Authors: Alan Huffman
I
am sitting in the municipal office of a New Jersey township so small and insignificant that it doesn't warrant a single exit off the nearby freeway. I can hear the cars and trucks, a distant murmur of life passing by, as I sit across the table from a bored policeman in the nondescript anteroom of the township office. It's early summer, when our campaign season really cranks up, and Michael and I have hit the road for an extended period of time, going our separate ways for now as we undertake several research projects simultaneously. I'm focused on a diminutive race, an example of how some political organizations strive to ensure that even third-tier opponents stay where they are.
The cop is reading a hunting magazine as I pore through a tall stack of bound township council minutes, the contents of which are both mind-numbing and, for some reason, jealously guarded by the local powers that be. It isn't as if much happens in the council meetings, but all sorts of bureaucratic alarms went off when I asked to review the minutes, which is why the cop is there, reading about recreational deer urine.
Assigning a cop to guard me in the Jersey township was a bit of institutional indulgence owing, perhaps, to the fact that the focus of my work is a minor township mystery. The implication is that I might try to steal the treasured minutes, for some unknown reason, or that my interest poses some other threat for the mayor, which it actually does, though it's not a threat an armed guard could prevent. All they've done, really, is make it slightly safer for others to speed through town on a summer day.
I was doing my best to take a genial approach to the whole situation because the clerk had at least been nice about assigning me a guard. Small public offices don't generally get a lot of strangers who arrive with what appears to be a very specific yet unrevealed interest. When they do, the staff can choose between being accommodating or officious in their efforts to find out what they're looking for and why, and, if necessary, to simply gum up the works. Michael and I can likewise choose between being polite and unforthcoming or impervious and unforthcoming. We typically take our cues from them.
Michael was once similarly placed under guard during a review of education records in Ohio. He reacted by indignantly asking the clerk, “What do you think I'm going to do, stuff them down my pants?”
One wonders, “Who steals education board minutes, anyway?” The implication was that anyone who wanted to review the actions of public officials was somehow a threat. It was about fear of the unknown. For all the administration knew, Michael might have been a schoolteacher, but because they didn't know, they responded with hostility. By contrast, a records clerk he encountered during another race erroneously had the impression that he was some kind of federal agent working on behalf of an ongoing investigation, and cheerfully gave him everything he asked for, saying, “Oh, yes, sir, we can give you that immediately.” The clerk also provided him with a personal workspace and did not charge him for what turned out to be a voluminous number of copies.
“When things are going that well, why say anything to the contrary?” Michael told me later.
Because the arrival of an inquisitive, evasive stranger with a Southern accent may represent the most provocative episode of a small township's official day, I give my current clerk credit for at least being sociable, though I'm aware that sociability often masks a hidden agenda.
“You sound like you're a long way from home!” she'd said, brightly, when I arrived at her window with my records request. After a meaningful pause, during which I failed to offer a response, other than to nod and smile, she'd asked, “So what brings you here?”
My answerâ“research”âfailed to satisfy. So she'd added, as if on cue, “And who are you with?”
I glanced behind me at the empty office, as if checking to see if I was with anyone, and concluded, “Nobody!” Then I smiled and extended my arms in mock surrender. A tiny furrow formed in her brow. I later overheard her telling someone in the back that perhaps I was a journalist who was comparing the institutional procedures of various town councils around the country, which led me to wonder where such a review might find publication. The supposition that I might be someone who studied small-town council minutes for a living had the effect of making my task seem even duller than it already was.
Opposition research can be exciting when you're on to something, but much of the work is like studying for a minor exam. A big part of it involves evaluating voluminous records of meetings by government agencies and ad hoc tree-pruning committees. That said, there's nothing like being bored to lower the threshold for what you find interesting. You may initially resist talking to the computer programmer in the seat beside you as your plane waits in line on the tarmac, but as the wait lengthens to hours, with no sign that you're ever going to take off, it is possible, out of synaptic desperation, to find yourself developing a low-grade interest in the computer programmer's life, including his recent foray into a master gardening class, held in a temporary building at a school currently undergoing sensitive renovation in a suburb of Milwaukee. When was the school built? What style is the architecture? The thumbnail sketch of his life may be a tour de force of forgettable scenes, but each painstaking detail instills in you a growing determination to find something, anything, to chew on.
Michael and I are similarly inspired to take note of documented details we might otherwise have overlooked. A subtle shift in the tenor of the township council discussion about sidewalk repairs or a bored cop reading about deer becomes a source of minor fascination. It doesn't have to be directly related to the task at hand, though that helps. The point is to keep the synapses firing. We search for anything or anyone of note, such as the escapee from
The Twilight Zone
whom Michael and I stumbled upon in an otherwise abandoned office building in Jersey City, where municipal public records were archived. He sat smoking, alone, at his desk, and insisted he knew nothing whatsoever about where the records we were searching for were located, nor about the boxes of moldering documents stacked in the darkened hallways, nor about the whereabouts of anyone who did know or when they might return. Because Michael and I are not easily deterred, even by someone who comes across more as an apparition than a living, breathing government employee, we pressed him for answers. Eventually he exhaled a puff of smoke, waved a hand toward the hallway beyond the door and said, “Help yourself.”
I looked at Michael, who had a quizzical expression. We proceeded to poke through the cardboard boxes stacked shoulder-high in the halls, but there was no order to anything. It was a futile endeavor. The archives of this particular government agency were like the memories of an elderly, demented brain. You could root around in there for as long as you wanted, but the odds were against your finding anything useful. Once we decided to give up, we returned to the office, but the employee/apparition had disappeared. I half expected the formerly busy streets to be eerily devoid of human life when we stepped back outside.
