Dean’s congresswoman in North Carolina’s Fifth District was a Republican in her sixties named Virginia Foxx—a stout woman with short gray hair and a degree in education who had been a reliable backbencher for George W. Bush. The district ran from the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Tennessee border to just west of Greensboro, with no town larger than twenty-five thousand people, and 90 percent of the residents were white. In other words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro three weeks before the election) called “the real America,” by which she did not mean fallow farms and disability checks and crack. Foxx was reelected easily, but in 2008 she seemed like a relic of the past, and so did her constituents, and maybe even her party.
On the other side of the state line, in Virginia’s Fifth District, a small earthquake was taking place. Virgil Goode, the anti-immigrant, pro-tobacco, conservative Democrat turned Republican incumbent, was opposed by a young lawyer and self-described practitioner of “conviction politics” named Tom Perriello. Perriello was thirty-four but looked like a college wrestler preparing for the opening clinch—short and broad-shouldered, with a wide flat face, a muscular jawline, and an edgy stare. On the day he was supposed to decide whether to run, he was stung by fifty yellow jackets, went into anaphylactic shock, and staggered into the woods outside his parents’ house near Charlottesville. His father, an obstetrician, happened to see him from across the lawn, grabbed the EpiPen that was on hand because of his mother’s recent allergic reaction, ran out to the woods, and injected his son as Tom’s eyes rolled back in his head. Perriello didn’t know if it was a sign from God, but he chose to take it that way and declared his candidacy for Goode’s seat.
No one really understood what Perriello did for a living—he called himself a “national security consultant,” a “social justice activist,” and a “public entrepreneur.” He listened to “conscious hip-hop” music and raised his glass of Jack Daniel’s to “a better world.” The fact that he was single, once wore a beard, and had spent much of his short adult life in New Haven, New York, Sierra Leone, and Darfur gave the Goode campaign a fat target for the modern version of sectional-cultural warfare.
For a long time the great mystery for the half of America that voted Democratic was why white people living in small, obscure places and getting poorer year by year were simultaneously getting more Republican—why the kind of Americans who, a century before, had passionately supported William Jennings Bryan were now voting in overwhelming numbers for the party that wanted to deregulate Wall Street and zero out the capital gains tax—why, along Route 29 south of Charlottesville, there was a great big GOODE sign outside an overgrown shack. But in 2008, times had gotten bad enough in the Piedmont for some people to turn in the other direction. Perriello made it easier for them because he didn’t use the typical language of big-city liberals—he talked constantly about God, was for guns, hedged gay marriage, and sounded radical on economics, denouncing the “corporate capture of government” and the big banks and multinationals whose collusion with Washington made it impossible for the little guy to compete. Perriello sounded for all the world like a twenty-first-century Bryan. He wasn’t—his friends were human rights activists and Washington think tankers and New Republic writers, eastern elites who spoke the language of insider baseball and progressive causes—but in the Fifth District he raised his voice with genuine passion for the hard-pressed farmer, the out-of-work seamstress, the small merchant. He didn’t find the great mystery in American politics very mysterious. “The core assumption is that somehow these poor working-class people are benighted for voting against their self-interest,” he said. “Tell me a rich Democrat that doesn’t vote against their pure self-interest.”
On November 4, Perriello swept the better-educated precincts around the university town of Charlottesville, where turnout among young people was high because Obama was at the top of the ballot (Perriello said that Barack Obama was the first politician in his lifetime who inspired him), and he cut into Goode’s advantage in the worse-off towns and rural areas of Southside, down along the North Carolina border. On election night the polls showed Perriello ahead by 745 votes out of 315,000 cast. Goode demanded a recount. Six weeks later, Perriello was certified the winner.
His victory in a conservative district was one of the biggest upsets of the year, and one of the races that made 2008 look like a watershed election. Perriello was Dean’s kind of politician, and Virginia’s Fifth was the district where Dean had built America’s lst BioDiesel Truck Stop. In retrospect it seemed inevitable that the two men would cross paths.
