with the masses in this way was “beneath the dignity of the office,” it would be hard to argue that these nontraditional efforts at getting out the message of the day aren’t effective. Obama’s appearance on “Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifianakis” reportedly led to a tremendous spike in sign-ups for healthcare — traffic to Healthcare.gov the day after the video was posted was nearly 40 percent higher than the day before; by April 1, enrollment had reached the White House’s stated goal of 7.1 million in spite of an infamously glitchy launch — and has been viewed 29 million times.