I fish my phone out of my pocket and call Darryl to see what he thinks.
I hear a woman’s voice in the background. The words are indistinct, but she does not sound amused.
“This a bad time?”
“Yeah, no, no problem. Just let me step out.”
I hear a door shut, and the woman’s voice is silenced.
“Real Americans?” Darryl muses. “I guess it implies genuine-ness. Maybe patriotism. Maybe a little generic, but I think PAC names tend to be a little generic. My name’s Gniewek, so generic doesn’t sound too bad to me.”
Turned out Gniewek is how you spell Darryl’s surname, as I found out when filling in the PAC incorporation papers.
“What’s wrong with Gniewek?”
“First, absolutely no one knows how to spell it. I always have to spell it, and people still get it wrong. Second, it means anger—gniewek means anger in Polish, which by the way is not the sweetest sounding language. Also, it sounds a little icky, given that it ends in ick.”
“Sounds fine to me,” I say, not meaning to minimize, just trying to be supportive.
“Easy for a guy named White Man to say.”
12
Toxic Chivalry
Saturday, September 1st, 66 days until the midterms
My phone buzzes as I shuffle down the apartment hallway. Imogen has taken to emailing me academic studies, polling data, and op-eds that bolster her position on the because/despite debate. She highlights what she considers the relevant bits. This one is about Evangelicals. Evangelicals? Christ.
“Trump . . . won about 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016 even though he’d been through two divorces, was accused of sexual assault and struggled to speak about the Bible coherently . . . conservative Christian leaders are strongly backing the president . . . Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of evangelical Liberty University, defended Trump’s controversial comments in the wake of the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Amid allegations that Trump had an extramarital affair, Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son . . . downplayed the controversy.”
Perry Bacon Jr. and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, “How Trump and Race are Splitting Evangelicals,” FiveThirtyEight.com, March 2, 2018.9
The contents of the apartment fridge scream bachelor. A fifth of Ketel One and a pint of Dulce de Leche Häagen-Dazs in the freezer, a partial six-pack of Stella, milk, condiments, and containers of leftovers in the fridge. Imogen brought home sushi for dinner, but that was hours ago and I’m feeling a little peckish. The ice cream looks tempting, but what with splitting my time between Woodside and Modesto, I’m not working out as much as usual. I can’t be sure, but I think a layer of fat is establishing a foothold over my abs. I reach for a mug instead.
“You want a cup of tea?” I ask over my shoulder.
“Uh. Sure. No caffeine. Rooibos?”
“Nope. How about chamomile?”
“Perfect.”
I carry the steaming mugs and a saucer for the teabags over to the couch, setting the saucer and one of the mugs on the coffee table within easy reach of her right hand, and Imogen scooches over to make space.
“Listen to this, Iz. This is from an interview with Mike Reed, your candidate, with the Modesto Bee.
‘Question: Would you be comfortable if your daughter served in the military, particularly in light of recent data on sexual assaults in the military?
‘Congressman Reed: I think it’s the wrong question. Many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually. Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting . . . I think a more sensible question is what do you expect to happen when you have men and women serving together? Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.’10
“See what he’s doing there? He’s equating human sexuality with sexual assaults—it’s just ‘young men finding women attractive,’ boys will be boys. No point in addressing sexual assault—we just need to keep women out of the military.”
I chew that over. I feel resistance. I’m not quite on board, but I’m not finding a hole in her thinking either.
“Okay, okay. Here’s another one. This one’s even worse:
‘Question: Would you be comfortable if your daughter worked in the White House, in close proximity with a man accused by dozens of women of harassment and even assault?
‘Congressman Reed: Again, I think you’re on the wrong track here. I’ve written and spoken on this before. For years, we have gotten the message from the mouthpieces of popular culture that you can have it all—career, kids, and a two-car garage. Sure, you can have it all, but your day-care kids get the short end of the emotional stick. You end up stunting your children’s emotional development. I am criticizing a culture that has bought the big lie that ‘Mom doesn’t matter.’11 Separate from keeping women from fulfilling their God-given duties as mothers, I think we do women no favors by encouraging them to join the scrum of the workplace. And the broader #metoo conversation demonstrates the hazards we are asking women to navigate when we ask them to work outside the home.’
“Oh. My. God. Sexual harassment in the workplace isn’t the problem—women working is the problem! Keeping them out of the workforce, keeping them barefoot and pregnant is protecting them from sexual harassment! What a load of horse shit. I don’t know what to call that. Misogynous benevolence? Toxic chivalry? I hate this guy.”
“Okay, that’s a little hyperbolic,” I say, letting my teabag drip into the mug for a moment before I put it on the saucer. “Anyway, Reed’s not as bad as Trump.”
“In some ways he’s worse. Trump brags about assaulting women. But Reed is like Vice President Pence, like Kaplan and Stone’s HR department. HR pretended to care, but their real agenda was protecting K&S. Pence pretends to care about women, but his real agenda is to protect the patriarchy, to drive women out of the workforce.”
“You’re making a big leap. Anyway, he’s not ‘my’ candidate. I’m just interested in his swing voters, like Darryl. And, to me, those don’t sound like arguments that would move Darryl Gniewek.”
“You only met the guy a month ago. How well can you really know him?”
13
RAPAC
Sunday, September 2nd, 65 days until the midterms
“You sprang for prime real estate,” Darryl comments. “Near the courthouse.”
