Jeffrey and David raise some interesting questions this week about Carcetti's character. Responding to David's observation that Carcetti is "a little too far to the dark side" Jeffery writes:

I don't see what you see in Carcetti. He's not shaking anyone down, is he? He's just trying to better his city and himself, which is what you'd expect.

I think Jeffrey misses the point. Yes, the U.S. attorney was a scumbag. And last season maybe Carcetti was right to turn down the state's money to help bail out the schools. The point is, however, that in both cases Carcetti has declined help because accepting it would frustrate his future ambitions. What is good for Baltimore is only a secondary consideration to what is good for Carcetti. "You can help the city from the state house" becomes a convenient excuse for his personal ambition.

For all his redeeming qualities and his promise, Chase appears to be introducing to Carcetti many of the moral ambiguities of the other characters. It also illustrates Chase's view on institutions: they powerfully shape the behavior of decision-makers. It is not a coincidence that Carcetti has "changed" now that he is mayor: one might conclude that any ambitious mayor, faced with the same institutional challenges and constraints, would make the same decisions to decline the state's money and the U.S. attorney's help. That's not to excuse Carcetti; it's to argue that institutions strip away our individuality, if not our compassion.

Carcetti has always been morally ambiguous (to put it nicely). He had no problems lying to his old friend Tony Gray about his intentions as part of his divide-and-conquer strategy to seize power. If he can betray his friends for the sake of power, he can betray a city. For Carcetti it has always been about seizing power first, and thinking about the good he might be able to do with that additional power is a convenient way of justifying the means.

Tony Gray would have been a better mayor than Carcetti, too. With his focus on education, there is no way he would've refused the money for the schools. And then -- ironically -- that would also have left Gray in a better position than Carcetti as to improving the police force.