At 9:28 a.m., swelling, majestic music—the soundtrack to the movie Air Force One—fills the air as Paul Ryan emerges onto the deck of the USS Wisconsin and strides down the ramp toward a cheering, flag-waving crowd below. The retired battleship is a museum on the Norfolk, Virginia, waterfront. On this Saturday morning, August 11, it is draped in bunting—a perfect political prop. Paul is waving his long arms, his grin huge, as he walks a roped-off path through the crowd, then steps onto a stage, at which point he reaches out to grip the outstretched hand of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for president.
They lean into a hug, then walk around a podium to face the cheering flag wavers, after an awkward instant during which Paul figures out where to stand. Romney has just announced that Paul is his vice presidential running mate, and they have never, before this moment, appeared together on the campaign trail.
Two tall, handsome, dark-haired men, they stand side by side until Romney pats Paul’s arm, steps away, and walks down a few steps off the back of the stage. The movie music fades, then stops.
Paul is alone on the stage. He is about to utter his first words as candidate for vice president. He is still grinning and, for a heartbeat, looks just a bit overwhelmed as he turns and stretches his right arm toward the bunting-draped battleship and says: “Wow! Hey. And right in front of the U.S.S. Wisconsin, huh? Man!”
The Norfolk crowd roars.
Back in Janesville, it has been four and a half years since Barack Obama arrived at the General Motors plant on a winter morning, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in the first months of the recession. Now, jobs and good pay are still too scarce, not just in Janesville, but in enough places that the issue is dominating 2012 presidential politics. Republicans have been blaming the economy’s slow recovery on policies of the Democratic administration in the White House, calculating that the blame will deny Obama a second term. In introducing Paul, Romney has just called him “an intellectual leader” of the Republican Party. He has his chairmanship of the House Budget Committee. He has his “roadmap” for cutting federal spending, curbing the federal deficit, and reconfiguring the government’s main entitlement programs. Among various Republicans whose names have surfaced over the months as possible running mates, Paul has been regarded as a bold, conservative option for a Romney campaign that has not been defined by boldness.
With this unexpected choice, Romney already is drawing attention to his running mate’s hometown. “Paul Ryan works in Washington, but his beliefs remain firmly rooted in Janesville, Wisconsin,” Romney said, moments before Paul’s appearance on the battleship deck. “He combines a profound sense of responsibility for what we owe the next generation with an unbounded optimism in America’s future and an understanding of all the wonderful things the American people can do.” The GOP presidential candidate was describing Janesville’s can-do spirit in a nutshell.
Paul was, in fact, home as recently as yesterday afternoon when he was spirited away to this spot in Virginia’s Tidewater through a clandestine plan to keep Romney’s decision secret so that the battleship-and-bunting theatrics would remain unspoiled. After attending a memorial service yesterday, Paul walked in the front door of his house on Courthouse Hill and out his back door. He sneaked through the small woods in which he had played as a boy, past the spot where he had built a wooden fort as a kid, and onto the driveway of the house in which he had grown up. In the driveway, a car driven by the nineteen-year-old son of a Romney campaign aide was idling, ready to take him to a small chartered plane that was waiting for him at a suburban Chicago airfield, along with his wife, Janna, and the kids, Liza, Charlie, and Sam.
Less than twenty-four hours after this covert departure, television crews from the major networks already are on Main Street. Their arrival, and the televised image of Paul striding down the battleship ramp, are elating Janesville. They are salve for bruised political feelings. They narrow the fissures that have been widening since the assembly plant closed, culminating in the recall election two months ago. Who wouldn’t be proud to have a native son of Janesville on a presidential ticket?
Well, not quite everyone is proud. Over at the Job Center, Bob Borremans is uncertain that having Paul in the White House would be helpful. During the nine years that Bob has been the Job Center’s director, he has invited the congressman to come take a look, to see what the needs are and see how the center is doing at helping people try to get back on their feet. He has asked Paul’s staff so many times whether the congressman could come take a look that he has stopped bothering to ask.
