by Alan Huffman
The problem with our New Orleans effort is that everything about it—the actual work and our quest for collateral entertainment—is so relentlessly productive. It’s hard to keep it up around the clock. Such are the hazards of attempting to balance the execution of gravely important, occasionally mind-numbing tasks with local stimulation. Sometimes we go too far. But the work should be fun. Life is short.
Our two weeks in New Orleans follows a particularly enervating stint in Baton Rouge, which had left us yearning for stimulation. Most state capitals are uniformly bland government towns, but you’d expect Baton Rouge to be an exception, Louisiana being a culturally rich state where people aren’t at all surprised when their governor serves time. And yet, in Baton Rouge we endured a week of institutional doldrums, eating the same Chinese buffet every day, spending countless hours combing through legislative journals, breathing fumes from the petrochemical refineries that line the riverfront. At one point Michael began loudly pounding on a broken copy machine at the state library, which caused something of a stir. It’s pretty obvious when we’re getting worn down by a summer of nonstop, highly detailed trouble. New Orleans is close to home, but we’re here for two weeks, and what’s next up I can’t even remember now.
During the height of the campaign season we’re gone more than we’re home, returning every few weeks for a few days to pay bills, touch base with friends and family, finalize our latest oppo report, search the web for hotels and restaurants and addresses and whatever at our next destination—all while fielding calls from campaign staffers and consultants eager to know when we’ll finish our work or wanting follow-up research, or setting up conference calls with pollsters who need assurance that their questions are supported by our documentation. The pace doesn’t slow from May to October. Our lives become a blur of airport terminals, highway signs, building directories and document files. At one point I ended up in Arizona, and I no longer even recall why. All I remember is burning my fingers on the rental car’s door handle because it was so hot, and staying in a nice hotel at the base of a mesa.
Touring the country like this can make us feel like Natural Born Researchers on an interstate rampage. We may research twenty candidates in a single summer, and the travel, the research and dealing with the campaigns can be intense. It’s all so negative, and even we have our limits. At such times the need for entertainment becomes more pronounced, particularly after spending hours on an interstate highway in a cheap rental car that weaves unpredictably. We often take the long way back to our hotel in hopes of happening on some odd roadside attraction, such as our encounter with Chatty Belle, the World’s Largest Talking Cow, a fiberglass bovine that stood proudly beside her mute, vandalized calf on a Wisconsin highway shoulder, not far from an empty tractor-trailer that once held the largest replica piece of cheese in history—seventeen tons of it—in honor of the real hunk of cheese that was featured at the 1964 World’s Fair.
A lot of what passes for opposition research today is done exclusively on the web by people with no real knowledge of the local context, but we, for many reasons, find it useful to get to know a place, up close and personal. It’s not only because the web is notoriously unreliable, and that some records aren’t available online. It’s also because you get a better sense of the context. Any reporter will tell you that you get a better story when you go to the scene of the action, rather than conduct interviews over the phone. Though she never came out and said it, Chatty Belle was clearly repping for the dairy lobby, which hinted that our subject candidate’s history of voting for dairy price supports might not cause much consternation there.
Invariably there’s a lot of free time, after the government offices close for the day and on weekends, and at such times we may find ourselves piloting a rented boat on a shimmering Minnesota lake or hanging on every sonorous word uttered by a beautiful Creole woman leading a tour of a Mississippi River plantation house (one of the rare occasions when we opted to take the guided tour). It’s definitely more fun when the nature of the research calls for us to travel together, though on solo trips there’s a better chance of meeting and getting to know someone new.
The trips offer a view of the United States we wouldn’t otherwise be likely to see. Our vantage point is much like it was of the Statue of Liberty that day in Jersey City—from behind. We see homeless people in Des Moines, staggering down the street with their shoulders hunched and heads down, while the candidate we’re researching is off in Washington, voting to subsidize the multinational corporations that fund his campaigns. In Cedar Rapids we pass a group of cocky young guys working on a car in the parking lot of the Tastee Freez, as if transplanted from a Bruce Springsteen song, and notice that the whole town smells like cereal, owing to the Ralston and Quaker Oats mills. In Dallas we visit the Texas Book Depository and gaze out the window from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK; in DC we stop at the Dupont Hilton on Embassy Row and see the spot where Reagan was shot. In Minneapolis we visit what used to be the great falls of the Mississippi, which have eroded away, and I imagine the eagle aeries that once were clustered around the falls, which were held sacred by the Dakotas but are now supplanted by parks and the ruins of factories; meanwhile, a few blocks away, stands a ridiculous statue of Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air—an example of local culture defining itself by imagery invented by TV.
Beyond finding something useful for the campaigns, we’re inspired by seeing how the behavior of local politicians illustrates what’s going on in America—how politics influences and is influenced by the people we meet or observe along the way. We compile our cultural audits from a variety of sources, and have gotten pretty good at finding entertainment along the way, though sometimes both endeavors are challenging—for reasons vastly different than in New Orleans. Sadly, many places, including most of the midwestern corn belt, are studies in bad architecture and soul-sapping ennui. In such cases we sometimes resort to inventing games, such as searching for quirky businesses and signs. In particular, for some reason, we’ve focused on beauty parlor names: Hair Explosion, Glitz International by Mavis, Hair by the Sea, Shabazz Hair Care Oasis of Red Lick. One of the salons was close to home—Tina’s Magnificent Beauty Closet, so we were aware when it later burned, and was rebuilt as, simply, Tina’s Beauty Closet, the magnificence apparently having gone up in flames.
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 l
ooks 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 a
s 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.