The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (49 page)

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On November 2, light rail went down in Hillsborough County by 58 to 42 percent. Karen
Jaroch and the Tea Party had outhustled the downtown businessmen and politicians,
as voters in the unincorporated boomburgs and ghost subdivisions didn’t see a benefit
in rail or want to pay another penny of taxes in the depths of the recession. Rick
Scott, a Tea Party hero, who had refused to meet with any newspaper editorial boards
and received none of their endorsements, was elected governor, continuing unbroken
Republican rule in Florida that dated back to 1998. Soon after taking office, Scott
decided to reject $2.4 billion in federal stimulus money for a high-speed rail line
connecting Tampa and Orlando, on which work was set to begin within weeks (the money
went to California). The seventy-acre site for Tampa’s new downtown rail terminal
remained a vast dirt field next to the interstate. A data company that studied statistics
for fifty metropolitan areas, factoring in unemployment, commute time, suicide, alcohol
use, violent crime, property crime, mental health, and cloudy days, announced that
Tampa was the single most stressful city in the United States. Eight of the top ten
were in the Sunbelt. Five were in Florida.

Mark Sharpe survived the challenge from a Tea Party candidate handpicked by Sam Rashid.
After being reelected to the county commission, Sharpe voted to put Karen Jaroch on
the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority board. After all, her side had won
the rail war—and among his many Tea Party detractors, he found Karen to be the most
reasonable.

A few weeks after the election, Mike Van Sickler was assigned to cover a meeting of
the Pinellas County Transportation Task Force, which was taking place somewhere near
the St. Petersburg–Clearwater airport, in a government-academic-business joint use
facility called the EpiCenter. As he drove past two-story apartment buildings, strip
malls, and office complexes with no street numbers, he couldn’t find the EpiCenter
to save his life. “Lost in Clearwater,” Van Sickler muttered, gripping the wheel of
his Ford Focus. “Talk about no sense of place. Give me a sign!” Rio Vista, Bay Vista—these
faux names! He hated it out here. If he screamed, no one would hear him.

The defeat of light rail had depressed Van Sickler more than he expected. It seemed
as if America was becoming a country that no longer believed in itself. “We can’t,
we can’t, we can’t. Let’s not do that rail project because it’s not going to work.
We can’t try to be the next great city. We’re just going to settle for what we’ve
got. We’re not happy with what we’ve got, but we can’t do any better.” That wasn’t
the country he’d grown up in. He had grown up in a much more optimistic country.

Van Sickler arrived at the EpiCenter half an hour late, red-faced with irritation.
The Pinellas County Transportation Task Force was debating whether to proceed with
its own rail initiative after the defeat in Hillsborough. There were a hundred people
in the room, including Karen Jaroch. In the front row sat two men in their twenties,
one in a green T-shirt with an Irish shamrock, the other in a red
I’M STILL WAITING FOR MY BAILOUT!
T-shirt. Whenever a member of the task force said something like “We keep talking
about ‘when the economy turns’—part of the reason to do this is to turn the economy,”
the two guys in T-shirts would cover their faces or throw their heads back in silent
laughter.

After the meeting, Van Sickler, in his corduroy jacket and tie, notebook in hand,
approached the one in the lucky Irish T-shirt and identified himself as a reporter
from the
St. Petersburg Times
. The guy gave him a hard look. Van Sickler asked what he thought of the discussion.

“I think they’re a bunch of communist sons of bitches who want to raise taxes. If
you listen to everything they say, it’s about how they’re going to pull the wool over
the eyes of the public. They want to push their agenda onto the people. Would you
ride it? It doesn’t go where I want to go. Who’s going to ride it in Pasco—the cows
or the fences?” The guy’s name was Matt Bender. He was a jobless construction worker,
looking for any kind of work, but he refused to apply for unemployment benefits. “I’ll
make my own way,” Bender said. “We have the pursuit of happiness, not the guarantee.
I’m tired of both parties not listening to what the people want, and the corruption,
the inside deals, the backroom deals. We have to eliminate the political class bit
by bit.”