But with the TV crews on Main Street and the theatrics in Norfolk, such skepticism is a minority view. Even among people who dislike Paul’s fiscal and social conservatism, his appearance on the battleship is stirring hope in Janesville that his candidacy will lift the city’s fortunes. Tim Cullen, the state senator who is one of the last surviving moderates in the legislature in Madison, doesn’t share Paul’s pure faith in the private sector, in private charity to solve social problems. Still, Tim has begun to say around town: “It can’t possibly hurt to have the vice president of the United States come from Janesville.” Paul is, Tim has begun to point out, the first Wisconsinite ever to become a vice presidential candidate for a major political party. Tim has begun to say such things as he is having political troubles of his own, even within the State Senate’s Democratic caucus. Less than a month ago, he quit the caucus in protest for a few days, saying that perhaps he would become an independent because the State Senate’s Democratic leader had just punished him for his bipartisan leanings by denying him the chairmanship of any meaningful Senate committee. The two resolved their spat, but for Tim the episode was another depressing sign of the polarization that has seized Wisconsin’s politics.
Of course, delight over Paul’s ascension is greatest among those who have been trying hard to bring new jobs to town, marketing Janesville as a good place to do business. John Beckord, an ally of Mary Willmer’s as the leader of the business association, Forward Janesville, is delighted. Last night, when the rumors started to filter across town and the first TV crews arrived, his delight was mixed with a realization that he would need to handle Paul’s candidacy with delicacy. Forward Janesville is apolitical. It does not endorse candidates, even if the businessmen and businesswomen who attend its meetings tend to share Paul’s views in favor of the private sector and against government deficits. Still, John is ecstatic that Janesville is becoming a household name. “It doesn’t hurt,” he is telling people, “to maybe have a favorable connection in the minds of people as they think of Janesville as an opportunity for investment. ‘Oh yes, that’s the home of Paul Ryan.’ We couldn’t buy this kind of public relations.”
As for Paul himself? After fourteen years as a congressman, he is forty-two years old and, at this moment, standing in a dark suit and white open-collared shirt with the gray battleship behind him, eight minutes into his first speech as a candidate for vice president. He has just condemned “a record of failure” by the Obama White House. “We are in a different and dangerous moment,” he says.
“I have seen and heard from a lot of families, from a lot of those who are running small businesses, and from people who are in need. But what I’ve heard lately, that’s what troubles me the most. There is something different in their voice, in their words. What I hear from them are diminished dreams, lowered expectations, uncertain futures.
“I hear some people say, this is just the new normal.” And now his voice crescendos, his right hand jabbing at air. “Higher unemployment, declining incomes, and crushing debt is not a new normal!”
Though he does not say so, Paul could be trying to comfort his hometown.
Thirty hours later, early Sunday evening, he arrives with Romney for what the campaign is billing as Paul’s homecoming rally.
It is an emotional scene. Governor Walker has the microphone onstage and has just whipped up the crowd. “Isn’t it great to have a Cheesehead on the ballot?” the governor yells out
as he introduces “America’s comeback team.” The majestic Air Force One movie music swells again, and Paul weaves through the crowd, shaking hands, greeting people he knows, Romney a few paces behind. By the time he bounds onto the stage, Paul’s hands are on his cheeks, wiping away tears. He and the governor share a long hug. He blows kisses from the stage. His wife, Janna, standing near the podium with their three kids, points out someone in the crowd. And so, as the movie music subsides, Paul leans into the microphone, and the first words he says are: “Hi, Mom!”
Walker is standing center-stage, right behind him, as Paul thanks the crowd and says, “It is good to be home. Oh, oh, I tell you, I love Wisconsin!”
It is a beautiful homecoming, and Romney is beaming at the Wisconsin Republicans’ adulation for a native son.
