Over dinner, Nosek argued that the best entrepreneurs in the world were seized with a single idea to which they would devote their lives. Founders Fund backed these visionaries and kept them in charge of their own companies, protecting them from the meddling of other venture capitalists, who were prone to replacing them with plodding executives.
Thiel picked up the theme. There were four places in America where ambitious young people went, he said: New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley. The first three were tired, used up. Wall Street lost its allure after the financial crisis; the D.C. excitement of the Obama presidency was over; Hollywood hadn’t been a cultural mecca for years. Only Silicon Valley still attracted young people with big dreams.
Nosek recalled that he had failed a high school English class in Illinois because the teacher said that he couldn’t write. If something like the Thiel Fellowships had existed, he and others like him could have been spared a lot of pain. Too many gifted people passed through college and grad school with no plan for the future. The Thiel Fellowships would find these talents and allow them to become entrepreneurs before they had a chance to lose their way or be snuffed out by the establishment.
Education, Thiel said, was like a “tournament,” with successively difficult stages of competition. “You keep trying to be number one. The problem with the university is what it does to your confidence when you find you’re no longer number one.”
There was wine on the table, but the guests did less drinking than talking. Throughout the meal the two subjects remained the same: the superiority of entrepreneurs and the worthlessness of higher education. At 9:45, Thiel suddenly pushed back his chair.
“Most dinners go on too long or not long enough,” he said.
His guests went out into the cool San Francisco night. The Palace of Fine Arts was brilliantly lit, its rotunda reflected in the pond. Thirty miles south, the labs of Silicon Valley were burning with fluorescent light. Thirty miles east, people weren’t doing well. Thiel retreated upstairs to answer e-mail alone.
JEFF CONNAUGHTON
Connaughton moved to Savannah. He wanted to live in the South again, near the ocean, so he bought a turreted three-story late-nineteenth-century Victorian—twice the size of his Georgetown house for half the money—near the pretty squares lined with live oak and Spanish moss.
Beneath its quaint stylishness, Savannah was just another city hit hard by the crisis. In his neighborhood there was a sign for a ten-thousand-square-foot house that was marked down from $3.5 to $1.5 million. The guy who gave tours of historic Savannah was an unemployed mortgage banker. Soon after Connaughton’s arrival, his neighbors invited him to a monthly potluck gathering, where the host that month was a prosperous-looking man in his sixties with holdings in real estate. A week later, he heard that the man had killed himself—the rumor was that he’d gotten overextended.
Connaughton volunteered once a week at the local legal services office. He acquired a shelter dog, part chow and part golden retriever, and named her Nellie. She was a stressed-out creature with a rough past and a bad case of heartworm. After a round of shots he brought her home and put her on antibiotics. One night, Nellie’s breathing sped up to three or four times a second, and he spent the whole night by her crate, keeping her calm. After ten days of convalescence in the house, he took her out for a walk to a nearby park. Within a few weeks, Nellie settled down as his constant companion.
In Washington, Connaughton used to spend every Sunday morning flipping between the TV talk shows, like everyone else in town, while reading the Times and the Post during commercials. The ritual exchange between high-profile hosts and guests became essential conversation fodder for the D.C. week. In Savannah, it seemed completely absurd. All but his closest Washington friends dropped away, as if he’d moved to the other side of the earth. As long as he had money it would be easy to insulate himself from the country’s problems—to give up on changing Washington and enjoy his life far from the morass, while America went about its long-term decline. He could feel that temptation, and the other one, too—the itch of public service, the Biden itch. It was still there. Every now and then someone sent a feeler his way, an opening at the White House, a good nonprofit job. Each time he said no.
He wanted to burn his ship so that he would never be able to succumb and sail back to his former life. With Nellie lying at his feet, he spent each morning writing a book about what had happened to Washington in his years there. It would be called The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. It would say everything.