One of Perriello’s first moves in office was to send an aide around the district, which was bigger than New Jersey, to find out what his new constituents needed from the stimulus bill that was moving through Congress. Around the farms and small towns of Southside, the aide found signs of life in renewable energy: a dairy farm outside Danville that was making electricity out of manure; a nursery just across the road where a former Goodyear engineer was testing crops for energy yield; a landfill in Martinsville where officials wanted to turn methane gas into electrical power. No one had told these people to do any of it, and they were just the kinds of businesses that Perriello wanted to highlight, tangible examples of a new economy in the Piedmont that didn’t look like the past. Instead of enormous factories and big-box stores that sucked the wealth out of a community before abandoning it, these were small-scale projects that created five or ten jobs at a time and kept the money local.
Eventually, Perriello found out about Red Birch Energy.
* * *
Dean had worked up a pitch, a PowerPoint slide presentation, and he was taking it to any audience that would listen. He always brought along three jars, one containing canola seed, the second canola oil, and the third biodiesel fuel, with a golden liquid in the upper half and a sediment of dark-brown glycerin waste below. He started with his come-to-Jesus moment, the week Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He told the story of Red Birch Energy and gave the quote from Jefferson about the cultivators of the earth, along with a lot of figures about energy yields from canola and the advantages of biodiesel over regular diesel, and made a strong case for smallness over bigness and the need to keep money local. The farmers and truck stop owners would be the new oil barons! Let the wealth trickle down from them, not from Wall Street! He asked how many people in the audience had heard of peak oil—never more than 15 or 20 percent. Dean firmly believed that there would be one Red Birch or there would be five thousand, and he closed with the story of Roger Bannister, the first man to break the four-minute mile: within five years of his feat, more than a hundred other people had done it. “He walked through a threshold. He showed ’em that it could be done. That’s the way we feel about Red Birch Energy.”
Over time, he fine-tuned the pitch, making slight adjustments for different audiences. To the monthly speaker’s breakfast of the Greensboro Kiwanis at the Starmount Country Club, he talked about the potential for investment in biofuels. Sometimes he got out ahead of his audience and later realized what had happened—too many quotes from Democratic presidents in a Republican county, not enough explanation of the refining process to a group of government officials. But every time—and he must have given the pitch to a hundred different audiences—Dean sounded as if the exciting novelty of his words was occurring to him right then for the very first time, because it was, and that this and only this was the road to collective salvation, because it was. A salesman had to believe in what he was selling, and Dean believed with the fervor of a convert. He was a Johnny Appleseed for biodiesel, spreading the good news from town to town.
Dean always said there was a thin line between an entrepreneur and a con man. What made Glenn W. Turner the latter and not the former? He probably believed every word he said with “Dare to Be Great.” Maybe Turner was in it for the money and fame, but Dean wanted to make his fortune, too. So what was the difference? “When I first started, I had to check myself,” Dean said.
“Are they with me? Am I a shyster? Am I trying to sell snake oil in the form of biodiesel?” But the oil he was selling wasn’t snake oil, and that was the difference. Biodiesel was as real as the earth. It made complete sense to anyone who listened: this was the way out of depression and into the future. Then he would pinch himself, thinking, “Am I in this position? Has my journey taken me to this place where we’re on the cusp?” It was mind-boggling.
One day in early February 2009, Dean was at the Omni Hotel in Richmond, preparing to give his pitch to the Virginia Agricultural Summit, when he went to get a Starbucks and saw a familiar-looking person sitting at a laptop. It was Tom Perriello—Dean knew his face from TV ads. Introducing himself, Dean said, “Please wait just a minute,” and he raced up to his room, where he had three copies of the January/February issue of U.S. Canola Digest with a lead article about changes in Washington and rural America: “Red Birch Energy could almost be the poster child for the Obama administration as it is energy independent, sustainable, community-focused and inspirational.” Perriello waited, and when Dean returned with a copy of the magazine and showed him the quote, the new congressman loved it. They talked for twenty minutes, and before leaving, Dean invited Perriello to visit Red Birch.
