We're with Nobody (13 page)

It's now possible to motor from Florida to Maine on a single multilane highway without seeing much of anything, passing through an interstate sensory deprivation zone that reveals the actual skyline of only one city, New York. While it's true that politics is, as they say, local, it's like so much about modern culture in that it's becoming increasingly franchised. You see many of the same basic political ads from coast to coast, produced by big agencies and blithely customized for specific races, just as you find heretically bland “Tuscan” dishes on the menus of a succession of chain Italian restaurants across four time zones. Michael and I try to seek out the local specialties, which sometimes poses a challenge. In Green Bay, when Michael asked a waitress what the local specialty was, she answered, “Fried cheese.” When he protested that a person can get fried cheese anywhere, she replied, “Not made with fresh Wisconsin cheese!” Thank God for Walleye Wednesdays.

Occasionally, as in Miami's South Beach, our tandem searches for political ammunition and diversion coalesce. In Miami the tendency to groom one's image—a staple of politics—reaches what is perhaps its highest expression in the United States, with the possible exception of LA. Everyone we encountered was young, good-looking, rich and bad, except us. We were reduced to cruising Ocean Boulevard in our rented Kia, a horrid little plum-colored car in which we later suffered the indignity of a blowout on Tampa's Sunshine Skyway Bridge, after which we limped into chic Ybor City on the doughnut wheel. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing to view things from the outside. We were at once attracted to, yet hypervigilant of, South Florida's love of bone structure and bling, aware that a culture built on money and good looks carries its own unique political temptations.

The first candidate we researched in South Florida was classically handsome, with gym muscles bulging beneath his suit—the kind of guy everyone notices when he walks into the room. We were pleased to find that he had also been cited fifteen times for blowing through tollbooths without paying, and for running stop signs and speeding in, by turns, his Cadillac and his Jaguar. Another candidate voted five times to approve $170 million worth of contracts for a company with which she was associated. Crime being a big deal in South Florida, we were intrigued to discover a judge who would not sign a search warrant in the middle of the night when detectives had a chance to recover fifteen stolen guns, including an assault rifle, from a West Palm Beach apartment. The judge was so angry to have been awakened at 3:30 AM that he refused to sign the warrant. By the time the deputies got their warrant, six hours later, the guns were gone. Six weeks later, one of the guns the police had been prevented from confiscating was used to kill a twenty-two-year-old man. I think of this story when I hear people complain that they're tired of negative politics.

Considering the wide variation in locations, Michael and I occasionally disagree over who will go where on individual research projects. We travel together when the deadline and the sheer volume of work require it, but we often separate to undertake different campaigns simultaneously. When that happens, I usually manage to go to the more interesting places, in part because I know how Michael's mind works. I may point out that it makes sense to do the Seattle research and the San Francisco research over the course of one trip, and by the way I know someone I can stay with in the Bay Area, which will save us hundreds of dollars in hotel expenses. Over time, Michael has become more mindful of the disparities, realizing that while he's watching Pay-Per-View TV in his interstate hotel room I'm floating in someone's pool in Marin County. So he occasionally balks. He once insisted that we flip a coin. I won the toss, which meant I got to travel to New York City for two weeks while he was awarded a round trip ticket to Pikeville, Kentucky.

“I just saw something about Pikeville on the History Channel a few nights ago,” Michael mused, trying to look impressed at his good fortune.

“Fascinating,” I said, as I began Googling Manhattan hotels.

Pikeville, he pointed out, was where the Hatfields and the McCoys engaged in their legendary feud, which started with a dispute over a hog. He said he could see by the look on my face that I was awed by his arcane knowledge of regional history, adding, “Sometimes I even surprise myself. I think it'll be interesting.”

