With the temperature dropping like a stone, we made our way to Imogen’s Mini, the second-to-last car in the darkened parking lot. Imogen had devoted the Mini’s precious trunk space to a cooler filled with ice and a magnum of Krug champagne; that’s how certain she was that we’d be toasting a Madame President for the first time in US history that evening.
So it came to pass that it was in a deserted middle school parking lot, the Mini lit only by the glow of our cell phones, that we watched the 2016 presidential election slip away.
…
I awoke to find Imogen shaking my leg and muttering about missing the noon checkout. I knew immediately that something really bad had happened, and because a voice from the television was droning on about exit polls, I quickly realized what the bad thing was.
Neither of us had had the stomach for the ‘Victory Party’ at the Atlantis. Instead we had returned to the Eldorado, turned on CNN in Imogen’s room, and when the Krug ran out, worked our way through Imogen’s minibar. I never made it back to my room. By the feel of it, the bottle count had been high.
We winced our way through showers and checkout, piled back into the Mini, and headed west. Imogen drove hunched over the wheel, periodically jabbing at her sunglasses when they rode down to the tip of her nose. The silence in the car was broken by Imogen’s sporadic outbursts, which generally began with, “Do you know what this means?”
For example: “Do you know what this means? This means Trump will pull out of the Paris climate accord—it means the planet is going to cook. Collapse of food systems, famine, drought, flooding, martial law.”
She ranted about the implications of Trump’s election for the Supreme Court, minimum wage, abortion, race relations, LGBT rights, gun control, and women’s rights, among many, many other things. I let her words wash over me.
She excoriated friends who had told her they weren’t volunteering, as they ‘just weren’t that excited about Hillary.’ She said, “I hope they’re excited now.”
She lamented that she had only devoted ten hours a week to going down to the Democratic Volunteer Center on El Camino in Mountain View. She could have, should have done more! She did everything but rend her cheeks.
I couldn’t decide if I felt guilty.
As I watched I-80 pass by, I probed the idea in my mind the way you probe the space where you’ve lost a tooth with your tongue when you’re a kid. Secretary Clinton, who handily won the national popular vote, lost the Electoral College vote and therefore the presidency because Mr. Trump defeated her by less than a combined 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Green Party nominee Jill Stein captured enough votes to make up the difference between Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.8
But California went for Clinton. My vote for Jill Stein hadn’t mattered. I decided I felt a bit raw, but no, I didn’t feel guilty. Not exactly. Still, it didn’t seem the time to mention it to Imogen.
…
We spent more time together in the month following the election than we’d spent together in the previous year. Perhaps because things had been a little rough between us before the election, there was a luxurious quality to our unity. Or maybe it’s just always good to have your strongest emotions mirrored back at you. When your own mind is running on a loop, saying, “Jesus. How did this happen? Jesus . . .” it is a sweet relief to have someone pour you another drink as she says, “Jesus. How did this happen?”
It was an unseasonably warm November and mornings found us wrapped in fleece, sipping cappuccinos on the back deck overlooking the redwood- and fir-covered slopes down to the coast, the Pacific winking through the gaps in the trees. We read each other op-eds from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, anything that might help us make sense of the election of a self-proclaimed sexual predator and racist to succeed the admirable Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the United States. Work was uncharacteristically quiet, serving simply as the interregnum between morning coffee and evening cocktails. We reconvened in the evening by the fire, the cocktail shaker getting a near-daily workout: martinis, or dark and stormies, or paper planes. We binge-watched Dexter, The Killing, Breaking Bad, and Luther. (I recommend them all.)
It was somewhere between a wake and a staycation.
By the end of the year, with the inauguration looming, it was becoming clear that we had exhausted ethanol’s ability to self-medicate away the horror of the impending Trump presidency. This was our Weimar moment. It was time to take action. We bought plane tickets to Washington for the Women’s March. We went to any meeting of any fledgling activist group in the area—Swing Left, Sister District, Indivisible, I can’t even remember them all—in search of answers, volunteer opportunities, and a path back to the nation we thought we knew.
