The Unwinding

by George Packer

  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.

  * * *

  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.

  “Nobody was getting converted,” he later said. “This was a
bout endurance.”

  The town halls appeared on TV news, and they gave the impression that everyone in the district opposed health care reform, even though many people who attended (and many who didn’t) were in favor or undecided—but theirs were the quieter voices, and sometimes when they spoke up they were shouted down, and as the month went on, the people with quieter voices, having watched the raucous earlier meetings on TV, decided not to bother coming, so that by the end of August the Tea Party in Perriello’s district believed that the congressman was ignoring nearly unanimous opposition.

  The spectacle of the town halls was so ugly that the old civic groups, the Rotary Clubs and garden clubs, nonpartisan pillars of the community, stopped issuing courtesy invitations to their congressman to come meet them for fear of being embarrassed by protests. And Perriello also noticed that the traditional trade associations, like the ones for small businessmen and community bankers, which used to give their members useful fact-based information and explain how they were negotiating the best deal possible with the government, now wilted under the popular heat and refused to play ball.

  By the end of that first summer of the Obama administration, one could have the impression that most of the country was in open revolt against a president who had won a resounding victory just nine months earlier.

  Perriello cast a difficult vote for health care, and after the bill passed in March 2010, a Tea Party activist posted what was supposed to be Perriello’s home address outside Charlottesville, urging people to go make their views known. It turned out to be the address of his brother, his brother’s wife, and their four children, and the next day someone cut the family’s gas line.

  Perriello began to feel that the first politician to inspire him was also leaving him hanging out to dry. On the one hand, Obama had “an unbelievable willingness to do what I got into politics to do, which is to take on the problems that neither party has had the guts to touch for my entire life.” On the other hand, the president spent his first year trying to cut deals with Republicans who were never going to give an inch, and he went out of his way to let bankers discredited by the financial crisis avoid taking a fall. The president talked about “a new era of responsibility,” but it didn’t seem to apply to those guys. The Obama team was full of unimaginative advisers who were too friendly to Wall Street and didn’t know how to create jobs on Main Street. “If you only know other people on Wall Street who make six or seven figures, all you’re trying to do is get back to the nineties,” Perriello said. “Well, in the nineties people in my district were losing a crapload of jobs.” The elites were biased toward other elites, even after they had failed massively. “Empires decline when elites become irresponsible.” Obama was a progressive insider, not a populist outsider, and Perriello got no cover from the administration when he went out to face his struggling, irate, misinformed constituents.

  The din of shouting in town halls and on AM radio, cable TV, and the Internet; the hostile and anonymous commercials filling the airwaves, paid for by the coal and insurance companies and the Koch brothers; the entanglement of cash, interest groups, and spinelessness on Capitol Hill; the strangely ineffectual Obama White House; the ongoing depression in the Piedmont: amid all this, who would know or care about Red Birch, and Perriello’s efforts on its behalf?

  Six Republicans challenged him. The winner of the primary was a go-along-to-get-along state senator named Robert Hurt. One day in August, three months before the midterms, Perriello began vomiting and couldn’t stop. For several nights he got no sleep. After two years of coffee and Diet Coke all day, and scotch or Jack Daniel’s in the evenings, and never enough water, he was completely dehydrated.

  November came. On the day before the election, Perriello was frantically campaigning alongside Senator Mark Warner in Martinsville. At the Sirloin House the two politicians went table to table greeting diners, some of whom didn’t want to look up from their cheese fries. Dean Price was there—he’d shown up to say hi and good luck—and he and Perriello exchanged a hug.

  “You’ve put up with a lot, I’ve put up with a lot,” Perriello told him, “but we’re on the right path, the path of righteousness! You know I believe in what you’re doing, keeping that money in the community instead of sending it to petrodictators.”

  The news cameras were rolling, and Dean picked up his cue. “It’s what I call the leaky bucket effect. Ninety cents on every dollar of oil and eighty-six cents at the big-box stores leaves the community.”

  Perriello lowered his voice. “Once this craziness is over in a couple of weeks, let’s sit down over a beer.”

  There wasn’t time to say more. Perriello was on his way to the next joint—Pigs-R-Us—and the day had barely begun.