As for Perriello, meeting Dean Price confirmed something that he had come to believe over the past few years and had made a tenet of his campaign: the elites in America didn’t have answers for the problems of the working and middle class anymore. Elites thought that everyone needed to become a computer programmer or a financial engineer, that there would be no jobs between eight dollars an hour and six figures. Perriello believed that the new ideas for making things in America again would come from unknown people in obscure places.
Two months later, in early April, Perriello visited the Red Birch refinery with the governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, and an entourage of local officials and aides and reporters. Dean wore a brown coat and a tie, his black hair parted neatly in the middle, looking like an uncomfortable farm boy among men in dark suits (Gary Sink wore a navy-blue one). He gave his pitch to the assembled guests inside the refinery. Kaine actually fell asleep in the front row, and Dean almost called him on it, remembering the time his father had done that to him when he was a boy and fell asleep in church. But Perriello really listened. He wasn’t like other politicians Dean had met or would come to meet, who made him feel like a shoe salesman trying to squeeze his pitch into a few available seconds. After the formal event, Dean took Perriello to the back of the plant and showed him the crushing machines, which were going full tilt. The congressman gave Dean his cell phone number and told Dean to look him up in Washington for a beer. Dean called once, but Perriello didn’t answer and he hung up without leaving a message.
They met again in July, on a farm north of Danville, where two members of Obama’s cabinet—Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, and Stephen Chu, the energy secretary—were appearing as part of a tour of rural America. The month before, Perriello had voted for the administration’s energy bill—it was known as “cap and trade,” or “the climate change bill”—a vote that made him much less popular among some of his constituents, who had been persuaded by energy companies and conservative groups that it would raise their electric bills and kill jobs in coal. At the farm, Vilsack and Chu talked about how renewable energy could tap the work ethic and the values of rural America, which had been neglected and even lost, and Dean felt that the highest officials in President Obama’s government were thinking along the same lines that he was. At one point Red Birch was mentioned, and Perriello had Dean stand up to be recognized.
Dean once said that Perriello could be president someday, and Perriello once said that if there was one American he wished the president would spend five minutes talking to, it was Dean. The congressman put Red Birch on the White House radar, and on a Thursday in August, an e-mail addressed to “Dear Friend” arrived at Red Birch, inviting “a select group of regional and national energy leaders” to “engage with Cabinet Secretaries and White House staff to discuss the ongoing debate over our energy future and how we can all contribute to a positive outcome.” The event would be held the following Monday. On Sunday, Dean and Gary took the train to Washington and spent the night at a hotel next to Union Station. The next morning, Dean put on his only suit—a black one that he had bought back in December 2004 to escort his third wife’s daughter to her homecoming dance and instead ended up wearing to his father’s funeral that same week—and a green tie, and he and Gary took a taxi to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
They never actually set foot in the White House. The event was held next door, on the third floor of the massive, French Second Empire–style Old Executive Office Building. Mark Twain called it “the ugliest building in America,” but Dean was overwhelmed with a sense of awe he’d never felt anywhere else. The granite halls and marble staircases, the history in those rooms named after presidents! The last speaker at the conference was the president’s young green-jobs czar, Van Jones, who was also the most dynamic. He had a way with phrases—when it came to employing inner-city youths to weatherize buildings, Jones said, “We’re going to take away their handguns and give them caulk guns!”
Dean happened to get the last question of the day. He stood up and said, “Since we’re all here advocating the same thing, and we’re going to go out and preach the gospel, one of the things that needs to be talked about is peak oil—because without it, nothing of what we’re doing makes any sense. How does the administration feel about peak oil?”