TAMPA
The Republicans converged on Tampa at the end of August simultaneously with Hurricane Isaac, which canceled the first day of the convention. At the last hour the storm veered west over the Gulf of Mexico, leaving the city soaked but unscathed. Meanwhile, fifty thousand Republicans, media members, protesters, security officers, and thrill seekers made landfall directly in downtown Tampa. The welcoming committee got the city ready by limiting access to the new Riverwalk, rerouting traffic away from the convention hall, and cutting up the downtown grid with black chain-link fencing, concrete barriers, and Hillsborough County dump trucks. Local people left town or stayed away, and on the canceled Monday the office buildings and surface parking lots downtown were nearly empty. In spite of the diminished car traffic, the city looked less like Jane Jacobs’s heaven than ever, the sidewalks even more deserted than usual, the only eyes on the street those of security officers clustered at every intersection—Tampa police mounted on black bikes, sheriff’s deputies from counties all over Florida, state troopers, national guardsmen in military fatigues, private rent-a-cops, black temporary hires wearing size XXL white T-shirts that said, without further explanation, STAFF. Armed skiffs patrolled the Hillsborough River, helicopters continuously clattered a few hundred feet overhead. All the public trash barrels were gone. Tampa was never safer, or more dead.
After the violence at the 2008 Republican convention in Minneapolis, the phenomenon of Occupy Wall Street and its aftershocks and portents, the predictions that Tampa 2012 was going to give Chicago 1968 a run, the city prepared for a riot. In the days before the convention, Matt Weidner’s blog scaled new rhetorical mountaintops:
… you really cannot be prepared for your city turning into a heavily fortified warzone until you’re sitting in the middle of it. And driving to work, I realized, I’m sitting at Ground Zero for the Republican National Convention here in Tampa / St. Petersburg … So this is what this failed democracy has come to? The St. Pete Police Department building, located just a few steps from my office, is being turned into a bunker, but the row after row, tens of miles of concrete barriers and fencing are what really catches your eye and makes my heart turn cold. It truly is a disturbing commentary on our national politics that so much effort must be made to barricade the ruling class from the peasants and the proletariat.
Weidner’s radicalism had no natural home in American politics. Despite his belief in massive worldwide debt repudiation, he was enough of a libertarian to become an avid Ron Paul supporter. When Paul’s delegates were forbidden to bring their own signs onto the convention floor in Tampa, and twenty of his Maine delegates were stripped of their credentials, and Paul wasn’t allowed to speak because he hadn’t endorsed the Nominee, Weidner announced that he was ending his lifelong membership in the Republican Party. He wouldn’t become a Democrat, though—the party of Obama, the “statist in chief”—“so I’m electing to change my registration to NO PARTY AFFILIATION!” He urged his readers to do the same. Then Weidner drove with his new wife and their four-week-old baby out of the warzone to rural Florida, where he waited out “the whole undeniably engrossing spectacle.”
* * *
Mike Van Sickler was covering the convention for the St. Petersburg Times, which, as of the first of the year, had become the Tampa Bay Times. His assignment was the Florida delegation. The Florida Republican party was being punished by the national party for jumping the gun on the primary schedule, and part o
f the punishment was for the Florida delegates to be exiled to the Innisbrook Golf and Spa Resort in Palm Harbor, an hour’s drive from the convention hall. One night, due to bus congestion and transit malfunctions, the delegates got back to their rooms at three in the morning, and Van Sickler wrote a wry piece imagining how things might have been different if Tampa Bay had commuter rail, like Charlotte, where the Democratic convention was to be held the following week.
After the conventions, Van Sickler was going to join the paper’s Tallahassee bureau, where his beat would include Governor Rick Scott. He had spent his career covering city halls and county commissions, running title searches and mapping foreclosures, beats where there were no communications strategists and press flaks, only the buried facts of folly and corruption, which he knew how to dig up as well as any reporter around. He had never covered real politics before, and he was nervous as hell, loving the action, going on adrenaline and fear, trying to figure out what questions to ask.