Except that, for Paul’s hometown, there is just one catch. This rally is not taking place in Janesville. It is taking place at the Waukesha County Expo Center, the site of Walker’s recall election victory speech forty-seven nights ago. The Expo Center is a few miles beyond the northern boundary of Paul’s congressional district, in a district represented by another Republican congressman, Jim Sensenbrenner. Waukesha is not like Janesville. Waukesha is one of the most reliable, solid Republican parts of the state.
Sure, Janesville is home. Two weeks from now, as Paul prepares to leave for the GOP presidential nominating convention in Tampa, Florida, he will be introduced by his older brother, Tobin, at a send-off rally in the gym of Craig High School, their alma mater, and Tobin will say that the values and people of Janesville have forged this candidate. Paul’s seven-year-old, Sam, will be wearing a Cheesehead hat, orange foam and shaped like a wedge of cheddar. But none of that counts for much today. This is presidential politics, with its narrow margin of error. And so when it comes to homecoming rallies, after the heckling that Paul endured from pro-union agitators at last year’s Labor Fest parade, and elsewhere around his district since then, the Romney-Ryan campaign organization is not taking any chances.
44
Labor Fest 2012
“We’re about ten minutes from parade step-off,” WCLO radio DJ Tim Bremer booms into his microphone from the reviewing stand along Main Street, across from the grassy swell of Courthouse Park. “Getting ready to start the Labor Fest parade here in Janesville.”
The clowns, as always, are first to bend from Milwaukee Street onto Main, tossing hard candies toward the kids scrambling off the laps of parents, who have brought their lawn chairs to the sidewalks that, on this day, September 3, are radiating a steamy heat.
This Labor Day is a shimmery scorcher. Compared with the old days, when as many as fifty thousand pressed together on these sidewalks for the parade, a few more storefronts than usual are sporting “For Rent” signs, and there is more room between the lawn chairs on the sidewalks. None of that dims the festive feeling that lives on—at once homey and electric.
The clowns give way to a phalanx of motorcycle-revving police in bright yellow shirts and navy shorts. Next comes the Janesville Patriotic Society, founded back in 1930, when the assembly plant already had been turning out its Chevrolets for seven years. And then comes the 2012 parade marshal, Pam Weadge, who worked at the plant for thirty years until it closed and now spends her time running karaoke at the VFW hall.
The Labor Fest parade connects Janesville with its past, even as it exposes what has changed. “The Parade of Champions” the celebration’s crowning event was called from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the UAW local, the Central Labor Council, and the town’s business owners all came together for the planning. During those years, workers from the local gathered down at the union hall, setting aside the labor of assembling Chevys to assemble parade floats, each year’s seeming more elaborate than the last. One year illustrated the benefits that unions conferred on working men and women, with a family on a simulated fishing trip atop a float with a fake stream. Another year, the parade set a world record for a hitched team, with a three-hundred-foot extravaganza—eight ponies and sixty-four llamas towing a wagon. Labor Fest, as the celebration has been called in more recent years, pulled in enough donations to hire the nation’s top-rated fife and drum corps.
Three years ago, the first Labor Fest after General Motors left town, the parade still had 152 units, marching from Five Corners through downtown to just below the reviewing stand. Today, Bremer, the DJ with his folksy style and radio-rich baritone, is announcing just eighty-three parade units. With Labor Fest no longer drawing enough donations to bring in bands, the only fife and drum corps coming down Main Street is Janesville’s own, formed for the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial. The only marching bands are from the city’s two high schools: the Parker Vikings in their emerald green and gold uniforms and the Craig Cougars in their royal blue.
As for the autoworkers who for so many decades were the parade’s chief sponsors and backbone, not only does Local 95 no longer have a float, no unit of autoworkers is marching today at all. Just two old guys in black T-shirts and union caps, each holding up one end of a dowel from which hangs a square banner that says, “UAW Local 95 Retirees.”
Yet there is an aspect of the parade even more surprising than the absence of autoworkers. The surprise is riding down Main Street in a borrowed white carriage with crimson lining. The carriage is just behind the marshal and just in front of the local fifers and drummers who are faint reminders of the parade’s more affluent days.