Jones didn’t appear to be familiar with the Obama policy on peak oil, or even what peak oil was. He handed the question off to a woman from the Department of Energy, who spoke for half a minute, demonstrating that she didn’t know any more than Jones. Afterward, Dean decided that peak oil was just too hard for politicians to handle. It meant the end of suburban, fast-food, industrial America, including Wall Street—no wonder the White House didn’t have a position. But Dean was taken with Van Jones, who exchanged high fives with him and Gary at the end of the event. And he was sorry when, two weeks later, Jones resigned after Glenn Beck and other conservatives tied him to extreme views on the 9/11 attacks and the imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal, along with the word “assholes” as applied to congressional Republicans. But Van Jones was never going to recruit the farmers in Rockingham County to the cause of green energy. They weren’t going to listen to a radical black man from San Francisco, and they didn’t like Obama any better—after Dean’s trip to Washington, some men at the local diner said, “You went to see that nigger?” The one man they might listen to was T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire corporate raider, who was old and white and had been appearing in ads for natural gas and renewable energy.
On his trip to Washington, Dean got nowhere near Obama, who was vacationing that week on Martha’s Vineyard. But a few months later, he actually met the president. In March 2010 an event was held at Andrews Air Force Base to announce the first biofuel fighter jet, and Dean was invited. He brought his son Ryan, and they waited in line as Obama greeted the crowd. There was no time to say anything, but Dean was struck by the feel of the president’s hand. It was the softest of any man he’d ever shaken hands with. It told him that Obama had never done a lick of physical work in his life.
* * *
Red Birch Energy was looking for a piece of the stimulus money that had been passed by Congress. The company needed help. In the last weeks of 2008, the price of fuel had plummeted, farther and faster than ever before. Below four dollars a gallon, Red Birch saw its competitive advantage disappear and started losing money. In the spring of 2009, when the canola farmers drove to the refinery with their load of seed, Dean and Gary had to tell them that the company couldn’t afford to pay for the crop it had contracted to buy. All they could do was cover the 6 percent interest on the money owed. Most of the farmers were understanding, but some of them threatened Gary and Dean and others vowed to sue Red Birch. One North Carolina farmer named John French—a Harle
y-type dude—pulled up in his big dually truck, the kind with four wheels on the rear axle. Before he unloaded his seed, Dean told him, “We don’t have the money.”
Dean was sure the farmer was going to kick his ass right then and there.
“Leave it here, let us crush it and try to sell some fuel,” Dean went on, talking fast and straight, “or take it back to your farm and try to sell it somewhere else.”
Once Dean opened his mouth, it was impossible not to like him a little. The farmer got in his dually and drove the load back to North Carolina. But the company’s reputation took a big hit around the Piedmont.
Without five-dollar gas, it was impossible to make Red Birch profitable. This was the hard lesson that Dean and Gary learned from the fiasco of the 2009 canola crop. And they realized that the answer lay in changing their business model and using the canola not once but twice: first converting the feedstock into food-grade cooking oil, selling it for ten dollars a gallon to local restaurants, and collecting 70 percent of it back as waste oil, then making biodiesel from that. If they could get to food-grade, they could pay farmers eighteen dollars a bushel, which would increase the volume of seed coming in and raise their profits. But it would cost almost half a million dollars to buy new crushing machines and bring the plant up to Department of Agriculture code. Perriello’s office put them in touch with officials in Richmond, who said that food-grade canola wouldn’t qualify for a stimulus grant. Instead, Red Birch was encouraged to apply for a grant toward the purchase of a microturbine, which could generate electricity from the glycerin waste left over from making biofuel, take the refinery off the grid, and create a new income stream when Red Birch sold some of the power to other users. Dean got the application in just a few minutes ahead of the deadline. In January 2010, Perriello came to Martinsville to announce the award of $750,000 in federal stimulus funds for Red Birch to buy a microturbine.
The Unwinding Page 28
