George Packer's Blog, page 246

The Day After in Virginia

A few notes from Virginia the day after the big Republican win:

My host in Charlottesvile, a University of Virginia professor who once ran for Congress himself, pointed out that Tom Perriello's loss came down to one distinct class: the country-club Republicans in Albemarle County, which surrounds the town. Two years ago, many of them voted for Perriello because they were embarrassed by the district's Muslim- and immigrant-baiting incumbent, Virgil Goode. Their children had been patients of Tom's pediatrician father, my host said; they liked Tom, he was welcome in their living rooms, he wouldn't get the carpet dirty. Then came the big reform legislation that Perriello unapologetically supported. Suddenly he didn't seem so much like their kind of guy. This year, the Republican, Robert Hurt, who ran the country's least conspicuous campaign, passed the carpet test with flying colors: he's a country-club Republican himself. So the moderates in the party switched their vote, and that was enough to end Perriello's brief political career—at least for now. It's easy to imagine similar swings by similar groups of voters in the middle all over the country.

To the southwest, in the Appalachian corner of the state, Perriello's veteran colleague Rick Boucher also lost. The shock waves could be felt in Charlottesville. This morning I drove across the Shenandoah range—amazing fall colors—and reached Carroll County around one o'clock in the afternoon. Hillsville is the flea-market capital of the western world and another small American town in decline. Large Boucher signs lined Route 58. The owner of the Race In truck stop is a local poor boy made good named Greg Crowder, and he could hardly believe the result. For three decades, Boucher had done good things for the district—gotten buses for the county schools, money for water and sewer repairs, thousands of jobs—while his opponent was a state legislator who didn't even live in the district and used his power in Richmond to block school aid and other helpful projects. The difference here wasn't country-club Republicans but the coal miners in Washington County: historically stalwarts of Boucher, they turned against him over his vote for cap-and-trade. Crowder wrote a salute to Boucher on his Facebook page last night; last I looked, it got 290 comments.

At forty-five, Crowder is a big, baby-faced ex-football player, an excellent raconteur, and a lifelong Republican. Born poor, he's clawed his way up through various businesses; the main one is wholesaling NASCAR souvenirs and paraphernalia. Here's what he said about Obama today:

"You know, Republicans, they're owned by the oil companies. I was brought up to vote Republican—Obama's the first Democratic President I voted for, which I kind of regret. It was for reform, change, morals, ethics, no more back-room deals. All the things he ran on and he didn't do it. People here were for and against health care, but they turned against Obama when he started buying votes. The death panels—I believed it, because he never said it wasn't true. This is what I'd have liked him to say: 'Show me where it is in this bill. Where is it?' What made it look like it was more true was when he started buying them votes—if his own party had to be bought, why was it so good? When he, a year ago, when he seen the people turning, he should have backed off. If you're President of the United States, you got to be like a chess player and think two or three years ahead."

"If a candidate could run right along the borderline and pick the best that either side says, I'd vote for him if he was an atheist." Crowder hadn't heard of Michael Bloomberg, but he seemed interested. "They said Obama was a hard-core leftist Muslim and it remains to be seen if it's true—I didn't care about that. I just wanted him to solve problems, and he didn't do it." What could Obama do to regain support here? "I don't think he can do it, because of all those deals he did." What about ending the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy? "This store does eleven million dollars a year and it's lucky to make two hundred grand. Small business runs America, and that tax increase is a death tax on small business. The people that need to be taxed are those people like Halliburton and these corporations that send their operations offshore. That needs to be stopped—trickle down. It didn't work. We're taxing the wrong people. We need to be taxing these corporations. Raise income taxes on millionaires instead."

Crowder wasn't eager to see the Republicans back in power. He feared they'd weaken Democratic legislation that had reduced the fees he has to pay the credit-card companies. There were many ways he saw the Democrats as potentially on his side, as long as the other side was the corporations. But my strong sense is that Obama's hold on the country clubbers, the miners, and the truck-stop owners was always tenuous at best, and it's gone. What can he do? What everyone in southern Virginia talks about—in tones of despair—is jobs. The Republican plan—tax cuts, then more tax cuts, then some more tax cuts—isn't going to make a dent in the staggering unemployment numbers (unofficially, forty percent in Carroll County, according to Crowder). So Obama needs to find a way to put a jobs plan on the table—money to the states for infrastructure, say—and let the other party come to him or not. Then he'd have an argument he might be able to win, even here.

