In 1987—the year that the Federal Communications Commission voted 4–0 to repeal its own Fairness Doctrine, which had been in effect since 1949 and required licensees of the public airwaves to present important issues in an honest and equitable manner (a vote that paved the way the following year for a Sacramento radio host named Rush Limbaugh to syndicate his conservative talk show nationally)—Breitbart entered Tulane. He spent his four years in New Orleans partying with a group of wealthy, hilarious, debauched friends, drinking himself into oblivion, and betting his parents’ money on football games and backgammon.
In his weakened state, Breitbart was exposed to the pernicious influence of his American Studies professors and their reading lists, which included Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse rather than Emerson and Twain. Fortunately, he was too drunk to be thoroughly indoctrinated in critical theory, but the prevailing philosophy of moral relativism inevitably eroded his personal standards. It wasn’t such a big step from the Frankfurt School to getting shitfaced nightly.
Breitbart stumbled through graduation and returned home to L.A., where his parents cut off his stipend, giving him the shock of his life. He started waiting tables near Venice Beach. Hard work was fulfilling. “My values were returning from exile.”
In the fall of 1991, he tuned in to the Clarence Thomas hearings, fully expecting to side with Anita Hill and the Democrats. Instead, he was outraged that porn rentals and a stray comment about a stray pubic hair on a can of Coke were being used to destroy an honorable man because he was conservative and black—with supposedly neutral journalists leading the mob. Breitbart’s eyes began to open, and hatred was born in his fun-loving soul. He would never forgive the mainstream media.
Several more years passed before Andrew Breitbart found his mission in life. In 1992—the year Warren Buffett, a major investor in the Washington Post Company, warned that “the economic strength of once-mighty media enterprises continues to erode as retailing patterns change and advertising and entertainment choices proliferate”—Breitbart got a job delivering scripts around Hollywood. He preferred listening to FM radio in his Saab convertible to kissing ass in the outer offices of Michael Ovitz or going to parties where people said, “I work in the clothing room at Mad About You.” But when grunge took over the alternative rock stations (“Who were these whiny, suicidal freaks?”), he switched in disgust to the AM dial. There, talk radio was waiting for him.
He found that he would do anything to listen to Howard Stern and Jim Rome. He put on a Walkman and kept listening after getting out of his car to make his script deliveries. But he was still enough of an unthinking liberal that, upon seeing Limbaugh’s book The Way Things Ought to Be on the coffee table of his girlfriend’s father, a TV actor named Orson Bean, he scoffed.
“Have you listened to Rush?” Breitbart’s future father-in-law asked.
“Yeah, he’s a Nazi or something.”
“Are you sure you’ve listened to him?”
Orson Bean, a game show regular from the sixties, was the seventh most frequent guest on The Tonight Show—his opinion counted. And after tuning in to Limbaugh over months during the 1992 campaign, Breitbart began to regard El Rushbo as his true professor. “I marveled at how he could take a breaking news story and offer an entertaining and clear analysis that was like nothing I had ever seen on television.” The hidden structure of things was becoming clear.
That same year, a friend from high school who was worried that Breitbart was adrift paid a visit to his apartment and told him, “I’ve seen your future and it’s the Internet.”
Breitbart replied, “What’s the Internet?”
One night in 1994, he vowed not to leave his room until he was connected. It took a rotisserie chicken, a six-pack of Pilsner Urquell, and several hours of sweaty effort with a primitive modem of that time, but at last he heard the crackle of a connection and suddenly Andrew Breitbart was linked to the Internet, the one place beyond the reach of the Democrat-Media Complex where you could say and think and be anything, and he was born again.
