Admit The Horse

by P. G. Abeles

  Before the primary season, his mother had taken the unusual step of asking him to help McCracken. He wasn’t really interested in the election, which at the time, looked like a foregone conclusion for McCracken, anyway. By the time he’d been recruited by a business school buddy to help Okono, he’d frankly forgotten all about her request. Oh, well, he figured. She’d get over it.

  Anyway, he thought Okono’s story would appeal to his parents, and, at first it had. His mother always proudly told the tale of how she had been in the audience in November of 1958 when Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. preached at the Salem Baptist Church in North Omaha. Both of Johannsen’s parents participated in multiple civil rights demonstrations—including the protest to end segregation at Omaha’s Peony Park amusement park in 1963. Early on, when he told them about his fundraising for Okono, both had told him that they were supporting McCracken, but if Okono were the nominee they’d happily support him. Privately Johannsen suspected that his mother was supporting McCracken, and his father was supporting his mother.

  But something had happened at the caucuses to change their minds. Neither of his parents was exactly voluble. As a general rule, he knew that Swedes (notoriously and proudly tightfisted) approach speaking as if it costs you something. But his mother, always so kindly and measured, had taken to referring to Okono as a ‘thug’ and a ‘cheat.’ Johannsen was appalled.

  Oh, well, he figured, nobody likes to lose. Perhaps they were more invested in the primaries than he’d suspected. With the kids playing out back, he figured he’d work on his dad a little about Okono while his mother was making dinner. His father was a big deal in the local Kiwanis and Lions Clubs; his opinion carried weight. Johannsen extolled the virtues of Okono and his incredible personal story. But to Johannsen’s surprise, his father appeared completely uninterested. He barely looked at his son, but continued watching the television as if his life depended on it, stone-faced and unbending. With her super-acute maternal hearing, his mother must have overheard his pitch. All of a sudden Paul realized his considerate, temperate, unflappable mother was… furious. He could tell by the way she was slapping the mashed potatoes on the kids’ plates as they sat down to eat at the large farm table. Oh, brother! What was this? His mother was making Johannsen really uncomfortable.

  Okay, he did feel a little guilty when his mother told him how disappointed she was that he wasn’t supporting McCracken, a woman. When he launched into his usual spiel about Okono’s great story fulfilling dreams for a better America, she held up her hand.

  “There is more than one way to make a better America,” she said, looking pointedly at his daughter.

  Johannsen shifted uncomfortably in the hard rush seat, but said nothing. What was going on? His mother was always so nice!

  She continued, “Electing a woman president is something I always dreamed about.” His twelve-year-old daughter looked confused.

  “Wait,” she interrupted: “Grandma: Are you saying there’s never been a woman president—of any color?”

  His mother remained silent, looking at Paul as if inviting him to answer. Johannsen paused, scratched his head and looked uncomfortable. His daughter looked at him thoughtfully. He knew he was always harping on what a historic election this was. Should he have told her? Didn’t she know? His mother and daughter exchanged a silent look, as the older woman shook her head ‘no.’ Now his son piped up; full of the confidence of a precocious ten- year-old.

  “That can’t be right, Grandma. Girls make up like half the population. African Americans are only like 14%.”

  The uncomfortable discussion continued throughout dinner. Perhaps, his mother had said to him pointedly, placing a large roast on the table, he owed a little more to white women than to black men.

  “C’mon, Mom,” Johannsen, said, feeling like he was getting the worst of the exchange. This was all rather unfair. She was making it sound like he was a bad guy, here.

  “You’re not suggesting I support a candidate because she’s white?”

  His mother bristled at the suggestion. “Certainly not.” She regarded him steadily: “I’m suggesting you should be supporting McCracken because both candidates would make history, and she’s more qualified.” His father, whose head was bowed as he said a silent blessing, now said, perhaps coincidentally, a loud “Amen.”

  Wow. For the first time in his life, Johannsen thought about his incredibly capable mother in the context of her life, not of his. Frankly, it had never occurred to him before that she might have wanted a different life. Moms had dreams? What was that all about? Was his mother, God forbid, a feminist? Probably she was spending too much time volunteering at the Women’s Crisis Center again, or something. Stuff like that always got them a little antsy. He remembered when Joan was answering some domestic- abuse hotline. He finally told her she had to stop. She had been coming home brimming with anger and furious about injustice. Worse yet, she wanted to tell Paul all about it. Ugggh. No. Who wants to hear stories like that? Thank heaven she’d given it up.

  But, Johannsen conceded, maybe his mother did have a point. Women had basically fed, clothed and educated him—well, to the present day. Of course, he supposed he was grateful and all. But was that enough reason to vote for one?

  As he entered the Okono headquarters the next day, Johannsen decided it was not. He understood women voting by gender just as African Americans were voting overwhelmingly by race. However, since he was neither a woman nor an African American, that left him in the clear, he posited. Was he not voting for McCracken because she was a woman? That was a tough one, because in the back of his mind there was a niggling voice that told him maybe that was part of it. Perhaps it was paranoia, but he felt like his daughter was looking at him with a more appraising eye. Oh, well, Johannsen thought, she was a teenager. When they got home Joan would explain things, take her to the mall and buy her some tank tops or something, smooth things over.