See more of The New Yorker's coverage of the midterm elections.

The Era of the Disappearing Era

Tom Perriello went down to defeat tonight in Virginia's Fifth District. The first returns had him behind by double digits; then he clawed back and ended up losing by just four percentage points, 51-47. The race was over within two hours of the polls closing. Last time around, in 2008, it took a couple of weeks for a recount to give Perriello an upset victory over the incumbent Republican, Virgil Goode. Tonight, in the same offices over the same Charlottesville wine bar, he and his mother and brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and staff watched the rural areas of the district go heavily for State Senator Robert Hurt. The divide in the Fifth is city/county. Not enough people in Charlottesville and Danville voted to overcome Fluvanna and Pittsylvania.

I spent the morning down in Henry County, on the North Carolina state line, and in the Republican precincts turnout was heavy and determined. In interviews, Perriello was a second-tier topic and Hurt never came up. These voters' ire and disappointment were directed at Barack Obama (who campaigned for Perriello in Charlottesville last Friday, clearly answering the directive recently issued by Interesting Times—political advice that the White House might now regard as somewhat misguided). A Republican poll watcher who only gave her name as Lorna said, "I'm a constitutional conservative and I do not ever approve of distribution of wealth, and I am not a socialist, this country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles. I will riot in the street if I have to. I have never been so ashamed of the way Obama has diminished the Presidency. He calls certain people enemies. He doesn't dress properly. He talks about certain networks. He is just what he is—a Chicago agitator." Others were more measured: one man said he would vote Republican "strictly on the basis of the health care bill. I sell health insurance—I don't want to compete with the federal government."

One good reason for a reporter to go to polling places and talk to actual voters, as opposed to sitting in a television studio and talking to other talkers, is that you always come away surprised. A surprise today came in the form of a woman who couldn't even remember whom she voted for in 2008. She told me, as if startled by herself, that she had come to vote for Perriello because of Jane Mayer's article on the Koch brothers (who have poured some of their money into the Fifth). This woman's husband works for a Koch-owned company, and when they started getting inundated with company literature telling them how to vote, she became suspicious. Then Jane's article explained it all. "I believe in free enterprise, I believe in people being rewarded for hard work, but I'm sick about all the greed in big business, and the corruption. In business and government. I just don't think people's votes should be bought." She wouldn't give me her name for fear of reprisals, but she said, "I'm going to be a lot more politically astute and intelligent."

My uncle and grandfather were congressmen, and my mother always described the defeats that ended their careers as devastating. Politicians can't help taking a loss as a direct personal rejection, and it goes to the core of their being. Tonight, Perriello was the one keeping everyone else's spirits up. In the coming days he'll feel the pain of his defeat. But he's only thirty-six, and he can feel good about having run an aggressive race in which he took the risk of standing on his principles—which he repeated in a gracious concession speech at the wine bar—rather than fudging or disowning them. One way or another, we'll see him again.

The big news in Virginia was that Rick Boucher, a twenty-eight-year veteran Democratic congressman from the coal district to the west of the Fifth, lost his seat, too. That's an indicator of a gale-force wind that Perriello was never likely to survive. Tonight is a stinging repudiation of Obama and the Democrats, even if they hold some of the Senate seats that the Tea Party appeared ready to claim. We're living in a time of instant eras. Bush's permanent Republican majority lasted six years. Obama's new liberalism lasted two. I have to admit I miss Arthur Schlesinger's cycles of history, which used to take around three decades to swing back. These days, as the woman with the Koch-employed husband said, "I'm so upset with the way things are going in Washington—changing every two years, trying to undo what the other party did. I don't believe the economy would be any better if the Republicans were in control." But we now know that analysis hardly moved anyone whose vote was up for grabs.

Yesterday, I ran into Senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, who was campaigning with Perriello in Martinsville and Danville. When I interviewed him over the summer for my piece on the Senate, he had said that he expected the election of some moderate Republicans, like Mark Kirk of Illinois and Mike Castle of Delaware, who might be able to create more middle ground for bipartisanship. When I reminded him of this yesterday, Warner wouldn't abandon the hope. How is it faring tonight? Not well—Castle lost to Christine O'Donnell in the primary, Kirk is losing, and Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, and perhaps other Tea Party senators, are headed to Washington. I predict that there will not even be a gesture toward centrism and bipartisanship on the party of Republican leadership. They're too scared, and too eager. Pace David Brooks, the level of extremism and partisanship I described will go up—way up. This midterm is the party's first salvo in its first order of business, to end Obama's Presidency. There will be little mercy and a great deal of rancor. Tomorrow we'll found out how Obama sees the next two years. I see one of the ugliest political periods in my lifetime, which has seen a few.