  The next day a woman named Lorna voted at the Ridgeway Ruritan Club, a one-story cinder block building on a wooded side street near the speedway south of Martinsville. Then she positioned herself on the sidewalk with a sign that said HURT. Lorna was a retired schoolteacher, about seventy, short and round inside a green woolen coat with a peaked hood. The rims of her sunglasses had a leopard-skin pattern, and under heavy lipstick her mouth was tight.

  “This country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” Lorna fairly spat, “and I will riot in the street if I have to. I have never been so ashamed of the way that man has diminished the presidency. He doesn’t dress properly, he calls certain people enemies, and he talks about certain networks. He is just what he is, a Chicago agitator. He does not have presidential qualities, he doesn’t represent all the people. We had statesmen—now all we have are politicians. I have never seen a president who has tried to change this country—this country does not need changing—fundamentally transform this country and we don’t need that from a Chicago agitator.”

  Lorna listened to talk radio and watched Fox News because the others were so obviously biased—that David Broder column yesterday, saying Obama was so much smarter than everyone else! And then there was Al Gore, living in his mansion and flying on his private jet, yet Lorna was supposed to pay everything she had in taxes after she and her husband never went on a cruise and didn’t buy extravagant cars and saved every penny he made working as a supervisor at the DuPont plant so they could enjoy life together and he could golf after retirement, but then they never had the chance. If he could hear her running off her mouth like this, he would turn over in his grave and say, “Lorna, shut up,” but now that she was retired from the school she could say what she wanted, and she had a lot on her mind. “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat french fries or Coca-Cola—no way! They want to tell me what to think. I have thought for myself all my life and I’ve done okay. I came from nothing, and I have never been so despondent as I am now. You can’t be the super force around the world if the economy is weak. I just hope and pray that this country can get back on the right track.”

  Lorna’s fury was ebbing. She hadn’t mentioned her congressman once.

  That night, Perriello and his family and staff waited for the results in the offices of a small financial services company, above a wine bar in historic downtown Charlottesville, the prosperous apex of the Fifth District.

  “All right, everybody,” Perriello called out, “we outperformed in Danville by a thousand votes!” A cheer went up. At eight o’clock half the precincts had reported and Perriello was trailing 53 to 45 percent, but those were mainly rural areas. Charlottesville started coming in, but Hurt’s lead held. Perriello’s press secretary was trying to keep the networks from making a call. Perriello gave a wry smile. “We’re surging back! Not really. But we’re doing better. Let’s keep closing that number.” At eight thirty Henry County finally reported, and Perriello got killed there. Red Birch hadn’t made a dime’s worth of difference.

  He lost, 51 to 47 percent. He came closer than other Virginia Democrats who were defeated, including long-serving ones, including ones who had taken safer votes. The aide who had traveled the district in early
2009 looking for projects to fund told Perriello, “We hit a gale force wind.” Across the country it was a rout for the president’s party.

  Perriello gathered his family together. Some of them were crying. He was the most cheerful person in the room.

  “I’ll tell you this—I don’t know why, but I feel great. We left it all on the table. Not everyone who lost tonight fought for forty million Americans to get health insurance coverage and cover preexisting conditions. Not everyone who lost tonight came up with a national energy strategy. This is the way we do things—high risk, high reward, leave it all on the table.” Perriello was smiling. “I kind of feel a weight lifted.”

  * * *

  Once, when Ryan was around thirteen, Dean took him to the big Labor Day flea market and gun show in Hillsville, Virginia. On Dean’s recommendation, Ryan spent his money on a bubble gum machine. The idea was to put it in the convenience store next to the biodiesel refinery in Bassett and start making a little money. “It was sort of a lesson to teach him,” Dean said. “The reason most people stay poor, in my opinion, is they don’t know the difference between an asset and a liability. Most people thought their homes were an asset, but they were a liability. The best way to tell the difference is if something puts money in your pocket, it’s an asset, and if it takes money out of your pocket, it’s a liability, very simply. Buying a bubble gum machine and getting a return on that asset I thought was a very valuable lesson.”

  The next year, when Dean’s truck stop company was liquidated and he lost the store, the bubble gum machine had to be taken home and put away in a closet. Dean hated for Ryan to lose his investment that way. But Napoleon Hill said that with every adversity there was a seed of equal benefit.