The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (63 page)

TAMPA

The Republicans converged on Tampa at the end of August simultaneously with Hurricane
Isaac, which canceled the first day of the convention. At the last hour the storm
veered west over the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the city soaked but unscathed. Meanwhile,
fifty thousand Republicans, media members, protesters, security officers, and thrill
seekers made landfall directly in downtown Tampa. The welcoming committee got the
city ready by limiting access to the new Riverwalk, rerouting traffic away from the
convention hall, and cutting up the downtown grid with black chain-link fencing, concrete
barriers, and Hillsborough County dump trucks. Local people left town or stayed away,
and on the canceled Monday the office buildings and surface parking lots downtown
were nearly empty. In spite of the diminished car traffic, the city looked less like
Jane Jacobs’s heaven than ever, the sidewalks even more deserted than usual, the only
eyes on the street those of security officers clustered at every intersection—Tampa
police mounted on black bikes, sheriff’s deputies from counties all over Florida,
state troopers, national guardsmen in military fatigues, private rent-a-cops, black
temporary hires wearing size XXL white T-shirts that said, without further explanation,
STAFF
. Armed skiffs patrolled the Hillsborough River, helicopters continuously clattered
a few hundred feet overhead. All the public trash barrels were gone. Tampa was never
safer, or more dead.

After the violence at the 2008 Republican convention in Minneapolis, the phenomenon
of Occupy Wall Street and its aftershocks and portents, the predictions that Tampa
2012 was going to give Chicago 1968 a run, the city prepared for a riot. In the days
before the convention, Matt Weidner’s blog scaled new rhetorical mountaintops:

… you really cannot be prepared for your city turning into a heavily fortified warzone
until you’re sitting in the middle of it. And driving to work, I realized, I’m sitting
at Ground Zero for the Republican National Convention here in Tampa / St. Petersburg …
So this is what this failed democracy has come to? The St. Pete Police Department
building, located just a few steps from my office, is being turned into a bunker,
but the row after row, tens of miles of concrete barriers and fencing are what really
catches your eye and makes my heart turn cold. It truly is a disturbing commentary
on our national politics that so much effort must be made to barricade the ruling
class from the peasants and the proletariat.

Weidner’s radicalism had no natural home in American politics. Despite his belief
in massive worldwide debt repudiation, he was enough of a libertarian to become an
avid Ron Paul supporter. When Paul’s delegates were forbidden to bring their own signs
onto the convention floor in Tampa, and twenty of his Maine delegates were stripped
of their credentials, and Paul wasn’t allowed to speak because he hadn’t endorsed
the Nominee, Weidner announced that he was ending his lifelong membership in the Republican
Party. He wouldn’t become a Democrat, though—the party of Obama, the “statist in chief”—“so
I’m electing to change my registration to
NO PARTY AFFILIATION
!” He urged his readers to do the same. Then Weidner drove with his new wife and their
four-week-old baby out of the warzone to rural Florida, where he waited out “the whole
undeniably engrossing spectacle.”

*   *   *

Mike Van Sickler was covering the convention for the
St. Petersburg Times
, which, as of the first of the year, had become the
Tampa Bay Times
. His assignment was the Florida delegation. The Florida Republican party was being
punished by the national party for jumping the gun on the primary schedule, and part
of the punishment was for the Florida delegates to be exiled to the Innisbrook Golf
and Spa Resort in Palm Harbor, an hour’s drive from the convention hall. One night,
due to bus congestion and transit malfunctions, the delegates got back to their rooms
at three in the morning, and Van Sickler wrote a wry piece imagining how things might
have been different if Tampa Bay had commuter rail, like Charlotte, where the Democratic
convention was to be held the following week.

After the conventions, Van Sickler was going to join the paper’s Tallahassee bureau,
where his beat would include Governor Rick Scott. He had spent his career covering
city halls and county commissions, running title searches and mapping foreclosures,
beats where there were no communications strategists and press flaks, only the buried
facts of folly and corruption, which he knew how to dig up as well as any reporter
around. He had never covered real politics before, and he was nervous as hell, loving
the action, going on adrenaline and fear, trying to figure out what questions to ask.

