Mourdock was no household name even in Indiana, but if you followed our state’s politics closely, then you could see him doing this sort of thing. There was something genial and earnest about him, but you could also read in his eyes the fixations of a fierce ideologue. Trained as a geologist, he had become a coal company executive and then a perennial candidate, trying three times unsuccessfully to win southwest Indiana’s congressional seat. He finally landed a commissioner position in Vanderburgh County, and, after a couple other unsuccessful campaigns for different offices, managed to become treasurer in 2006. Through his many races, he established the reputation of a strong conservative, making it clear that bipartisanship was not his thing. He once told a cable news host that “bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view,” adding that “to me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else.”
You might wonder how such partisanship could possibly play into a job as technical and non-ideological as state treasurer, whose main role is to manage the state’s pension funds for government employees and teachers. But someone with a deep enough ideological worldview, coupled with strong ambitions to run for something bigger, can always find a way to use an office—any office—to make a name for himself.
Mourdock was a purist when it came to free markets, and therefore was totally against the idea of government playing a role in the economy. The auto bailout was a Bush-initiated program designed to hold off a possible depression, but that didn’t make it any more acceptable in Mourdock’s view. Even worse, the terms of the negotiated bankruptcy were favorable to the United Auto Workers, anathema to a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who viewed organized labor with contempt.
Cleverly, Mourdock realized that Indiana’s pension funds owned some Chrysler bonds, and reasoned that this might give him standing in court to challenge the deal. When else would an obscure state treasurer get a chance not only to assert free-market principles and deal a blow to labor, but also to provoke a showdown with the hated Obama administration over a major policy priority? The temptation was irresistible, and so Mourdock went to court.
The theory of his lawsuit that was the pension funds were secured creditors, and should have been given better treatment when they took a loss on their holdings as part of the bankruptcy and restructuring of Chrysler. The Chrysler bonds represented less than 1 percent of the pensions’ holdings—about $17 million—but that was the legal toehold Mourdock needed in order to intervene. He hired a New York–based law firm for about $2 million and filed a lawsuit asking that the bankruptcy be halted. The stakes were enormous: If he succeeded, the entire rescue might have been prevented, pushing the company into liquidation. The company, its assets—and, most importantly, the jobs—would be gone forever.
On Friday, May 29, 2009, New York’s federal bankruptcy court rejected the motion. Mourdock appealed. On June 5, the appeals court also affirmed the sale, leaving Mourdock heading into the weekend with nowhere to go but all the way to the Supreme Court. He filed a request for an emergency stay on Sunday, June 7, and the next day the court granted a temporary stay while reviewing whether to intervene. To his original argument, Mourdock added a constitutional challenge, arguing that it was not legal to use funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program for this purpose. Using the TARP money this way was Bush’s work-around after the Senate refused to fund the auto bailout in late 2008; if found unconstitutional, it would push the entire matter back into the hands of a Congress incapable of doing anything unpopular.
Until the Supreme Court could decide whether to take the case, the sale was on hold. But it couldn’t wait long: the entire bailout deal had a June 15 deadline. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Howard County had soared to 20 percent. Kokomo’s mayor, Greg Goodnight, braced his employees and community for the possibility that their biggest employer might never get back on its feet. Services would have to be cut, families would have to reconsider plans to send their kids to college, and the entire population of the town would begin to drain away.
Obscure bankruptcy proceedings don’t generally get much notice outside of the business world, but over that weekend the country began to take notice. Mourdock was making the rounds of the cable shows, and in the process became a hero in what was just beginning to be known as the Tea Party for standing up to government, labor, and Obama all at once.
By now Chrysler was estimated to be losing $100 million a day. One industry expert told CNN that “if the case drags on for even a few weeks and Chrysler is unable to restart its plants by the end of the month as planned, it could spell doom for Chrysler.” Its suppliers would be next—and the simultaneous rescue of GM might fall apart, too.
In a filing on Monday the eighth, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, soon to be named to the Supreme Court herself, responded for the administration, reminding the Supreme Court and the country of what was at stake. “The liquidation of Chrysler would have very severe effects on the American and Canadian economies. . . . More than 38,000 Chrysler employees would lose their jobs; 23 manufacturing facilities and 20 parts depots will be shuttered; more than 3,000 Chrysler dealers would suffer significant and possibly fatal harm to their businesses; and billions of dollars in health and pension benefits for current and former Chrysler workers would be wiped out.”
In addition to the economic gravity of the situation, there were serious legal flaws in Mourdock’s case. The biggest was that the holdings he represented would actually be worth less under liquidation than in the proposed bailout deal. In other words, if the pensions won the lawsuit, they would actually lose money compared to the plan they were suing to stop. In general, American case law does not allow you to go to court and sue to make yourself worse off.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied the stay and declined to hear the case. The sale could go forward—as it did, the next day. The sense of relief was still tentative. It would be years before we would know that the rescue was a success, with the companies and jobs saved and the government paid back. But the Indiana communities that rely on the auto industry—and possibly the American economy as a whole—had dodged a bullet.