I want to be clear: I didn’t have to be talked into joining the resistance. I was not reluctantly opposed to Trump. From the start, my opposition was wholehearted and visceral.
3
Just the Ticket
Thursday, July 5th, 2018, 124 days until the midterms
Staring at the door Imogen slammed behind her, I wonder what happened to that shared commitment? That energy?
Sure, we went to the Women’s March. We’ve gone to subsequent marches too. But the marches are largely symbolic. Without follow-through, they mean about as much as Occupy Wall Street. If that is the sum total of our contribution to the Resistance, then we’re gonna end up like those Germans who spent their post–World War II years claiming they thought their Jewish neighbors were off vacationing somewhere, or that they had absolutely no idea what that smell coming from Bergen-Belsen was.
The sale of my start-up, ChemTemex, distracted me, to say the least. It was my first. Not my first start-up, but the first to succeed, the first to get acquired by Big Pharma, and my first serious payday. But we celebrated the closing of that deal months ago.
Imogen has been at liberty much longer. The sexual harassment and discrimination dust-up with Kaplan and Stone, her old law firm, settled before the 2016 election. She calls it ‘consulting,’ but she’s been licking her wounds ever since.
For very different reasons, we both have time on our hands. Maybe too much. Maybe it’s time to put our money and our time where our mouths are.
Not here in Silicon Valley. Our Democratic congresswoman wins her elections by forty to fifty points. Silicon Valley is so dark blue, it’s nearly black. We need to put our shoulders to the wheel someplace it will matter.
I pour myself a couple fingers of scotch and start surfing the web, reading up on political pundits’ views on what it will take for Democrats to flip the twenty-four seats needed to take control of the House of Representatives, put an end to efforts to repeal Obamacare, an end to tax cuts for the wealthy, and effectively limit Trump to a two-year presidency.
I spend considerable time on FiveThirtyEight and the Cook Political Report. Of the seats targeted by Democrats, at least seven seats are in California. One of those seats, California’s 10th Congressional District, is held by a guy named Mike Reed, a white Evangelical who is, paradoxically, much loved by both the pro-gun and pro-life lobbies. The Democratic challenger is a woman named Sylvia Delgado, a hometown girl with an impressive up-by-her-bootstraps biography. She attended Stanford undergrad and law school before returning home as a community activist.
This district is not winning any prizes on the education front. Whereas about 30 percent of people go to college nationally, only half that number go to college in District 10. Comparing Obama’s margins to Hillary’s in 2016, it appears a lot of voters in District 10 swung from voting for Obama twice, to voting for Trump. These Obama-Obama-Trump voters could be the perfect test subjects for demonstrating what drove non–college educated white votes for Trump. This battleground district could be the perfect place to teach Imogen a thing or two about tolerance and inclusion.
District 10 lies in California’s Central Valley, encompassing towns like Turlock, Tracy,
and Modesto. And Modesto is a manageable two-hour drive from our house in Woodside.
I’m on my third scotch and it’s coming up on three in morning when I decide District 10 might be just the ticket.
4
Game On
Friday, July 6th, 123 days until the midterms
I wait until Imogen has a cocktail in hand (an expertly mixed paper plane, crafted by yours truly) before I approach the subject.
“What happened to all that activist zeal we were spouting last year?”
Imogen is curled up in one of the leather chairs in front of the fireplace. The fog rolled in thick and cold before the sun went down, and she’s watching the newly set fire catch and grow. Tongues of orange and yellow lick up the rough sides of a big log, making the occasional pop and crackle. Her gaze swings to meet mine.
“I’m serious. Is all that talk going to amount to anything more than a pair of misshapen pink hats?”
She regards me seriously. “What are you thinking? Do you have something in mind?”
“I think we should put our money and our time where our mouths are. I think we should head out to California’s tenth congressional district, currently represented by a holy-roller, anti-choice freak, and take it by storm.”