For example, what should he ask Governor Scott’s mother? There she was on the second
night of the convention, in a big black skirt and floral top, sitting with the Florida
delegates directly in front of the podium, listening to Janine Turner from
Northern Exposure
(dyed blond, like most of the women present), and waiting for the Nominee’s wife
to speak. Should he ask Mrs. Scott a gotcha question? What would be the point? The
chances of getting any news were small. She probably wouldn’t even answer him. He
decided to let her listen to the speeches.

Van Sickler worried that he didn’t have the speed and fluency for the big leagues.
He knew that he would have to play ball with Rick Scott, pay attention to nuances,
be a drama critic after a State of the State address, make trades with his handlers
to stay in the game and get his calls returned. That was how politics was covered
at the highest levels, and it didn’t come naturally to him. He was much better operating
out in the open—making them talk to him because he had dug up facts. Facts were Van
Sickler’s strength, and he decided to stick with them as much as possible in this
new phase of his career.

*   *   *

The convention was in Tampa, but inside the hall it was rare to hear anyone mention
the foreclosure crisis, ghost subdivisions, robo-signing, mortgage fraud, bankruptcy,
or homelessness. No speaker told the story of how Wall Street and lenders and developers
and local officials had created the conditions for a catastrophe that still had not
receded from Tampa Bay. No one spoke for Usha Patel, or Mike Ross, or the late Jack
Hamersma, or the Hartzells. Instead, leading Republicans took the podium one after
another to sing the praises of the successful business owner and the risk-taking investor.

The Republicans felt nothing for their Nominee. They had chosen him, as the Democrats
once chose John Kerry, in the hope that others would like him better than they did.
There was no relief at the top of the ticket for their fever, no love to ennoble the
scalding hatred of the president and his America that had energized the resurgence
in the Republican grassroots since 2009. The beating heart of the party was not to
be found in the loveless convention hall, where only loyal delegates and visitors
with the right credentials could enter, bused in on a single clogged access road,
funneled on foot through a single checkpoint, stepping in bright red dresses and high
heels between concrete barriers, sweating into the armpits of sport coats as they
walked in darkness under the Crosstown Expressway and looked around for a store that
sold bottled water.

Four decades after his first try for Congress, Newt Gingrich was in Tampa, posing
for pictures with Callista, his buttoned suit jacket emphasizing his width, speaking
at his mobile “Newt University” for two hours a day, every day, including the canceled
day, holding forth in the Royal Palm Ballroom at the Wyndham Tampa Westshore on the
subject of America’s energy future to whoever would listen. Morning Joe listened for
a few minutes, then did a stand-up with Gingrich out in the corridor. Everyone knew
that Gingrich and the Nominee despised each other. Why, Morning Joe asked, was Newt
here in Tampa to lend his support? “How do you avoid making it personal?”

“We have an overarching agreement that in the end we’re all Americans,” Gingrich said.
“This is what makes us so powerful, because we can come together in a way that Adolf
Hitler or Tojo or Khrushchev never could.” Warming to his theme of civic unity higher
than politics, he smiled, and smiling made him look like a boy who’s thought of a
clever answer. “I think it was a remarkable thing that I was allowed to run. It’s
a remarkable thing that I’m allowed to be on your show. I so much love being a citizen.”

Morning Joe cracked a few jokes with Gingrich, thanked him, and hurried out of the
hotel. Gingrich turned toward a French TV camera and was asked for reasons to vote
for the Nominee. Gingrich stopped smiling, his face dropped, the corners of his mouth
turned down in deep grooves, and under the white helmet of hair his eyes narrowed
in a hard humorless stare. “Obama stands for fundamentally radical values that will
transform America,” Gingrich said, quickly and automatically, for the ten thousandth
time, far too many times to know if he really meant it, any more than if he meant
that in the end we were all Americans, or if he was even subliminally aware of the
contradiction, but it didn’t matter anyway because he was already on his way back
inside the Royal Palm Ballroom, where there was more talking to be done, always more
talking, for not to talk would be to die.