Tom Perriello's Lonely Battle

In 2008 I wrote two political essays: "The Fall of Conservatism" and "The New Liberalism." Was I wrong?

About the first, I don't think so. I argued that, after decades of ascendancy, the modern conservative movement had run out of ideas and talent, with no serious answers to the central problems of our time. For all the right wing's noise and energy and apparent momentum going into this year's midterms, these points are no less true today, and the Tea Party provides nonstop proof. There are no new conservative ideas, only the old ones presented in their most extreme form. Government is still the problem, tax cuts and deregulation are still the solution, liberal élites are still the enemy. All that's changed is the level of vituperation, ideological rigidity, and anti-intellectualism.

The quality of Republican candidates has sunk to sub-Palin levels, from Alaska and Nevada to Delaware and New York. Last week, a local reporter asked the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey, why tax cuts should be expected to improve the economy when real incomes actually dropped after the original Bush tax cuts. According to the Times, Toomey "brushed aside" the question with the reply that he "did not believe the data." How convenient for him! But if a candidate deals with core economic realities by asserting his right to his own facts, that's not a sign of a vibrant political creed, however good his poll numbers (Toomey's opponent, Joe Sestak, seems to be gaining ground). Nor will the number of seats Republicans pick up next month be a reliable gauge of the party's long-term health and viability. In 1974 Democrats picked up forty-nine House seats; two years later a Democrat was elected President; and throughout the decade conservative ideas gained ground, leading to a certain revolution in 1980.

In the essay, I wrote that if the 2008 elections went against conservatism, the reaction would be either self-reform or self-purification. There hasn't been much sign of the former. Instead, as David Frum predicted to me at the time, conservatives have resorted to saying the same thing louder (much louder). It will happen again in 2012. The grassroots zeal on the right has been astounding. The party's refusal to make any effort to help the Administration solve problems created under Republican rule has been shrewd (and deeply irresponsible—I'd say unpatriotic). These things will benefit Republicans next month. Over the longer run, they will help marginalize the party.

As for "The New Liberalism," a question mark at the end would have been more prudent. We've seen several pieces of landmark legislation, including the most important social reform since the Great Society, health care, which is also the first significant blow to economic inequality since the trend started in the late seventies. But there's no new or revived ism to sustain the values and ideas behind these achievements. Obama has no larger movement behind him; the one he had ended on election night. After all the analysis of his political flaws and tactical mistakes (I've engaged in this cheap spectator sport myself), here is the heart of his political weakness. F.D.R. had the labor movement; L.B.J. had the civil-rights movement. Obama had Obama for America. His campaign was based on the man more than any set of ideas or clear vision of the future. Everyone knew what Reaganism stood for. No one knows what Obamaism means, which has allowed his enemies to fill in the blank.

Could the President have helped bring a progressive populism into being, by vilifying the banks and hammering his money-backed opponents from the start, as a counter to the right-wing populism that totally dominates the media? Maybe, but it would have been contrary to his character and his approach to governing. I'm not sure it would have found an answer in the country, either. Skepticism of government's ability to improve people's lives runs deep. The White House designed the positive effects of the stimulus bill (there have been plenty) to be undetectable to the naked eye. Americans' economic circumstances have gotten harder, not easier, since Obama took office. Arguably, the same could have been said of F.D.R. in 1934 (the midterms that year went his way), but back then people were more desperate and less informed, meaning less likely to convince themselves that they shouldn't "believe the data." And conservative, pro-rich populism didn't exist. The Liberty League, unlike the Koch brothers, had no Glenn Beck.

It turned out that the Obama Administration had about seven minutes to prove that government could bring some decency and security back to people's lives. Whatever their mistakes (and they've made many), the odds were long against them—much longer than I thought on November 4, 2008. More and more it seems clear that Obama's best qualities leave him barely able to make himself heard in the storm and lead the country out of it.