“Where’s the tenth?”
“It’s in the Central Valley, two hours from here. Think Modesto.”
“Modesto?”
She reaches for her phone.
“The challenger is Latina. A hometown girl who made it out but returned to try and make things better. Woman named Sylvia Delgado.”
Her head is bent over her phone, her thumbs flying.
“Imogen. Christ. Are you listening?”
She thumbs a moment more, then looks up at me and smiles.
“Connie Chu, a classmate from law school, ended up in Modesto. She’s a big fan of Delgado. She says the campaign is looking for someone to coordinate field operations. The current coordinator had a close encounter with a big rig on Route 99. She’s going to be fine, but she’s out of the picture through the election.”
Wow.
I have to admit that Imogen’s decisiveness can be impressive at times. Coordinating field operations would give her the perfect opportunity to target turnout of the Democratic base—women, Latinos, the small African American and Asian populations in the district. With Imogen already networking her way into Delgado’s campaign, we mix a second round of paper planes and consider how I’ll get involved.
My first inclination is to form a political action committee, a PAC, to work a Democratic jobs message.
But Imogen throws my logic back in my face. “Ha! You’re the one who said that a voter could have preferred Trump’s jobs message and his racist rhetoric, or he could have preferred Trump’s jobs message but disliked his racist rhetoric and cast a Trump vote despite the racist rhetoric. Running a Democratic jobs message won’t tell you anything about whether Trump voters voted because of or despite the racist rhetoric. It makes me think you’re not so confident that former Obama voters swung to Trump despite the racism.”
Is there anything more irritating than your sister parroting your own points back at you?
Still, she has my point: if working-class white voters who voted for Obama and then swung to Trump did so holding their noses about ‘Mexicans are rapists,’ then there should be a racist bridge-too-far. A point where the racist rhetoric would cause the one-time Obama voter to return to the Democratic fold. And I would dearly like to rub Imogen’s nose in her bias about these folks.
So my plan is to go undercover, as a Silicon Valley Independent, ostensibly supporting the Republican incumbent, Mike Reed. I’ll form my own PAC and give my bridge-too-far messaging a try.
While I mix a third round, Imogen muses about her own messaging. She makes some fuzzy allusions to the promise of social media, maybe a blog. Her messaging specifics are similarly vague. But she stresses that she intends to abandon the traditional Democratic white paper, footnote-dense approach in favor of a progressive variant on Trump’s fire-bomb approach. She says repeatedly that ‘the gloves are coming off.’ This is a little mystifying, since no one has ever accused Imogen of a gloves-on approach to communication—or anything else, for that matter.
It’s game on.
6
Good Help Is Hard to Find
Friday, July 20th, 109 days until the midterms
Before the turn of the century, there was campaign finance law that limited how much money each person could give a candidate to stop rich people from being able to buy candidates. But in 2010 we got the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The decision ripped the $2,700 fig-leaf limit off the whole throbbing campaign business. Since Citizens United, so long as political action committees don’t ‘coordinate with campaigns,’ whatever that means, PACs can spend as much money as they want on an election. In my case, that’s roughly $250,000 of the proceeds from my options from the sale of ChemTemex.
I set up a couple meetings with Republican consultants and, fifteen minutes into the first one, I realize I’ve taken the meetings too lightly. The prohibition against coordinating with campaigns is convenient for me; it obscures my outsider status and should allow me to keep a low profile, to stay undercover. The problem is, I haven’t figured out my cover yet.
I open my mouth and weird drivel dribbles out of it. Bullshit about ‘political division’ and ‘gridlock in our nation’s capital.’ My potential consultants show great discipline in maintaining their politely expectant expressions. As I squirm inside, they wait and wait for me to add something, anything that means something. When nothing is forthcoming, they make painfully polite transitions—‘Yes. Well. As I was saying, we offer a full range of services . . .’
