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Draining The Swamp: A Guide For Outsiders And Career Politicians, Carl Abbott
Draining The Swamp: A Guide For Outsiders And Career Politicians, Carl Abbott
Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations
What do Ron Paul, Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump have in common? They’ve all promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington politics.
These ambitious “hydraulic engineers” rely on a phrase that is deeply mired in our political discourse. The metaphor gets its clout from the notion that Washington was built in an actual physical swamp, whose foul landscape has somehow nourished rotten politics.
The assumption is just plain wrong: Washington was never a swamp, as I’ve discovered in exploring its first two centuries.