In the real world, where there is relative order to the archiving of records (even if they're under lock and key) the challenge is most often to avoid getting lost in a documentary trance after reviewing hundreds of pages of tedious recountings while in solitary confinement. The most important details are sometimes found on antiquated, wheezing microfilm, in boring tax records, or hidden in the coded language of obscure memos. You have to really, really care what people are saying, and Michael and I do. Even so, we still find ourselves wondering, “Is anything happening here?” If the council members do something meaningful, will I even recognize it through the fog of bureaucratic language? It's like being a reporter on the police beat, sleeping with a police scanner on your night stand; after a while, the chatter lulls you to sleep, and you wonder if you'll even notice if something important goes down. But you always do. There's a sudden shift in toneâin the syntax and cadence of the voicesâthat tells you something consequential is happening, even though the words may be generic and the tone deceptively flat. So it is with the subtly suggestive minutes.
Michael once researched a candidate whose seemingly minor legislative actions had had profound effects on his community. While serving on the city council, the candidate had voted against renewing a permit for a center that provided exercise classes for stroke victims, saying it was detrimental to the neighborhood in which it was located, despite being warned that denying the permit would violate the rights of the disabled. This, again, surfaced in the otherwise mundane minutes of the council meetings. The elected official's response? “It looks like we're playing favorites for some people.” Ignoring the needs of stroke victims may not seem like a significant transgression, unless you or one of your loved ones happens to be such a victim. Just because something seems uninteresting at first glance doesn't mean it's unimportant. Sensational stories dominate the headlines, but history also unfolds on page 3B.
The New Jersey township and its mayor are uniformly bland, which puts me in good stead when it comes to forced fascination with the cop and the minute books, as well as with anyone else who might chance to walk through the door. The minutes are basically one long small-font testimonial to governmental minutiae that in all likelihood no other human being has ever read all the way through, and I alternate my bleary-eyed review with random surveys of my surroundings, which steadfastly refuse to produce anything of interest. I search, at regular intervals, for something remotely inviting to the eye, my gaze repeatedly landing on the same overwatered philodendron in the corner, its leaves wilted and edged with brown; the now-familiar plate glass windows, through which a Chevy Citation with mismatched hubcaps is partially visible; and the notices of garage sales and informational meetings about hazardous waste disposal posted by the clerk's window. It's like being stuck in study hall with a math textbook as a kid, staring out the window at the passing clouds with a level of interest that grows in inverse proportion to the slowly suffocating tedium of the numbers. Meteorologyânow
that's
interesting! Except that there are no clouds visible through the window. It's just me, the cop, the minutes and the senseless despair of a neglected plant. There are also, I note, spiderwebs in one corner, where the walls meet the water-stained acoustic tiles of the ceiling, and at one point I realize that the Citation has inexplicably disappeared! How could I have missed its departure?
Before long, I'm spending most of my extracurricular time discreetly studying the cop, a stocky, youngish guy loaded down with crime-fighting appurtenancesâa flashlight, a pistol, a radio, handcuffs and other curious, jangly things that on the occasion of our initial introduction I had been unable to adequately catalog without seeming suspiciously overinterested. I don't know what it is about cops that makes me not want to seem suspicious when I'm doing nothing wrong. Why couldn't I comfortably look over all the stuff hanging from his belt before we took our seats and the accoutrement disappeared beneath the table? Now I'm left only with occasional, furtive glances at his strangely placid face as he reads, at the radio mic pinned to his collar, at his name tag and his magazine, on the cover of which is a photo of a deer hunter encumbered with the gadgetry necessary for stalking and killing large herbivores.
Unlike the clerk, the policeman doesn't seem to care what I'm up to as we while away the hours in the foyer of the township office, a place you'd not likely visit unless you had a problem with a water main or a marriage license, or were, like me, secretly researching the mayor. Owing to the circumstances, I feel obliged to limit my occasional dialogue with him to small talk, mostly about deer hunting, which isn't easy when you have never actually hunted a deer. I strive to keep my deer anecdotes geographically nonspecific, aside from referencing the deer I'd recently encountered while jogging in a wooded preserve alongside a highway interchange. It helps that the cop seems content to keep our official hookup anonymous, too. The conversational conclusion we will reach, over the course of the day, is that there are too many deer, everywhere.
Midway through my review, after I've made no obvious moves to abscond with the minute books, the cop has become deeply engrossed in his latest hunting magazine and no longer looks up each time I tear tiny shreds of Post-it notes to mark pages in the record books for copying. Of particular interest to me are the notations recounting mayoral cameo appearances in the council minutes. Though the summaries are pretty general, and utterly devoid of conversational nuance, after the second reference I sense a pushiness on the mayor's part as he urged the council to approve a contract for some infrastructure improvement. I can almost feel the electricity in the room as a certain council member, no doubt a perennial troublemaker who grows his own tomatoes, and talks about it, questioned whether the mayor's recommended contractor was the best one for the job. I imagine the councilman raising one eyebrow as he spoke, eliciting an icy stare from the mayor, and I make a note to check the mayor's campaign contributors to see if the contractor is listed among them.
It's at this point, pretty late in the day, that the stasis is broken by the arrival of an interracial couple, walking hand in hand, who have come to the township office hoping to resolve a problem involving a marriage license. Finally, the township office seems poised to come to life. I listen with growing interest as they explain to the clerk the trouble they're having in getting a marriage license, which, I should point out, does not appear to have anything to do with the fact that they are of different races. In fact, I mention their races only because by this point anything even minutely out of the ordinary is, quite simply, extraordinary. The cop, who is likewise bored, absently licking his thumb as he turns a page, also glances up at them. It becomes evident that the couple knows nothing about the process of getting married and that the license problem is bigger than the clerk is prepared to handle, so she summons the mayor, inadvertently providing me with an opportunity to observe my subject in action, unscripted and unaware.