For example, what should he ask Governor Scott’s mother? There she was on the second night of the convention, in a big black skirt and floral top, sitting with the Florida delegates directly in front of the podium, listening to Janine Turner from Northern Exposure (dyed blond, like most of the women present), and waiting for the Nominee’s wife to speak. Should he ask Mrs. Scott a gotcha question? What would be the point? The chances of getting any news were small. She probably wouldn’t even answer him. He decided to let her listen to the speeches.
Van Sickler worried that he didn’t have the speed and fluency for the big leagues. He knew that he would have to play ball with Rick Scott, pay attention to nuances, be a drama critic after a State of the State address, make trades with his handlers to stay in the game and get his calls returned. That was how politics was covered at the highest levels, and it didn’t come naturally to him. He was much better operating out in the open—making them talk to him because he had dug up facts. Facts were Van Sickler’s strength, and he decided to stick with them as much as possible in this new phase of his career.
* * *
The convention was in Tampa, but inside the hall it was rare to hear anyone mention the foreclosure crisis, ghost subdivisions, robo-signing, mortgage fraud, bankruptcy, or homelessness. No speaker told the story of how Wall Street and lenders and developers and local officials had created the conditions for a catastrophe that still had not receded from Tampa Bay. No one spoke for Usha Patel, or Mike Ross, or the late Jack Hamersma, or the Hartzells. Instead, leading Republicans took the podium one after another to sing the praises of the successful business owner and the risk-taking investor.
The Republicans felt nothing for their Nominee. They had chosen him, as the Democrats once chose John Kerry, in the hope that others would like him better than they did. There was no relief at the top of the ticket for their fever, no love to ennoble the scalding hatred of the president and his America that had energized the resurgence in the Republican grassroots since 2009. The beating heart of the party was not to be found in the loveless convention hall, where only loyal delegates and visitors with the right credentials could enter, bused in on a single clogged access road, funneled on foot through a single checkpoint, stepping in bright red dresses and high heels between concrete barriers, sweating into the armpits of sport coats as they walked in darkness under the Crosstown Expressway and looked around for a store that sold bottled water.
Four decades after his first try for Congress, Newt Gingrich was in Tampa, posing for pictures with Callista, his buttoned suit jacket emphasizing his width, speaking at his mobile “Newt University” for two hours a day, every day, including the canceled day, holding forth in the Royal Palm Ballroom at the Wyndham Tampa Westshore on the subject of America’s energy future to whoever would listen. Morning Joe listened for a few minutes, then did a stand-up with Gingrich out in the corridor. Everyone knew that Gingrich and the Nominee despised each other. Why, Morning Joe asked, was Newt here in Tampa to lend his support? “How do you avoid making it personal?”
“We have an overarching agreement that in the end we’re all Americans,” Gingrich said. “This is what makes us so powerful, because we can come together in a way that Adolf Hitler or Tojo or Khrushchev never could.” Warming to his theme of civic unity higher than politics, he smiled, and smiling made him look like a boy who’s thought of a clever answer. “I think it was a remarkable thing that I was allowed to run. It’s a remarkable thing that I’m allowed to be on your show. I so much love being a citizen.”
Morning Joe cracked a few jokes with Gingrich, thanked him, and hurried out of the hotel. Gingrich turned toward a French TV camera and was asked for reasons to vote for the Nominee. Gingrich stopped smiling, his face dropped, the corners of his mouth turned down in deep grooves, and under the white helmet of hair his eyes narrowed in a hard humorless stare. “Obama stands for fundamentally radical values that will transform America,” Gingrich said, quickly and automatically, for the ten thousandth time, far too many times to know if he really meant it, any more than if he meant that in the end we were all Americans, or if he was even subliminally aware of the contradiction, but it didn’t matter anyway because he was already on his way back inside the Royal Palm Ballroom, where there was more talking to be done, always more talking, for not to talk would be to die.