  When he was talking to his father this morning, he’d talked about Okono’s overwhelming support in the state. Why, he wondered, were the morning broadcasters still claiming it was a statistical dead heat? His father hated controversy of any kind, and clearly did not want to engage. Finally, he looked at his son with sympathy. “Son,” he said, “I wouldn’t take those caucus results to the bank, if I was you,” and that was all. Johannsen looked after him, gaping.

  Johannsen was surprised to see that the Okono campaign wasn’t projecting a big win either. “It’s going to be a squeaker!” someone doing phone push-polling called out from the back of the room. Everyone was rushing around. One group was calling out reporting numbers from various precincts which another volunteer wrote on a huge dry-erase board in an indecipherable scrawl. Other volunteers busily made calls to get people to the polls. Johannsen and the kids had volunteered to drive a mini-van to ferry people back and forth to the precinct. Eventually, the polls closed. It had been a long day. 92,000 people had participated, two-and-a-half-times the number that had participated in the caucus. And, most importantly, Okono won. But for some reason that was inexplicable to Johannsen, the margin of victory was far different than in the caucus. In the caucuses, a whopping 36 point spread favored Okono. In the primary, Okono won 49% to 46%, the point-spread a measly… three.

  Driving to Eppley Airfield in Omaha to catch a flight home the next day with his kids, Johannsen started talking to the limo driver. Traveling as much as he did, Johannsen had developed an enormous respect and appreciation for limo drivers. “What had happened?” he asked the driver. “What had changed, to collapse Okono’s margin of victory from the caucus blowout in February?” The limo driver looked at Johannsen curiously, and shrugged. “It didn’t count,” he said simply, as if it were obvious. “They didn’t need to cheat.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chicago, Illinois

  EVERYONE LIKES A STORY. Or at least that was The Professor’s first premise. The second premise was that all good stories have three elements: an exciting plot, an interesting
protagonist and finally, of course, a moral. The first story was the leadership story, or the story of self. And if anyone ever had an interesting story of self, Appelbaum mused, it was the aging, disheveled, but oddly luminous man seated across from him at the Formica conference table. In a campaign that prided itself on being cutting-edge, The Professor was clearly a throwback to an earlier time. Balding, bespectacled, with a walrus mustache and an irreverent grin, from the top of his unkempt head to the rainbow socks he wore with his Birkenstocks, The Professor exuded a kind of enthusiastic readiness for civic misadventure. It had always been so. Right from the beginning, The Professor seemed to have been destined for a life of contradiction: the son of a suburban rabbi devoted to the rights of rural farm workers, a privileged Caucasian who temporarily dropped out of Harvard to work for civil rights for poor blacks, a male American Jew who was teaching himself Arabic to work for social justice for Muslim women in the Middle East. Determinedly idealistic about his goals and yet ruthlessly cynical about the means necessary to achieve them. Raised in a community for whom the displacement of the dustbowl was a recent memory, The Professor had internalized the inequalities of life until the core of his being thrummed with a profound and personal commitment to social justice. Appelbaum knew enough of The Professor’s history with the Farm Workers to have taken the recommendation of one of the campaign’s Harvard policy wonks seriously, that this man was probably the world’s leading expert on ‘movement building.’

  In April 2007, with the sounds of an aria that the opera-obsessed Professor played constantly trilling in the background, Appelbaum and Okono had met with The Professor at his Victorian clapboard home on a tree-lined Cambridge street. All that had been required of them was to listen and marvel at the plan The Professor laid out for them. The plan was a result of a two-year study The Professor had undertaken at the request of one of the nation’s leading environmental groups. The Wilderness Project had been working to raise public awareness of conservation and ecology since the 1890s, but by their hundredth anniversary they appeared to have run out of steam, seldom able to mobilize their 800,000 members to communal action. After evaluating the performance of the group’s 63 chapters and 360 local organizations, The Professor had pinpointed the problem. The Wilderness Project’s volunteers were operating as ‘lone wolves,’ and the group was doing nothing to get them to network or cooperate with others. The solution: encourage the volunteers to build relationships among themselves. Relationships, which in the long run, would create a sense of obligation, when it was a question of whether or not to roll out of bed on a Saturday morning to meet up at a protest, or take action to support the group’s goals. The other issue was the appeal that The Wilderness Project made to supporters—which was rational, and issue-based, left-brain. It wasn’t motivating supporters to action, The Professor argued. To hook them, the appeal needed to be more manipulative, emotional, right-brain.