It wasn’t long afterward that Breitbart found a one-man news digest called the Drudge Report—a mishmash of politics, Hollywood gossip, and extreme weather reports. He was hooked, and when Drudge began exposing Clinton sex scandals that the media wouldn’t touch, Breitbart knew what he wanted to do with his life. Drudge and the Internet rescued him from the cynical irony of his generation and showed him the power of one individual to expose the corruption of the Complex. Breitbart was so awed that he sent an e-mail to the secretive Matt Drudge: “Are you fifty people? A hundred people? Is there a building?” Drudge introduced him to a rich Greek-born L.A. divorcee and author named Arianna Huffington, who wanted to do the same kind of awesome Web-based muckraking as Drudge. In the summer of 1997—a year after MSNBC and Fox News launched—Breitbart was invited to her Brentwood mansion, and over spanakopitas and iced tea Arianna offered him a job. Pretty soon she couldn’t get him to go home.
The Internet and the conservative movement fused together in Breitbart’s brain. He read Camille Paglia on academic politics and saw his whole life as an illustration of the Complex’s totalitarian power. He’d been living behind enemy lines ever since birth: the liberal fascism of the Hollywood elite, the left-wing bias of the mainstream media, the Nazi-fleeing German philosophers of his Tulane syllabi who had settled in L.A. and taken over higher education in order to destroy the coolest lifestyle in history and impose their Kurt Cobain–like depressive nihilistic Marxism. The left knew what the right ignored: New York, Hollywood, and college campuses mattered more than Washington. The political war was all about culture. A barely employed, autodidactic Gen-X convert with an ADD diagnosis and an Internet addiction was uniquely well armed to fight it.
For the next eight years Breitbart worked with Arianna and Drudge. He helped Arianna with her biggest coup, getting a Clinton crony who had fabricated his war record disinterred from Arlington National Cemetery. Who needed The New York Times? “We were all doing more from Los Angeles with minimal resources than the mainstream media were doing from Washington, D.C., with hundreds of reporters.”
The terrain Breitbart sauntered onto was diminishing, crumbling, wide open to him. Pillars of the Old Media were turning to infotainment and opinion journalism to save money and hold on to a distracted audience. Reporters were spooked because Jayson Blair made up stories in the Times and Dan Rather aired phony documents on 60 Minutes, while watchdogs on the right and left barked ferociously at their every hint of bias and upstarts of the New Media jeered the frightened gatekeepers, until no one knew who was right and what was true and no one trusted the press and the press stopped trusting itself.
It was the perfect environment for Breitbart to stake his own claim.
In 2005—the year Rather was sacked by CBS, The Wall Street Journal reduced its width from fifteen to twelve inches, the Los Angeles Times cut another sixty-two newsroom jobs, and Arianna, by then a liberal convert, started Huffington Post with Andrew’s help (he later claimed to have thought it up as a fifth column in the Complex)—Breitbart.com launched. It was a news aggregation site for wire service stories (you could bash the Old Media and feed off it at the same time) and a forum for truth telling, in the spirit of the Swift Boat Vets and other citizen journalists. The great thing about New Media was anybody could do it. Breitbart would fly to New York all the time and make sure he got invited to mainstream media parties, where he drank their appletinis and pinot noir and made them think he was on their side, but at the end of dinner he would get in their faces and say, “You guys don’t get it. The American people are now in control of the narrative, and you can’t grab it for yourself and drive it off the cliff.”
Everything changed for Breitbart on the August day in 2009—the year the Chicago Tribune eliminated its foreign desk and The Washington Post closed its three remaining domestic bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—when a young citizen journalist named James O’Keefe walked into his house with
a batch of raw videos. They were the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society. They showed O’Keefe and another citizen journalist named Hannah Giles posing as a pimp and prostitute who wanted to set up a brothel using underage girls imported from El Salvador. James and Hannah brought their hidden camera into offices of the national left-wing organization ACORN, in Baltimore, New York, and other cities, where low-level staffers sat across the table and gave them useful advice on how to establish their business while making the federal tax code work in their favor. “It was like watching Western civilization fall off of a cliff.”
Breitbart knew exactly what to do. Make news by breaking news. Feed the media like training a dog, one video at a time instead of the whole meal at once, catching ACORN and the news outlets off guard, exposing their lies and biases while keeping the story alive. Use a friendly network like Fox News to amplify the effect. Stay on offense, be outrageous. His real target was the mainstream media—honestly, who cared about the poor homeowners that ACORN protected from predatory lenders, or the low-income workers whose wages it fought to raise? Within a few months, ACORN ceased to exist and Breitbart was a Tea Party hero and media bigs were competing to publish profiles of him. It felt like he was doing every single banned class A narcotic simultaneously.