The interviews don’t provide much in the way of feedback regarding what is expected or acceptable. These guys (they are all guys) are eager for business, so I basically get no negative feedback. Whatever it is I want to do, they are the guys who are going to maximize my effort.
Campaigns are big business. There’s a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to getting folks elected. There are endless different kinds of consultants—consultants for strategy, for messaging, for traditional media, for online media; I can’t even name them all. What I need is a Republican consultant who will be so strident, so immoderate that he will actually drive moderate voters to the Democratic candidate. Given some of the Republican ads I’ve seen, I’m pretty sure that consultant is out there. My problem is that I need to find that consultant without telling him what it is I’m trying to do.
I flail through a few meetings before I meet Corey Strutsky. Corey is the sort of guy I’d describe as ‘a character’ and Imogen might call ‘an asshole.’ I put Corey somewhere around fifty-five, maybe sixty. A once good-looking man gone to seed, Corey has more salt than pepper in his greased-back hair, his face is flushed with broken veins across his cheeks and nose, and his gut strains against the confines of his pinstripe suit. His voice is the low growl of a lifelong whiskey and cigarettes guy, with one of those working-class East Coast accents, although I can’t quite place it. It has hints of outer borough, maybe the South Bronx. There’s a fascinating street brawler quality to him.
At Corey’s suggestion, we meet for coffee at the swanky Clock Bar at the Westin St. Francis. The tufted brown leather and wood paneling look like Hollywood’s idea of a power broker setting. Over the course of the meeting, Corey takes occasional notes in a little leather-bound notebook. He uses a Sharpie and writes in big, blocky capital letters. Even upside down, I can read ‘Isaiah Whitman = straight Peter Thiel.’ Peter Thiel!?
Okay, that’s not very flattering.
I’m not anywhere near that much of an asshole, not anywhere near that old or that beady-eyed. Seriously, I’m not bad looking. I also have a net worth a tiny fraction of Thiel’s, so maybe that part was flattering. At least it tells me what my role is, so I guess it does simplify matters a bit. Straight Peter Thiel. Jeez.
Corey i
s still talking. “Look, I’m not an ideologue. I don’t give a shit about orthodoxy, and I’m never gonna start a conversation about whether the ends justify the means. To me, that’s just whining and dithering. I’m a pragmatist. I do what needs doing to get the job done. And the job here is to keep the Congress red. Period. You wanna have a long conversation about health care reform? Call Paul Ryan, that’s his job. My job: to make sure the Speaker has the votes in Congress to pass whatever reform bill he wants to.”
Coffee turns into drinks when Corey signals the waiter. “Take this shit away and bring me a Manhattan.”
Normally, this would be a red flag, a signal to thank Corey for his time and move on. Who wants to work with someone who can’t be bothered with basic civility during the interview process? But somehow Corey pulls this off as a kind of straight-talking injunction to get the party started.
“Alrighty, then!” says the waiter, grinning and turning to me. Is he charmed by Corey, or by the prospect of a bigger tab and tip? Either way, the mood is now festive.
So I order a martini.
Corey is a natural-born storyteller, and he regales me with his various adventures in campaigning, which gives him the opportunity to drop more than a few names—the junior senator from this state, a congressman from that state. He takes the opportunity to discuss some of the more colorful episodes on his resume, including a client who made a distinction between ‘legitimate rape’ and the majority of allegations of sexual assault, and another who ran an ad featuring a visual of pigs at a trough.
Corey’s takeaway: “Sometimes the best move, sometimes the only move, is to ruffle the feathers of the liberal media. Trigger the libs.”
He goes on to say that if we’re doing our job right, then we’ll ruffle more than a few feathers. Corey is no novice when it comes to dueling with the likes of Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow. He is willing, even eager, to take on the role of spokesperson for my PAC and assures me that in that role he will always give as good as he gets. The liberal media is our tool, he cautions, but it is also our enemy, not to be underestimated.
Rules of Resistance Page 2