*   *   *

Gingrich was one of Karen Jaroch’s personal heroes. Karen had supported him in the
Florida primary after her first choice, Herman Cain (for whom she had served as county
chairwoman), dropped out. One night during convention week, she attended the Faith
and Freedom Rally at the Tampa Theater and heard Gingrich speak, along with other
heroes of hers, including Phyllis Schlafly, who was eighty-eight years old but still
looked like the firebrand housewife (the same as Karen Jaroch) from the 1964 Goldwater
campaign. Karen had made her peace with the party’s Nominee for 2012—“anybody but
Obama”—but she didn’t care much for the convention itself, the kind of insider establishment
event that had kept her away from politics most of her life. In a way, Karen didn’t
need to be there, because in Tampa the fringe had made it to the floor, the podium,
and the platform. There was even a plank condemning Agenda 21, the twenty-year-old
UN resolution that obsessed opponents of rail.

Karen was working full-time in a new job. At the start of the year, she had become
the Hillsborough County field director for Americans for Prosperity, the pro-free-enterprise
group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers. The week before the convention she
opened the field office in a small strip mall in North Tampa, next to a Serbian massage
therapy parlor and downstairs from a realty company. Karen was making thousands of
“issue” calls, trying to identify potential supporters and direct them to the group’s
website. Around the office were empty desks waiting for phones, computers, and volunteers.
One night, a group had come to watch a screening of
Who Is John Galt?
, the second part of a film version of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
. Jaroch hadn’t read the novel—she wasn’t a big reader of books—but agreed completely
with its principles. She had found her purpose, now joined to a national organization
with bottomless amounts of money, and she applied herself with the unflagging energy
of an adherent whose worldview couldn’t be disturbed by any argument or fact. Beneath
her politics was a basic feeling that she and her husband had always played by the
rules without ever cutting corners or asking for help.

The job was Karen’s first in years, and although she had vowed not to make a career
of politics when she first started the Tampa 9/12 Project, her family needed the paycheck.
But she would do it even without one. “This is where my heart is.”

*   *   *

The Hartzells spent a little time watching the convention, but not as much as they
spent watching “Sexy and I Know It,” a music video by LMFAO—Laughing My Fucking Ass
Off, an electropop duo—with Brent and Danielle dancing in the living room. Not as
much time as Ronale spent on the rental laptop entering Disney World contests and
cash sweepstakes. Not close to as much time as Danny spent online playing League of
Legends rank matches at Level 30.

It wasn’t that Danny and Ronale weren’t interested in politics. They thought and talked
about politics more than they used to. Working at Wal-Mart pushed it in your face.
Danny was making $8.50 an hour—Dennis was making $8.60, after two years—and he hated
the job. He hated the superior attitude of the managers, the way they just pushed
the old potatoes and onions to the back of the bin, the customers who interrupted
him while he was shelving stock to ask where the frigging bananas were, the fact that
he was an “associate” instead of an old-school “employee,” the phony Tampa police
car that the store rented for thirty thousand a month and parked out front as a deterrent
to shoplifting. On his break Danny went out into the parking lot and stood there in
his uniform khakis and blue shirt and smoked 305s—he had picked up the habit working
at Wal-Mart—and thought about his old welding job. He liked dirty jobs, where you
made something and had a feeling of accomplishment. He was blue-collar, and if somehow
he could get a loan and open his own welding business he would feel like a king, but
that wasn’t going to happen. He had read that 47 percent of Americans were now too
poor to pay income taxes. Forty-seven percent! How did that happen? Greed. Just corporate
greed. Sometimes he thought it would be better to get rid of money and go back to
the barter system, wheat in exchange for milk and eggs. Here was Danny, the little
guy doing the heavy lifting and helping the customers—the backbone of the workforce—making
ten grand a year, while the guy who sat behind a desk doing nothing but watching the
little guy work made eight or nine million. Why was that fair? The rich got richer,
the poor got poorer. You couldn’t ever get ahead. You just got used to it—that was
life. At this point he was doing it for his children, hoping they’d be better off.