Mourdock himself was no worse off for his courtroom rejection. He had made a name for himself, and in his own mind he had stood on principle by defying Washington and the auto workers who had pushed so hard to save their jobs. Gripped by ideology, Mourdock simply could not accept that government getting involved could be a good thing, even if it prevented the destruction of thousands of lives. But I wonder, sometimes, whether he talked to any of the families whose livelihoods could have been wrecked by his legal adventure. Did he think about the stakes for them, or was it just numbers on a page to him?
To Mourdock, it seems, the most important issue at stake in the auto rescue was that investors on the bond market would have to take a haircut. To the rest of us, the most important issue was that families’ lives could be ruined by the same kind of economic disaster that had nearly killed my hometown half a century earlier.
To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point. At its best, the practice of politics is about taking steps that support people in daily life—or tearing down obstacles that get in their way. Much of the confusion and complication of ideological battles might be washed away if we held our focus on the lives that will be made better, or worse, by political decisions, rather than on the theoretical elegance of the policies or the character of the politicians themselves.
RICHARD MOURDOCK WAS UP FOR REELECTION in 2010, and when I investigated who was looking to run against him from the Democratic side, the answer was no one. I was surprised. I knew down-ticket races, especially for Democrats in Indiana, were thankless, difficult, and hard to recruit for. But a candidate as extreme as Mourdock
seemed beatable—at least if there were a favorable national atmosphere, a flawless campaign, and a little bit of luck. Surely someone would take him on, in the name of the people and communities who could have been devastated by his adventure. And if no one else was going to step up, why not me?
In American political culture, you are not supposed to admit you have any interest in running for office until the moment you declare. I didn’t even realize this was a particularly American quality until studying in England, where I would often meet students who made it clear they would stand for Parliament at the earliest opportunity, and then did exactly that. It’s hard to say where this norm of ours comes from; I’d like to think it has something to do with the premium we place on humility. There is something jarring about the idea that anyone thinks himself truly fit to perform the tremendously difficult and sensitive tasks of public office, and so putting yourself forward to do so seems immodest.
Partly for this reason, a politician’s account of how he or she first came to run for office is supposed to begin with a ritual mention of having been urged to do so by others, being flattered, demurring, and eventually feeling called to step forward. Later, for other offices, something like this really would happen to me. But not this time. No one was pleading with a twenty-seven-year-old management consultant to run for statewide office in Indiana as a Democrat. I just started to think about it and felt like it could make sense.
Of course, I knew that this might or might not be a good idea, and that I would need to consult people who knew this world better than I. I needed to figure out how to explore the waters, before giving up my job and income in order to run for statewide office. What would I have to consider? How would I gauge the odds? What steps do you even take to get prepared and under way? I contacted Jeff Harris, whom I had gotten to know while helping our nominee for governor in 2008, to get his advice. Jeff had worked for years in and around campaigns and the labor movement, and understood the state’s press corps, legislature, and Democratic Party as well as anyone. I thought he might be put off by the idea that I, in my mid-twenties, wanted him to help me pursue something you would normally work your way up to for years. Still, over soup at a favorite diner, I worked up the nerve to tell him what I had in mind. “After watching what went on in that office, I was thinking that maybe someone like me could—”
“Do it,” he interrupted. “You should do it. I’ll help you.” He offered not only to help me think about it but also to bring me to events where I would meet the kind of party and community leaders I would need to know in order to mount a serious campaign.
Campaigning for office is enormously difficult, but in a way, it’s not very complicated. You have to persuade voters to vote for you, raise money so you can reach more voters, and get other people to help you do those two things. Half the battle is name recognition, and my biggest problem was that no one had any idea who I was. My name was unfamiliar and unpronounceable. (Jeff and I spent half a day just figuring out how to render it phonetically, settling on the breakdown “Budda-judge,” which was close enough and easier to remember than any other way we could think to write down.) Plus I was twenty-seven years old, and baby-faced enough to pass for a college student. In a campaign office, I would be more likely to be taken for an intern or perhaps a young organizer than an actual candidate. My family had no Indiana political connections, and neither did my employer—McKinsey didn’t even have an office in the state.
Jeff quickly devised a way to deal with the name recognition problem, at least among party regulars. He spotted a perfect opportunity at a traditional statewide gathering of Democratic activists at the old French Lick Resort in southern Indiana, held every year in late August. Party faithful from every corner of the state, from longtime county committee officers to young volunteers, would come together for a little bit of party business and a lot of socializing. It was a captive audience; with the right strategy, we could become known to the entire party base over the course of a single weekend.
Jeff prepared by printing hundreds of stickers and spray-painting dozens of old yard signs from other campaigns with a simple, stenciled, two-word message: MEET PETE. The first day of the gathering, he arrived early. Leaning on old friendships, he convinced anyone he could to wear one of the stickers. And he installed a lawn sign every few hundred feet along all the country roads, winding through rolling hills and cornfields, that led to the tiny town and the big hotel. It was impossible for anyone attending the event to miss the low-budget advertising.