As Van Sickler drove back to the office to write up his story, he thought about the
way Bender had looked at him. The contempt. Just like the comments that came in after
one of his stories went up on the Web—they had nothing to do with what he’d written,
minds were already made up, every local issue was drowned out by the shouting on national
cable news. There were no longer any facts that everyone in America could agree on
at the start. For example, his paper had gone to great effort and expense to dig up
information about the benefits, as well as the costs, of light rail in Tampa, and
none of it had sunk in. What had sunk in was “No tax for tracks”—maybe because light
rail seemed kind of fanciful to people in Hillsborough County who just wanted to hunker
down, raise their families, hang on to their jobs. And it had been the same with Sonny
Kim, his big story from the financial crisis. Van Sickler had waited two years for
heads at higher levels to roll, and instead the U.S. attorney’s office had nothing
to show but a low-life mortgage fraudster. Van Sickler was beginning to wonder about
the relevance of newspaper work. The weeks and months it took for an investigative
reporter to map the story out, get it right, and deliver, with the hope that something
might change as a result—and then
nothing
happened. What was he doing it for—his ego? Because it didn’t seem to matter to anyone
else.

But he wasn’t about to stop believing in journalism. “You’ve got to believe in something,”
he said. “I don’t believe in God—I believe in this. I believe in the possibility that
man can improve himself, that we as a civilized society can get better, and journalism
is the part of it that makes sure things are working.” For most of the twentieth century
in America, things worked about as well as they ever had in human history. Even if
that was no longer true, and most Americans no longer trusted reporters like him,
what was the alternative? Who else was going to be the public’s eyes and ears? He
didn’t see Daily Kos or Red State at city hall, he didn’t see Google or Facebook at
the county commission.

One Sunday morning, Van Sickler applied sunscreen (though it was still March) and
drove out to eastern Hillsborough County. He wanted to see what was happening in Carriage
Pointe, the county’s most distressed subdivision, which he had visited a dozen times
and written about at length. The place still seemed pretty deserted—houses where he’d
once interviewed the owners were now abandoned. But as he walked along the streets—not
a stick of shade—and stopped to talk with a Jersey woman who was working in her yard,
and a black man from West Palm Beach who was sitting with his family in an open garage,
a picture started to emerge: people were moving here again. Most of them couldn’t
afford to buy—instead, they were renting, because rent was cheap. They knew nothing
about their neighbors, and if they depended on the after-school center up the road
they were out of luck because it was shutting down due to county budget cuts, and
the price of gas sucked up a big chunk of their wages since the nearest jobs were
forty-five minutes away, and if their car ever broke down they were completely screwed.

But Carriage Pointe was still alive, and as Van Sickler drove away he had a vision
of the place five or ten years in the future: a slum in the middle of nowhere. The
rich would live in the cities, the poor would live in the exurbs, and Tampa would
wait out the slump until the growth machine started up again.

DEAN PRICE

If you drove around Southside Virginia or the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina in
the weeks before the 2010 midterms, you would see black billboards along the roadside
that announced
NOVEMBER IS COMING.
The signs were vague and ominous, but everyone knew what they meant. A black “November
Is Coming” bus prowled the region’s roads, festooned with figures on the cost of the
“Failed Stimulus,” “Healthcare Takeover,” and “Cap & Trade Energy Tax.” The billboards
and the bus were paid for by Americans for Prosperity, a group that Dean had never
heard of, which was funded by the Koch brothers, a pair of oil and gas billionaires
from Kansas who believed that President Obama was deliberately destroying the free
enterprise system.

The Tea Party was so big in Dean’s area that he didn’t broadcast his personal views,
but as far as he could tell, it was like the brownshirts. His neighbors never gave
Obama a chance. They called him a socialist, a radical, and a Muslim, but the word
that got to the main point started with
n
. People like that were easily conned by a huckster like Glenn Beck. Dean used to
watch him when he had a show on CNN, and because it was a regular news channel, when
Beck made all kinds of predictions after 9/11—there was another plot, a bomb would
go off at such-and-such time tomorrow—Dean would think, “Lord have mercy, if that
happens this country’s screwed.” After a couple of times, he decided that Beck was
a nut—more entertainer than anything else, another snake oil salesman. But he had
a following, including in the back of Dean’s house. On the other hand, MSNBC was hopeless.
Rachel Maddow looked too dykish, and Dean just couldn’t relate to Keith Olbermann.