In a losing battle, it's almost always better for morale to stick to principle than abandon it, and it probably increases the odds of winning. At a time when many endangered Democrats are denouncing Nancy Pelosi and highlighting how often they voted with the other party, down in south-central Virginia, Tom Perriello, the embattled freshman Democratic congressman (I wrote about him in March), is conducting a kind of experiment. He's trying to get reëlected in a fairly conservative district, in the least hospitable climate imaginable, by taking the fight to his opponent, a Republican state senator named Robert Hurt. In TV ads and debates, Perriello talks about the benefits of health-care reform and stimulus money for people in his district. He has made green energy and the jobs it can create the center of his message. He puts himself on the side of the small entrepreneur, the local innovator, against big oil and big banks. He has the authentic populist voice and anger that Obama lacks.

Earlier this month I spent a day following Perriello and his dented white Ford pickup around the hard-pressed towns of Southside, the southern tier of his district, on the North Carolina state line. He announced grant money for a new charter school and a fire house. The volunteer fire chief of Kenbridge, an old textile and tobacco-processing town, said that with the hard times he anticipates a rash of house fires, as residents turn to burning wood in order to save on heating costs. Jobs are so scarce that the race for county treasurer has produced an unusually crowded field. Perriello's strategy is to show voters in socially conservative towns like this that he is working hard to create the kind of jobs that put people to work again making things—and, along the way, to tie his opponent to the kind of big businesses that raise electricity rates.

"If you take the stimulus, health care, and energy and you treat them as three discrete debates, you've already lost," Perriello said at dinner in a Danville restaurant (the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne was with us and wrote about it as well). "All three were about making us competitive in the world."

The next morning, in a chilly park outside Danville, Perriello stood near a war memorial alongside twenty or so veterans from every war since Second World War and accepted the endorsement of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (to go with his endorsement from the N.R.A.—you can't be a social liberal as well as an economic populist in the Fifth District and hope to win). The news had come out the day before that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was pouring anti-Perriello money into the campaign from a fund that included contributions of foreign corporations. Perriello didn't hesitate to seize the issue. "Most folks are pretty smart, and when you follow the money to Bahrain and China, you realize these corporations don't have the interest of the middle and working class at heart," he said. "The Republican Party, for all the flag-waving, has given up on middle-class America. It's part of a moral decay that dishonors those that stood behind me today and risked their lives for this country. The choice in this election fundamentally is whether you're with the people or want to protect the powerful, and the Republicans have shown they want to protect the powerful."

This kind of language is not the norm from a southern Democrat in a tough race in 2010. Outside groups like the Chamber of Commerce and oil and utility interests have been advertising against Perriello since he took office in 2009. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded free-enterprise group, has spent four hundred thousand dollars in the district, and their ominous black billboards that announce "November Is Coming" can be seen all around Southside. Nate Silver's political-statistical calculator, FiveThirtyEight, gives Perriello an 8.5 per cent chance of winning. The Democratic National Committee has decided to triage him out of its money pool. But several polls show Perriello within the margin of error against Hurt. His uncompromising positions and rhetoric are keeping the race close.

Last January, while I was driving through the district with Perriello, he got a message from a colleague on his Blackberry: Obama, who was meeting with House Democrats at the White House, gave a shout out to his friend Tom Perriello, thanked him for the hard votes he had cast for the Obama agenda, and promised to campaign for him in the fall. We're down to the last two weeks. Obama recently recorded a radio ad for Perriello, but a much bigger help would be a Presidential visit to the university town of Charlottesville. Is it too much to say Obama owes him?

Trashed Out

Almost two years ago, I went to Tampa to write about the housing bust and foreclosure epidemic that were the leading edge of the global economic crisis. The downturn had come to southwest Florida as early as 2006—if the Great Recession started anywhere, it was in places like Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Lehigh Acres, and Pasco County. These communities gave us new terms like "ghost subdivision" and "underwater mortgage" that would become as familiar as the formerly exotic vocabulary at the other end of the rot, on Wall Street—"mortgage-backed securities," "credit default swaps." In Tampa, I asked everyone I met who was to blame for the disaster, and I heard a range of answers: mortgage brokers, loan officers, bank officials, state regulators, speculators, homeowners. Where the crisis began, people seemed less inclined to put the blame much higher than its local faces. Perhaps Wall Street and Washington were too far away.