By the time I stepped across the porch of the old restored hotel and into the bright, big lobby with its old-fashioned chandeliers and mosaic floors, there was a buzz about the signs. Enough people were asking, “Who the hell is Pete?” that I had an instant conversation-starter when I introduced myself to the various county party chairs, labor leaders, students, state legislators, and assorted other characters who milled about the lobby and corridors. And while I may have been an unfamiliar figure, I convinced people that my business background and education could qualify me to challenge an opponent who had just made a name for himself in the worst way.
Buoyed by the response at French Lick and encouragement from the state party chairman, Dan Parker (who was probably relieved that a somewhat qualified candidate was willing to try this at all), I took my message to the chicken dinners of as many county parties as we could find. If a dozen Ball State College Democrats were willing to meet, so was I. If a friend of my parents was willing to organize a house party in South Bend, I was there. A church basement in Sullivan or a one-room Farm Bureau office among the mint fields of Starke County would do fine—anyplace that would let me introduce myself and talk about how important the office was. I also went around union halls, hearing firsthand what was happening to communities that had relied on auto jobs, and sensing the anger and frustration of workers who felt that their own elected officials could not be trusted to support their livelihoods. Over rubber chicken, ham and beans, chili, or sweet potato pie, I listened to stories in one town after another coming to terms with the kind of devastation that had ripped through my own city a generation before.
Technically I was still “just thinking about it,” but the reception at these events made me feel that I could hold my own as a candidate, and that there was a path to victory, however uphill. True, no Democrat had held this office since the 1970s, but an underfunded candidate in 2006 had come remarkably close, and Mourdock’s track record meant it might be the hottest-ever race for treasurer, if there was such a thing. All I had to do was quit my job.
I WAS READY FOR A CAREER CHANGE; still, it wasn’t an easy leap. Moving home to South Bend had worked wonders for my cost of living, but I still felt uneasy about living without an income for a year so that I could campaign full-time. And if I actually won, I could look forward to getting paid a fraction of what I’d be making if I stuck around the Firm. But seeking this office was a chance to do something uniquely important—and something no one else seemed prepared to do.
It also meant finally ignoring what the script says a well-credentialed young professional ought to do. Up to that moment, at virtually every juncture in my life there was a powerful brand name associated with whatever I was doing. Harvard. Rhodes. McKinsey. United States Navy. When you are connected to an institution with that strong a name, people use it as a shortcut for understanding who you are. And if you’re not careful, you use it as a shortcut, too, taking on the shape of that name yourself over time.
Contrary to every unspoken rule of my education, running for office now meant trading a stable and prestigious role for an unlikely and unheard-of effort. It was time to step out of the warm embrace of well-branded institutions known for both nurturing and defining their people, and exchange it for the chance to build—and become—something new.
As a single person, I had lived simply during my time at McKinsey, and had saved enough to get me through one year. So, other than Navy Reserve drill weekends, I was a full-time candidate for most of
2010. Jeff and I set up a simple office in the basement of the Building Trades Union Hall in South Bend, next door to the Insulators and across from the Painters. Like my high school, the interior of the place had a distinct feel of the 1950s—dark brown tile on the floor and what looked like asbestos panels on the ceiling. It was also functional, close to home, and filled with likeable and jocular labor organizers—and the price was right. We moved in and got to work.
As with any other job, there is no better way to learn political candidacy than by doing it. An introvert by nature, I slowly became comfortable with the outgoing disciplines of campaigning. Each day brought a new lesson. Up at dawn to shake hands at a manufacturing plant gate when the shift changed, you learned that the people coming into work were a much better audience than the ones who were leaving, tired and ready to go home. Crossing the state in a hurry to get from a parade in one county to a lunchtime function in another, you learned that car time can and should also be call time, your best chance to reach potential donors and allies during the day. Watching faces rise and fall during a dinnertime speech to, say, the Dearborn County Democratic Party at an Elks Lodge, you learned which stories would resonate where, how long to make your speech, when you had an audience in your hands, and when you were about to lose them. Sticking out your hand to introduce yourself to a stranger enjoying his pork tenderloin at a county fair, you learned that it was a lot better to start a conversation by asking about his goals than launching right into yours.
The call time was the hardest. It meant reaching out to everyone you had ever known to ask if they would send you money. You have two minutes’ small talk, a quick windup about the state of the race, and the inevitable hard ask: “Sooo, I was hoping I could count on you for a two-hundred-fifty-dollar contribution.” Eventually I came to prefer calling strangers to calling acquaintances, since they took less time to realize why you were calling and were more comfortable giving a yes or a no. I spent hours on this daily, and often wonder if most Americans realize this is how many elected officials spend most of their time. It’s not unusual for a member of Congress to spend twenty hours a week doing this, and you have to wonder whether, like spending too much time typing or sunbathing, it does something unhealthy to you over the long run. In the car or at a desk in headquarters, I would go through page after page of calls that our finance director had prepared for me, based on lists of people who had a history of giving to Democrats. And just when I was losing hope, after an hour spent leaving ten voice mails that I knew would never get returned and having three conversations that all ended in “Okay, let me think about it” or “I’d have to talk to my wife,” someone would actually help.
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