URBAN DECAY

"I'm a big fan of 'The Wire,' " Barack Obama told US Weekly last week.
"It's not a happy show, but it's addictive." His fellow liberal
intellectuals apparently agree.

Called "the best TV show ever broadcast in America" by Slate's editor
in chief, Jacob Weisberg, and "astonishingly sophisticated" by NPR
media reporter David Folkenflik, the HBO series, whose finale was
shown on Saturday, is a cops-and-criminals saga that brings its genre
to an entirely new level. "No other program has ever done anything
remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social,
political and economic life of an American city with the scope,
observational precision and moral vision of great literature," wrote
Mr. Weisberg last year. Conservatives such as National Review's Jack
Dunphy and The Weekly Standard's Dean Barnett laud the show too. But
conservatives may see in it a lesson that liberal viewers are unlikely
to take to heart.

Set, written and produced in Baltimore, "The Wire" aired 60 episodes,
with each of its five seasons focused on a different subject -- drug
trafficking, the port, local politics, public schools and the city's
newspaper.

From the series' opening sequences filmed in "The Towers" -- huge
public housing projects whose courtyards serve as drug bazaars --
through its depiction of the continuing devastation of neighborhoods
by violent crime and unemployment, the Baltimore of "The Wire" becomes
the poster child for six decades of failed urban policy.

Its crumbling, corrupt Baltimore is in virtual free fall while the
city's caretakers -- including nearly all its politicians -- feed at
the public trough, cavorting and partying as Baltimore burns and
children die. By season five, the city's fiscal situation is so dire
that budget cuts cripple the already disheartened police department
even further as police cars break down for lack of service. A look at
some real-life statistics shows how accurate this picture is.
Surpassed only by Detroit in CNN/Morgan Quinto's 2006 ranking of the
country's most dangerous large cities, Baltimore has traded places
over the past few years with Detroit and Washington as the country's
urban murder capital. With 282 homicides last year and a population of
about 641,000, Baltimore had a homicide rate six times that of New
York and three times that of Los Angeles. While crack usage faded in
resurgent cities like New York, Boston and Chicago in the 1990s, it
never lost its hold in many Baltimore neighborhoods, even as heroin
became the new drug of choice. Addicts just used both. By 2000, the
federal Drug Enforcement Agency said, Baltimore had the highest
per-capita heroin consumption in the country. Meanwhile the public
schools deteriorated, graduating less than half their students. The
Baltimore Housing Authority was put on HUD's troubled authority list
and in the 1990s dynamited many of its high-rise projects. Mr. Obama,
like most of his fellow liberals, believes that poverty is at the
heart of urban problems and that its eradication is a federal duty.
"What's most overwhelming about urban poverty is that it's so
difficult to escape -- it's isolating and it's everywhere," he
commented as he released his plans last July to reinvest in
impoverished neighborhoods. By this he means giving more public
funding to after-school and job training programs, parental
counseling, extended day care, and public-private business incubators.
What Lyndon Johnson called "model cities" programs Mr. Obama refers to
as "promise neighborhoods." The idea is that, freed from poverty,
people who are now dealing drugs would be living productive lives.

But Mr. Obama's favorite show puts forth a very different message: It
is the crime that causes the poverty, not the other way around.

Just watch a few episodes and it becomes clear that brazen drug
trafficking degrades everything it touches, seducing children with its
lure of money and murderously punishing anyone who defies it. When the
city blows up the federally funded housing projects whose density
helped make drugs so profitable, trafficking becomes even more vicious
as dealers war over the smaller territory that's left. Many favorite
characters are murdered or set themselves on a clear path to death and
disaster.

Apparently no one is immune: Even "citizens" -- the cops' term for
normal, law-abiding people -- are gunned down.

Crime prevents what little legal economic activity that exists from
flourishing. The often overlooked second season of the show covers the
port, its decline and deep corruption. One union boss who oversees the
loading and unloading of cargo ships accepts bribes from corrupt
importers to rename or "lose" containers in order to evade customs.

He fools himself that by lining the pockets of his union brothers with
this money he is protecting the mainly underemployed stevedores and
their families.

But as the port's decline worsens, the bribes are paid for
increasingly brutal purposes -- such as human trafficking.

"The Wire" shows that there are other factors besides crime at the
heart of Baltimore's problems (both real and fictional). The breakdown
of the family and the horrendous urban schools are more significant
than poverty itself as the source of urban decay.

You would never know it, though, to hear all of the Democrats' talk of
the income-inequality gap.

In one scene in "The Wire," a frail boy who was badly beaten in a
street fight comes to Cutty, a former criminal, for boxing lessons and
is pummeled in the ring by a smaller boy. When he cries bitterly that
he's a failure "on the street," Cutty tries to comfort him, saying
that the rules of the street aren't the same as those in the rest of
the world. "But how do I get from here to the rest of the world?" asks
the boy -- who has a missing father, a drug-using mother who ignores
him, and a school that teaches him nothing. Getting from teeming urban
streets to the rest of the world has been the objective of generations
of city dwellers -- and of urban policy.

Yet the West Baltimore of "The Wire" may be more desperate, perilous
and "isolating," to use Mr. Obama's word, than the worst of
19th-century slums. Those slum dwellers saw a way up and out.
Characters on "The Wire" do not. Many are not even sure where "out"
is, having never been beyond West Baltimore. Even the show's
longshoremen are unsure of how to get from here to the rest of the
world.

The days of well-paying industrial jobs are over, probably forever,
the men's skills are limited, their futures dim. Their unions
protected a few jobs at the cost of the overall economic health of the
port, just as the public-school unions have favored teachers,
including incompetent ones, over students.

The real lesson of "The Wire" is what New York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani
and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton understood from day one: To
restore a city and its neighborhoods, fight crime successfully and
everything else will start to fall into place (though New York's
public schools remain deplorable). And don't wait around for federal
support.

Take whatever money you can find.

Instead of advocating old-time Model Cities-type programs, Mr. Obama should
propose The Wire Urban Agenda: Fight crime Bratton-style and resist the
unions that stand in the way of prosperity. Now that would be true audacity
of hope.

Ms. Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.