“Goodwill Ambassador Ann Forbeck,” the radio DJ announces, introducing the social worker who has been trying to knit together the frayed lives of the city’s growing crop of homeless kids. As Ann holds up her goodwill plaque, Kayla and Cory, two of the students from the film Sixteen Forty-Nine, are sitting across from her. They ride backward on the carriage’s red velvet seats, smiling and waving like any teenagers would in a spiffy parade carriage, and not like kids who at times haven’t had a safe place to sleep at night.
As the DJ is booming out thanks to Ann for her “dedication to our community,” no one in the crowd reacts, other than with polite applause, to what would once have been the unthinkable sight of a Labor Fest parade unit bearing homeless kids right down Main Street.
45
Pill Bottles
Late in the summer, Rock County sheriff Bob Spoden gets a report from the commander who oversees the jail: One of the correctional officers was having an improper relationship with an inmate. Other inmates were talking about it.
The silver-haired sheriff is genial, but he also is no-nonsense. He grew up in Janesville, the son of a sheriff’s deputy, so that a Spoden has been in law enforcement in town for a half century. Bob was the department’s chief deputy before he was first elected sheriff six years ago. Now he does what a sheriff under these circumstances is supposed to do. He opens an investigation into correctional officer Kristi Beyer.
The improper relationship hasn’t been going on long—about two months—but the report is lengthy. It documents the allegations of the affair, the food, the drugs, and more. Kristi could be fired. She could face criminal charges because, under Wisconsin law, it is illegal for a correctional officer to have sexual contact with an inmate, no matter who initiates it, because the law regards inmates as unable to give consent.
So far, the sheriff and his staff have not told Kristi about the investigation. At 10:30 p.m. on Monday, September 17, when Kristi reports for her overnight shift, the sheriff’s chief deputy summons her. The chief deputy tells her that she is under investigation. She tells Kristi that she is on paid administrative leave. She tells her to surrender her jail keys. She tells her to return for an investigational interview at 1:30 p.m. on September 19. A commander escorts her out the door.
Kristi tells her mother what has happened. She does not want to go through questioning. She thinks that she is going to be fired, that she might even get some jail time herself.
“Well, let’s go then,” her mother says to her. “Let’s leave. What do we got here? Nothing. I will go wherever you want
.”
Kristi’s suspension begins five days before her fortieth birthday. Since she was a girl, Kristi has liked people making a fuss over her birthday. This past Friday, she asked her mother to go with her on an early birthday shopping trip to Johnson Creek, the outlet stores forty minutes away, between Madison and Milwaukee.
Kristi was in a good shopping mood. She had been dieting, and her five-foot-five frame fit into size 8 jeans. She bought a pair.
Her mother, Linda, was surprised that Kristi talked so much about her new guy. Her mother let her talk.
“Give him a chance,” Kristi said.
He was out of jail now, but that, in her mother’s view, didn’t make it any better. “I don’t approve of you going with a prisoner,” she told Kristi.
On their way home, they stopped at Olive Garden, the same one where Kristi and Barb and their families had celebrated on the spring day more than two years ago when they graduated with honors with their criminal justice degrees from Blackhawk Tech.
That evening, Kristi went out and got a tattoo on her right foot—an infinity symbol, shaped like a sideways figure eight. Inside one loop of the symbol was “Josh,” her son. Inside the other was “Ty,” the guy from the jail. She went home and showed off her fresh tattoo to her mother.
Kristi and her husband, Bob, have been sleeping lately in separate bedrooms, hers on the left at the end of the hall, his on the right. At 5:20 a.m. on Wednesday, before he leaves the house for his commute to the state office building in Madison, Bob steps into her room to say goodbye. Normally, Kristi wouldn’t be home yet from her overnight shift, but this is the second morning of her suspension. When he steps in, she is wearing a gray T-shirt and white leggings with two silver pendant necklaces—an angel and a cross. She is on her left side with an arm hanging over the bed’s edge. She does not seem to be breathing.
Janesville Page 22