* * *
Gingrich was one of Karen Jaroch’s personal heroes. Karen had supported him in the Florida primary after her first choice, Herman Cain (for whom she had served as county chairwoman), dropped out. One night during convention week, she attended the Faith and Freedom Rally at the Tampa Theater and heard Gingrich speak, along with other heroes of hers, including Phyllis Schlafly, who was eighty-eight years old but still looked like the firebrand housewife (the same as Karen Jaroch) from the 1964 Goldwater campaign. Karen had made her peace with the party’s Nominee for 2012—“anybody but Obama”—but she didn’t care much for the convention itself, the kind of insider establishment event that had kept her away from politics most of her life. In a way, Karen didn’t need to be there, because in Tampa the fringe had made it to the floor, the podium, and the platform. There was even a plank condemning Agenda 21, the twenty-year-old UN resolution that obsessed opponents of rail.
Karen was working full-time in a new job. At the start of the year, she had become the Hillsborough County field director for Americans for Prosperity, the pro-free-enterprise group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers. The week before the convention she opened the field office in a small strip mall in North Tampa, next to a Serbian massage therapy parlor and downstairs from a realty company. Karen was making thousands of “issue” calls, trying to identify potential supporters and direct them to the group’s website. Around the office were empty desks waiting for phones, computers, and volunteers. One night, a group had come to watch a screening of Who Is John Galt?, the second part of a film version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Jaroch hadn’t read the novel—she wasn’t a big reader of books—but agreed completely with its principles. She had found her purpose, now joined to a national organization with bottomless amounts of money, and she applied herself with the unflagging energy of an adherent whose worldview couldn’t be disturbed by any argument or fact. Beneath her politics was a basic feeling that she and her husband had always played by the rules without ever cutting corners or asking for help.
The job was Karen’s first in years, and although she had vowed not to make a career of politics when she first started the Tampa 9/12 Project, her family needed the paycheck. But she would do it even without one. “This is where my heart is.”
* * *
The Hartzells spent a little time watching the convention, but not as much as they spent watching “Sexy and I Know It,” a music video by LMFAO—Laughing My Fucking Ass Off, an electropop duo—with Brent and Danielle dancing in the living room. Not as much time as Ronale spent on the rental laptop entering Disney World contests and cash sweepstakes. Not close to as much time as Danny spent online playing Lea
gue of Legends rank matches at Level 30.
It wasn’t that Danny and Ronale weren’t interested in politics. They thought and talked about politics more than they used to. Working at Wal-Mart pushed it in your face. Danny was making $8.50 an hour—Dennis was making $8.60, after two years—and he hated the job. He hated the superior attitude of the managers, the way they just pushed the old potatoes and onions to the back of the bin, the customers who interrupted him while he was shelving stock to ask where the frigging bananas were, the fact that he was an “associate” instead of an old-school “employee,” the phony Tampa police car that the store rented for thirty thousand a month and parked out front as a deterrent to shoplifting. On his break Danny went out into the parking lot and stood there in his uniform khakis and blue shirt and smoked 305s—he had picked up the habit working at Wal-Mart—and thought about his old welding job. He liked dirty jobs, where you made something and had a feeling of accomplishment. He was blue-collar, and if somehow he could get a loan and open his own welding business he would feel like a king, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had read that 47 percent of Americans were now too poor to pay income taxes. Forty-seven percent! How did that happen? Greed. Just corporate greed. Sometimes he thought it would be better to get rid of money and go back to the barter system, wheat in exchange for milk and eggs. Here was Danny, the little guy doing the heavy lifting and helping the customers—the backbone of the workforce—making ten grand a year, while the guy who sat behind a desk doing nothing but watching the little guy work made eight or nine million. Why was that fair? The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. You couldn’t ever get ahead. You just got used to it—that was life. At this point he was doing it for his children, hoping they’d be better off.
The Unwinding Page 47