It was fun! Telling the truth was fun, having the American people behind him was fun, fucking with the heads of nervous journalists and helping the mainstream media commit suicide was fun. Breitbart went on Real Time with Bill Maher and stood up for himself and Rush to the politically correct hometown mob of an audience, and it was an incredibly committed moment in his life. He found himself the leader of a loose band of patriotic malcontents, and right in front of him was the same opportunity that the Founding Fathers had had—to fight a revolution against the Complex.
And if he happened to get an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod fired by releasing a deceptively edited video that seemed to show her making anti-white comments when in fact she was doing just the opposite—fuck it, did the other side play fair? Anyway, Old Media’s rules about truth and objectivity were dead. What mattered was getting maximum bang from a story, changing the narrative. That was why Breitbart was winning, with ample help from his media enemies, and why he must have been at least semi-sober during his college classes on moral relativism.
In 2010 Breitbart was everywhere, Manhattan and D.C., the Tea Party Convention and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Twitter and YouTube, working his BlackBerry while talking on the phone, turning his florid face and keen blue eyes and wave of graying hair toward every camera aimed in his direction, getting up close with righteous indignation and puerile humor, jabbing his finger. Kate Zernike of The New York Times, are you in the room? You’re despicable … Ted Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement, he was a fucker, a big-ass motherfucker … When people are like, “What do you think we should do on health care?” I don’t have a fucking clue, it’s too complicated for me … It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Representative John Lewis to put up or shut up … They think they can take me down, that they can hurt me. It just makes me bigger … Fuck. You. John. Podesta … Have you ever seen me on TV? I always change the subject to the media context … Media is everything … It’s a fundamental flaw in my psyche—I don’t do well with death … They want to portray me as crazy, unhinged, unbalanced. Okay, good, fine. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck—
On March 1, 2012, in the full flame of glory, less than a year after scoring his biggest coup in the shape of Congressman Anthony Weiner’s erect penis self-photographed behind gray briefs, shortly after leaving an evening of wine and talk in a Brentwood bar, Andrew Breitbart collapsed from heart failure and died at age forty-three.
TAMPA
At the start of 2010, the Times took Mike Van Sickler off the housing beat and sent him to cover city hall in St. Petersburg. He understood the reasons—the budget was tight, the paper was losing a couple of hundred jobs. He had hoped to take his work on Sonny Kim to the next level and look into the players who had made his deals possible, but he couldn’t tell his editors exactly how he was going to get there and nail it in three months, and they couldn’t afford to wait him out.
In June, Sonny Kim was indicted by the feds and pleaded guilty to money laundering and fraud. It was a big case for Florida’s Middle District, but Van Sickler had handed it over on a plate. The U.S. attorney’s office announced that Kim had been part of a conspiracy and the investigation wasn’t finished, but months went by and no one else was brought in. Van Sickler wondered, “Where are the big arrests? Where are the bankers, the lawyers, the real estate professionals?” Kim was just one piece of a network—what about the institutions? It was the same in Washington and New York: not one criminal case brought against the big banks. Van Sickler was mystified. “It’s going to be one of the great puzzles of history to figure out, when Obama became president, why Eric Holder didn’t decide to make this a priority.”
Around Tampa, 2010 was the rock bottom. Unemployment in Hillsborough County passed 12 percent. The residential housing market was dead in the water, and commercial real estate was starting to sink. Middle-class people were showing up at the crisis centers and social service agencies, clueless how to navigate the maze of government benefits. There were stories on TV about families of four sleeping in cars, schoolchildren who didn’t want to tell their classmates where they lived. Radio ads for precious metals warned of collapsing stock markets and hyperinflationary depression in the new Washington–Wall Street economy. But no one seemed to have any solutions, other than to wait for the housing market to come back, which was supposed to happen around 2015. The county commission went back to cutting regulations and lowering impact fees on developers—anything to jolt the growth machine into gear, even though tens of thousands of units around Hillsborough County sat vacant. The sense of crisis would flare up, then wilt under the humidity. The sunshine and beaches were still here. It was a torpid apocalypse.