As it turned out, he could not sustain his air of triumph for long. It proved fun, for a minute, to discover Pikeville's quiet horrors, one gap-toothed records clerk at a time. During our regular status updates, I gloated about researching my candidate in the same courthouse that appears in scenes of
Law and Order
and dancing into the wee hours with a stranger in a SoHo bar. I could tell he'd reached his breaking point when, as I was trying to explain how I'd happened on Jerry Seinfeld the night before, waiting in line for the premier of a show, and how we'd exchanged the wussup nod, he interrupted to say, quite petulantly, “Oh, really. Have you had any time to do any actual work? Because I can assure you there are no celebrities in Pikeville, Kentucky.”

Softening, I reminded him that the process of discovery matters equally in the world's busiest and most culturally diverse city as in some hillbilly town founded long ago when a random pioneer's wagon broke down. At this point he was forced to concede that he had also come up with nothing that mattered for the campaign. “It's because I'm in a shitty place,” he said.

It made matters worse that I had tapped into some great information in New York. Michael prides himself on finding the best information—we often compete in that regard, and it's true that he tends to be discerning and methodical, while I discover things in a more scattershot manner—but in Pikeville, he'd come up with nothing that mattered for the campaign. I'd found where one of our opponents, whose campaign platform was that he would operate government “like a business,” had had five federal tax liens filed against his own commercial enterprise, which had also been sued twice for unpaid debts. Meanwhile, across the river in New Jersey, I'd found where a state police investigator who was running for office had been restrained during an altercation with a group of local cops, during which he had used racial slurs, and another candidate who'd been fined $13,000 for violating state campaign finance laws while treasurer of his party's county organization.

After I relayed these details, there was silence on the other end of the line. Finally, Michael sighed and said, “I've been eating greasy tacos from a gas station, and all there is to do at night is watch
Andy Griffith
reruns. And I swear there's bloodstains on the wall of my motel room. The worst part is that there's just nothing.”

Now and then we become so immersed in far-flung research projects that we wake up wondering where we are. Sometimes we momentarily forget where we're going while airborne. We are occasionally beset by flight delays, including, in one case, when we were forced to stay overnight in a dreaded airport hotel in Atlanta, without our bags, and to fly out the next day for a meeting with a congressman dressed in wrinkled, dirty clothes. When we got to Minneapolis our rental car reservation had been canceled, forcing us to scrounge for another. When we arrived at our hotel they refused to refund the money we had prepaid, though they'd given our room away. When we finally found other accommodations, the valet wrecked our car. Such stresses are part of the process, but the parade of odd characters and memorable scenes provides a welcome antidote to—as well as entertaining context for—the information we gather.

Typically, the campaigns we work for don't fully understand why, as we're researching their opponents, we're also chronicling the trail of outlaw Jesse James. Our position is that whether you're following an actual historic trail, touring a stylized mockup or blazing your own path, it's all about outlaws and lawmen, about who's right and who's wrong. The evidence is wherever you find it—however you find it.

As much as it's influenced by national trends, political behavior can be very site specific, so, in a way, all of this matters. One of the more unusual places we've done oppo is Utah, which looks homogenous on the surface but becomes far more complicated once you're inside. Utah is much like you might picture it: high, dry and populated primarily by clean-cut, square-jawed Mormons whose ancestors wanted to get away from everyone else. Those ancestors resorted to violence when disputes arose with Native American tribes and the U.S. government itself and, in one bloody episode, slaughtered 120 settlers from Arkansas and Missouri, en route to California, whom they considered some kind of threat.

Because Mormonism emphasizes strict adherence to doctrine, and that doctrine strives to harness and limit individual power, you'd be safe assuming that Utah's demographic is pretty clearly defined. The state is more than 90 percent white and largely conservative. Yet there's a very visible counterculture of tattooed mountain bikers, dreadlocked backpackers and homeless vagabonds wandering Salt Lake City in clothes stained the color of desert canyons, wood smoke and industrial grime. Interspersed among the legions of men in starched white shirts who stroll West Temple Street are a remarkable number of guys wearing no shirts at all. Cultural escape takes many forms in Utah: Sometimes it's shirts; sometimes it's skins.