Dean had his own questions about Obama. He still liked the president and respected
him, but he couldn’t understand why Obama didn’t do more to spell out his ideas for
the new economy. Washington let the biofuel tax credit expire in 2009, and investors
were uncertain which way things were going. Tying it all to global warming just muddied
things up, made it too partisan. Obama still talked about renewable energy, but it
seemed like he didn’t have a clue what to do, or he didn’t think the country could
handle the truth, or he still had the old mind-set that bigger was better. His agriculture
secretary, Vilsack, had a slogan touting small-scale production—“know your farmer,
know your food”—but he wasn’t going to turn his back on industrial farming. They were
playing both sides. Everybody had believed that Obama would get in there and tell
the truth and not side with the multinationals, but maybe they bought him off. Could
that be it? Or did he just hire the people who helped cause the problems in the first
place? Summers, Geithner—that was like the fox and the henhouse. But the American
people were thinking radical change back in 2008, not the status quo.

Dean thought about Obama a lot, questioned him, argued with him, wondered about him,
almost as if they knew each other. He kept dreaming about him, too—he didn’t know
why, but he tried to encourage those dreams. It was important for your very last waking
thoughts to be only the things you wanted to see in your life. You almost had to will
it. Because once you were asleep your subconscious would work on it, drawing to you
the things you continuously concentrated on. That was Napoleon Hill. Lying in his
bed, Dean thought about what he would do once he made his fortune. He had a very specific
vision of it. Then he would fall asleep and dream about being with the president.
They were sitting alone in a room, and Obama was listening while Dean spoke. He never
remembered his words—it was just the cause, the cause, the
cause
.

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In November the Tea Party was coming for Tom Perriello.

The first TV ads against him went up before he’d been in office a month—right around
the time his Republican colleagues in Congress stopped returning his phone calls.
“There was a decision made by the highest levels of leadership that they weren’t going
to have their fingerprints on anything,” he said. “They were smart enough to know
the economy couldn’t possibly turn around before November 2010, and they could run
against us. That was probably a smart strategic move but it was a fundamentally immoral
and unpatriotic thing to do. To me that’s more or less evil.”

In Perriello’s district, the recession was so severe that local officials were faced
with a choice between closing schools and raising property taxes, and at first there
was hardly any opposition to taking federal funds. A Republican banker in Danville,
who had been the president of the Virginia Bankers Association, wondered why there
was no money in the stimulus bill for public works, like overhauling the Depression-era
post office downtown—that was how desperate things were. Perriello himself regarded
the stimulus as “fairly milquetoast stuff”—he wanted something bigger and more visionary,
like a “national smart grid”—but the Recovery Act did bring three hundred million
dollars into his district, money that kept teachers in classrooms and paved roads
that needed paving. But over time, as the months went by and the slump continued,
and there was no sign of work starting on the stimulus project to rebuild the decrepit
Robertson Bridge over the Dan River, and the Republicans in Washington and the Glenn
Becks on the airwaves denounced everything the government did, endlessly repeating
the lie that the stimulus hadn’t created a single job, public opinion in the Fifth
District began to turn against Obama and Perriello.

Then came the hellish summer of 2009. After Perriello and the House voted for the
president’s energy bill in June, outside money from anti-Obama groups like Americans
for Prosperity poured into the district. The local Tea Party organized a protest in
the parking lot outside his office in Charlottesville, fifty or a hundred people gathered,
and when Perriello came out to talk to them, they denounced the federal energy police
that they were certain the bill would empower to raid their homes in order to check
the efficiency of their refrigerators. But this was just a warm-up for health care.
In August, Perriello held twenty-one town hall meetings around the district—more than
anyone else in Congress. Everywhere he went, five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred
people would pack the senior center or theater, stoked with the talking points they’d
downloaded from the Internet and brought on a sheet of paper, in some cases so angry
that they kicked and spat at members of Perriello’s staff. They lined up to rant against
death panels and violations of the Constitution (“You want the government to control
doctors’ decisions? Are you insane, stupid, or just plain evil?”), and Perriello stood
there with a microphone, looking twenty-two years old in his blue shirt and khakis
and tie, sweating, nodding, taking notes, drinking water, listening until every last
constituent was finished, and answering until he lost his voice (“The Supreme Court
for the last couple hundred years has read Article I in an incredibly expansive way”),
even if it took five hours.