There was one idea that inspired some people in Tampa: rail. Back when Tampa was going to be America’s Next Great City, none of its rivals around the Sunbelt—Charlotte, Phoenix, Salt Lake City—had commuter rail systems. Now they all did, leaving Tampa behind. Tampa had standing plans for a light rail line, funded by a sales tax increase, but the Hillsborough County Commission always refused to allow it onto the ballot. In 2010, the wind shifted. Mark Sharpe, the Republican county commissioner—a fitness buff, intense reader, and former navy intelligence officer with a crew cut—made light rail his cause, saying it would bring economic development and finally elevate Tampa Bay to the status that had eluded the area for a quarter century. Sharpe was a conservative—in 1994 he had tried to join the Gingrich revolution, running for Congress on Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge (he lost to the Democratic incumbent). But by 2010 he was appalled at how narrow and extreme the Republican Party had become. He aspired to be a John McCain–like reformer, and he talked in ways that other Republican elected officials didn’t dare, quoting John Quincy Adams on the need for canals and roads to unite the nation, Lincoln on federal land grants to the railroads, Eisenhower on the interstate highway system, telling audiences with a chuckle, “It was constitutionally okay for the government at the federal level to be involved in building roads.” But now those highways were jammed, gas prices chronically high, and you could widen I-275 only so much. Sharpe openly mocked the growth machine. “They build something, call it Lazy Oaks, and hope there’s a canal running through it, put in a nine-hole golf course. I don’t know about you, but after one or two times golfing I get bored.”
Light rail looked like streetcars, slower and cheaper than regular rail or subway trains. The plans called for forty-six miles of track, a single line from the airport through Westshore to downtown Tampa and then up to the University of South Florida and New Tampa. The tracks would follow some of the long-defunct tram routes that had once crisscrossed Tampa. In 2010, the Hillsborough County Commission finally voted to put a on
e-cent sales tax referendum on the November ballot.
Van Sickler had loved trains ever since he was a teenager riding the Cleveland Rapid to Municipal Stadium and the Flats. He saw in light rail the answer to the sprawl that had brought Tampa down. Building the tracks and stations would create jobs, but more important, light rail would change the pattern of living. People would get off the train and walk, and walking (without fear of traffic death) would change the urban landscape, away from the shopping plaza, the parking lot, the gas station, and the roadside sign to townhouses, cafés, bookstores, the kind of places that encouraged pedestrians to linger, and their presence would spur other businesses to cluster, and before long there would be density—Jane Jacobs’s heaven. Strangers would meet in nontraumatic accidental encounters and exchange ideas. Tampa would become the magnet for educated young people, tech start-ups, and corporate headquarters that its counterparts with commuter rail had already become, putting the economy on a sounder foundation than real estate had. The center of gravity would move back to the city, away from Country Walk and Carriage Pointe, which would fade into irrelevance. If there was an answer to the fatal growth machine, it was rail.
* * *
Karen Jaroch grew up in Tampa, the daughter of a retired military officer. When she was sixteen, in 1980, she got up the nerve to hold a sign at the corner of Westshore and Kennedy for Reagan and Paula Hawkins, a Republican who became Florida’s first woman senator in the conservative sweep that year. That was Karen’s last public political act for almost thirty years. She married a fellow student at the University of South Florida who was the most liberal person she’d ever met, and at first they couldn’t talk politics, but over the years, in her quiet, reasonable way, she brought him around to her side. They were both trained as engineers and they lived next to a golf course in New Tampa, an unincorporated boomburg on the northern outskirts of the city, and raised four kids while Karen became a stay-at-home mom, a churchgoer, a PTA member, and in every way an ordinary middle-class woman, down to her geographically indeterminate middle American accent.
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