The alternative types stand out in Utah precisely because the mainstream culture, while deviating in significant ways from the American norm, is very staid. When I was there researching a congressional candidate I saw an alt-guy with his alt-girl dressed in dirty, torn, gray-and-olive-drab clothes, scuffed hiking boots and head rags that looked as if they'd been ripped from the drapes of an abandoned building. Their hair was wild and dirty. The scent of campfires and long-term B.O. lingered in their wake as they passed a café where four Mitt Romney clones were dining al fresco. At that moment, Utah felt like no place I'd ever been. It's as if the survivors of some postapocalyptic world had wandered on to the set of the old
Osmond Family Show
.

When I mentioned the odd contrast of Donny-and-Marie-meet-Mad-Max to my friend Edy, who lives in nearby Park City, she said, “That would be a street fight worth watching.” Her money would be on the Mormons, she said, because they could disable the road warriors with laserlike smiles bright enough to glint off the windows of downtown buildings.

Surprisingly, though, there didn't seem to be much conflict. For one thing, all those young Mormons you see roaming the neighborhoods of other cities, proselytizing in their telltale shirts and ties, are actually outliers of a deeply entrenched bike-centric civilization that, in Utah, encompasses both mainstream and alternative lifestyles. In Salt Lake you see bicycles everywhere, piloted by people of all ages and backgrounds—men in suits, women in shorts and sandals, road-weary travelers laden with cross-country baggage, mountain trekkers outfitted with technical gear, delivery guys, elderly eccentrics, kids. Despite the familiar American car culture that periodically smothers Salt Lake in a haze of pollution and contributes to sprawl throughout the valley, there's a strong athletic vibe that also carries a whiff of anarchy. This is a society, after all, where polygamy was once considered a family value.

Famous people with Utah connections are an odd assortment: Butch Cassidy, Donny and Marie, serial killer Ted Bundy, Robert Redford, Mitt Romney and Karl Rove. There's also that guy who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart and kept her in a pen in his backyard. If you can find the median in that demographic, have at it. What this all means to a political researcher is that whatever you find on a candidate will have to fit into a very narrow box. Social issues aren't likely to bring a serious candidate down because the vast majority of the population believes pretty much the same thing. Anyone who looks the least bit crazy, meanwhile, isn't going to have a chance. The question is what, exactly, the majority of the voters believe, in the aggregate.

For a politician, playing to an audience that is both mainstream and slightly renegade carries inherent yet ill-defined risks, but on the ground in Utah, it was clear that the worst thing we could discover about a candidate was that he did not play by the rules. Mormonism places particular emphasis on abiding by a host of rules, many of which are unique to the religion. The inevitable backlash is about flagrantly breaking them. Not surprisingly, the candidate I was in town to research hadn't been obvious about his violations. He had sidled up to the Tea Party crowd, the antiabortionists and the like, but aside from breaking some of the rules of conventional American politics, those associations didn't look particularly controversial. His public statements generally reflected predictable rightwing opinions, with a few twists. He'd opposed a bill to ban gifts from lobbyists, while accepting such gifts himself, which said something about him but did not indicate inconsistency—another trait that puts off many Mormon voters. There were a few other minor problems, such as that he had missed more than two hundred votes while a state legislator. But his most egregious offense was something more personal, and that was not easily discovered: a tax lien filed against him for failing to pay state income tax—an indication that he had, in fact, violated the rules.

The lien wasn't really out there for public consumption. While going through the index of lawsuits the candidate was involved in I found one reference without a clear description, though the index code (as a helpful staffer in the state law library explained) indicated it was a tax lien. Utah has strict privacy laws that make it one of the more difficult places where Michael and I have ever done research. Finding and acquiring copies of even routine documents can be a clerical Rubik's Cube of confusing guidelines, and it's not uncommon to get conflicting reports from staffers in the same office about what is public record. In the case of the tax lien, the woman at the window of the court clerk's office flatly refused to let me see it.