  The first area of the Okono campaign to draw on The Professor’s expertise was the internet operation. The Professor’s plan focused on pop-up ads on political websites, which invited potential supporters to sign up for social events; gave them the names of people most active in their area and encouraged them to contact them by email and attend a ‘meet-and-greet.’ From the psychological point of view (The Professor was, after all, a trained psychologist) it emphasized the primacy of relationships—to the group leader, to the other volunteers and most importantly to the candidate—over platforms or issues. Media pundits noted the brilliance of the strategy to create a relationship with the voter before the campaign asked for contributions—so refreshingly dignified after the McCracken campaign’s almost embarrassingly relentless begging for small dollar contributions. But the pundits didn’t bother to notice, Appelbaum thought to himself, that only a well-funded campaign could afford such a luxury.

  By June, the Professor had set up the field organizer and volunteer training systems, and the Okono Camps—week-long camps devoted to giving thousands of ‘leadership teams’ and local organizers crash courses in the take-no-prisoners Alinsky-based principles of community organizing. But the Professor brought more to organization building than the sometimes controversial tactics utilized by Alinsky. Because under The Professor’s direction, after the volunteers absorbed Okono’s mythologized personal story—“The Story of I,” there was a second story almost equally as powerful— “The Story of Us.” For Democrats discouraged by the ham-fisted policies of the current Republican administration, it was an irresistible invitation to join with other disaffected souls.

  Finally, there was “The Story of Now,” which included an explanation of the ‘skills of action’ identified by Alinsky. If some aspects of it seemed a little cynical, a little manipulative—there was nothing less at stake than the future of the country! How could they scruple over minor irregularities? The brilliance of the plan was that to the participants, the whole experience felt incredibly organic and personal—as if they were spontaneously and independently fomenting their own tidy revolution within the echo-y confines of an elementary school gymnasium. Unbeknownst to them, the whole process was orchestrated by a genius psychology professor, who had discovered that the personal storytelling during workshops created precisely the right kind of right brain appeal necessary to fully engage the volunteer.

  Of course, Appelbaum recalled, O. had at first resisted the reliance on emotions, uncomfortable that they might be creating something they couldn’t control. So, they’d given The Professor’s plan a road test. For the first primary in New Hampshire, they’d used a conventional organizing and marketing strategy. They lost. In Iowa and South Carolina, they’d instituted The Professor’s model, and won big. Okono was initially a little put-off by the “Mein Führer”-like mania that seemed to overtake his supporters as they started referring to him with quasi-religious zeal as “The One,” but he was quick to sense the power it gave him. After a disagreement with Appelbaum on the way to a campaign stop, his cold eyes bored into Appelbaum’s as he prepared to exit the limo. “Watch this,” he said simply as he exited the car to the roar of the waiting crowd’s adulation. It was a none-too-subtle reminder that the puppet could turn puppeteer.

  By June, The Professor had written a closely-held 280 page brass-knuckle instruction manual on every aspect of running the campaign, and more than 23,000 volunteers had participated in at least eight or more hours of what The Professor called ‘leadership training’ and what the McCracken camp called ‘obedience training.’ Rather than focusing on Okono’s record, or position on hot-button issues, volunteers were instructed to focus voter and media attention on Okono’s inspirational story and their own personal stories—the more hard-luck and tribulation-filled the better. The student taking the semester off, the single mother of four working as a waitress, the taxidriver working his way through night school, the university professors and champagne liberals passing out flyers and getting their hands dirty—the high-low involvement of these people, the campaign argued, was evidence of the ‘new politics’ of hope and inspiration, of respect and empowerment that the Okono campaign was all about. Of course, the voters and the media weren’t allowed to read The Professor’s 280 page training manual—that, after all, might have told a different story.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rockville, Maryland

  WITH OKONO CONTINUING TO POWER through the caucus states, and McCracken prevailing in the big state primaries, it was clear that the Democratic National Committee was going to be forced to come to a decision about how to handle the delegates of the states that had moved the date of their primaries. The tickets to watch the deliberations of the Democratic Party elders were supposed to be available online on a first-come, first-served basis. Under its own charter (the Democratic National Committee is a private corporation, after all, despite its public role) the meetings of the 30-member Rules and By-laws Committee (RBC) were required to be held in public. Requests for tickets were to be made online or by fax—and the DNC provided a date and t
ime: Tuesday, May 22nd at 10:00 a.m. Trying to pre-subscribe earlier would be useless, the DNC warned. Tickets would only be available at 10:00:00 exactly.

  However, when McCracken supporters logged on at the hour stroke to request tickets, most were diverted to a mandatory ‘Party Builder’ volunteer sign-up page. When they completed the form, and re-loaded the ticket request form, the tickets were gone. The rumor was that Okono supporters had been told in advance to pre-register. When they logged on, the cookies on their computers took them directly to the ticket request page.

  The DNC had also insisted that tickets would ONLY be available by fax or over the Internet. However when hundreds of Okono supporters showed up in person at 9:00 a.m. at the DNC’s 4th Street, S.W, D.C. headquarters, tickets were distributed to them first, the number then subtracted from the pool of those available online. The McCracken supporters were outraged—considering it one more example of the Okono campaign scamming the system with the willful assistance of the people running the Democratic Party. Perhaps it was not a hopeful sign that the page on the DNC website devoted to providing instructions on the ticketing process to both sides, had a link to “Join Team Okono.”