Four years after the onset, the foreclosure rate remains stubbornly high—and now there is a second foreclosure crisis. This one has nothing to do with irresponsible people taking out loans they couldn't afford. The paperwork scandal is entirely the doing of the big banks, which didn't keep track of the ownership trail of mortgages that change financial hands as often as crumpled dollar bills, and then hired unqualified workers and trained them to cut corners in dealing with the piles of foreclosure cases. The result is that the same banks whose subprime loans and mortgage derivatives helped create the crisis, and that received transfusions of public money after the crash, have been wrongly repossessing thousands of houses. Incompetence or venality? It's hard to tell them apart, and by now it's hard to feel much surprise or disgust.

Yesterday, Shaun Donovan, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote that, however outrageous this latest twist, the nationwide moratorium on foreclosures that some people are calling for would only worsen the weak state of the housing market. He's probably right—but I can't help thinking back a year and a half ago, to the moment when the Wall Street bonuses from bailout money came to light, and the Obama Administration seemed a little too eager to stamp out any notion that they should be given back or taxed to nothing. There is a kind of rectitude that has the air of self-defeating vanity. (I wrote about the pluses and minuses of this ethic of responsibility in "Obama's Lost Year.") As the midterms approach, the President seems to know it. Yesterday, in Peter Baker's revealing Times Magazine cover story, he's quoted as saying: "There is probably a perverse pride in my administration—and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top—that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who's occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can't be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion."

I just finished reading a powerful new book called "Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession," by Paul Reyes, a writer in Tampa who spent the past couple of years helping his father with his "trash-out" business—clearing out what former owners left behind in houses claimed by the banks: the letters and photos, books and posters, carpets and fridges and fleas. Reyes, treasuring what the owners themselves didn't bother to keep, calls this "a guilt-ridden literary forensics." (For the visual analogues, see this essay by Reyes on the Times Web site, and the new school of photojournalism it describes.) He has a weakness for the intimate details that people in haste and trouble left behind, combined with an insider's ability to find ongoing life in landscapes that more casual visitors would regard as undifferentiated decay. It's a bleak book, with an accumulation of unpleasant physical detail and a strain of comedy and affection—Down and Out in Tampa and Lehigh Acres. There's also a moving subplot of dislocation and downward mobility in the author's own family. Everything feels transient, dreamy, and thinly rooted in the sandy soil, amid the palmettos and shotgun shacks, with hard times bearing down like a tropical hurricane.

Two unrelated thoughts about Reyes and foreclosures: first, that it's a bit of luck that a fine writer happened to be on one local scene of this huge national event, with the intimate knowledge necessary to produce a permanent record for the rest of us. And second, did any of the trash-outs done by Reyes father and son turn out to be mistakes by the bank?

Should the Dream Ever Sour

Nine years later, the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don't stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob burning an effigy, or the imagined image of a man burning a mound of books. Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives ...

A Date That Will Live in Oblivion

What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because they will be aiding one side in an active war z...

Reporting the Senate

My piece on the Senate in this week's issue is the second of two Washington stories that I did while filling in for Ryan Lizza. At the start of this gig, someone high up in the Obama Administration gave me some advice: "Cover Washington as if it's a foreign capital. Cover it like Baghdad." It was an excellent idea, but not so easy to follow, since most journalists and consumers of journalism assume that they already know Washington, more or less, since they read and hear so much about it...

Lakers-Celtics, One More Time

Thank God the Celtics won't be hanging another championship banner at the Garden. Everything would be perfect if only Doc, Ray, Pierce, and the rest of their big-hearted team had somehow nonetheless won. The feeling of turning off the T.V. after the guys you were rooting for just lost the seventh game of the NBA Finals: temporary desolation before "the injustice which triumphs so flagrantly in the destinies of men" (Gissing). Yeah, I still remember.

Three Words on Human Rights

A few weeks ago I wrote a Comment on the grumbling among human-rights types about the President's lukewarmth toward their concerns. A couple of them spoke of serious unhappiness on this topic among Egyptians—important because Cairo is still the capital of the Arab world, not to mention the city where Obama chose to give his visionary speech on Islam and the U.S. a year ago. A few days after that speech, the streets of Iran filled with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators protesting a...

Ray Allen, Analyzed

A friend from Boston (whose Celtics could win the title tonight) writes:

"The Lakers' Achilles' heel is their arrogance. From the top down. I can't stand the 'Zen master' Phil Jackson anymore—he's so full of himself and way too cool. After one game he ridiculed one of his own players (perhaps Artest, who had some absurd dribbling play ending nowhere) by saying with quiet disdain, 'That was a very interesting play,' with his slight smile. Doc [Rivers:] would have said, 'That was stupid.'...