Darryl and I met as agreed Sunday morning outside the furnished office I rented in downtown Modesto. Real Americans Political Action Committee has adopted a Friday through Monday schedule, at least for the time being. This will allow Darryl to fit the ten to twenty hours a week he’s committed to RAPAC into his regular Monday to Friday welding job. Coincidentally, this matches my schedule with Imogen’s. Imogen got the job coordinating grassroots activities for the Delgado campaign, including voter registration, door-to-door canvassing, etc. That sort of electioneering generally takes place on weekends when volunteers have time and target voters are home. When we get closer to the election, we’ll probably be here all the time, but for now, we’re on a Friday to Monday Modesto schedule.
I glance over at Darryl as I contort to push the elevator button with my elbow. We each carry a bulky Apple computer box, so neither of us has a spare finger. Darryl could clean up at a poker game: I can’t gauge whether he’s being ironic or sincere.
The office building is, as Darryl noted, in sight of the Stanislaus County Courthouse. You know those neoclassical monuments to the collective endeavor we call government that grace small towns across America? Courthouses, town halls, public libraries, all pediments and porticoes and cornices rendered in the local limestone or granite? I love those buildings. Modesto’s courthouse is nothing like that. This unlovely number, erected in 1960, is a collection of dun-colored blocks jumbled together, their unadorned surfaces randomly interrupted by plate glass, or stripes of faded aqua. It isn’t quite ugly enough to be notable.
>
Across I Street, our building’s primary tenant is a law firm: Swindle, Goodwin, and some other guys who lacked the marketing savvy to keep a guy named Swindle off the masthead. Their names are plastered across the lintel over the entrance to the lobby. The leasing agent told me, without irony, that everyone refers to it as The Swindle Building. This struck me as humorously appropriate to Real Americans PAC’s mission, so I rented the space. The building management has already updated the directory in the lobby. Given that there are only five firms in the building, perhaps it isn’t too difficult to keep the directory up to date. We’re listed in large type as RAPAC, followed by smaller type spelling out Real Americans Political Action Committee. RAPAC. I like the sound of that too.
RAPAC’s space is on the second of the building’s two floors. It consists of a large general area, a private office (with a window overlooking the moderately ugly courthouse), a conference room (windowless, with an oversized conference table and chairs, resulting in a grim, claustrophobic space), and a small kitchen/break area. The general area is subdivided by waist-high acoustic panel partitions, which define a small reception area and a bullpen. We share common restrooms with the other tenant on the floor, an insurance company. All told, it’s roughly two thousand square feet of space. It’s more than we need, but it’s only going to be a few months, and in Modesto even downtown space doesn’t cost that much.
Renting the space furnished means that all the furniture is reminiscent of a mid-range dentist’s office, which is to say, it’s a little depressing. The furnishings include ‘art’ on the walls—unframed, abstract oils, swirls of colors vaguely suggestive of landscapes. But it also means that all we need to get started are a couple computers and some office supplies.
Ten-thirty a.m. finds me rotating back and forth in my newly rented desk chair, planning for my inaugural messaging meeting with Corey Strutsky at eleven.
I find myself caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the view of the courthouse and a mustard, brown, and black ‘landscape’ hanging on the wall. I stare at it for a full two minutes, trying to understand how it came into being, let alone was purchased and placed in view of anyone with functioning eyesight. I try, but I fail. Having wasted two minutes of life I will never get back, I get up and take the landscape down and set it on the floor next to the office credenza, propped face-in against the wall. Despite the paler space in the off-white paint with the black painting fastener at its center, it’s a significant improvement.
I get back to mentally reviewing how to play this. My plan is to dispense with the racist dog-whistling and go hard-core racist. I consider this a push strategy because the decent elements in the Republican base will be turned off by the racism. They’ll be pushed out of the Republican Party and into the Democratic Party. Although this line of messaging is straightforward in theory, in practice, I anticipate it getting pretty messy. Based on Corey’s track record and his presentation as a man without apparent qualms or squeamishness, I don’t expect any resistance on his part to wading into the mess.
But given that I’m undercover, navigating to racist messaging with Corey could be a bit tricky. It doesn’t seem in character for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to be talking smack about race. For a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a libertarian bent, the small-government-equals-cutting-taxes-and-entitlements is the default, thoroughly vanilla position. But while I expect Corey to be on board with the actual trashing of taxes and entitlements, my hope is that he won’t support it as a messaging strategy. My hope is that Silicon Valley Guy will open with the small government message and be ‘guided’ by Corey to pursue a race strategy. Then, while Corey’s aim is focused on mobilizing the more extreme members of the base, I’ll be peeling off the O-O-T voters.
I try to take a step back from the tactical manipulation of Corey. My plan, after all, is to unleash racist messaging into a campaign, with nothing more than a theory about how it will impact the race. But at this point, the messaging is just an idea. There will be more decision points before any message goes live. Manipulating Corey is a clear and present challenge, a hurdle I must get over before I have the option to unleash the messaging.
14
Thinking vs Belief or Believing in Believing
Sunday, September 2nd, 65 days until the midterms
When Corey arrives for our meeting, I’m in the kitchenette, grabbing a cup of coffee. He stands in the doorway, carrying a Starbucks cup in his right hand, sizing up the office.
“Pretty dated,” he says. “But I guess I’ve seen worse.”
He heads into my office, and when I get there, I find he’s taken the power seat, the seat behind the desk. In my office. I half suppress a laugh at the chutzpah of leaving me to choose between the guest chairs with their largely unobstructed views of the courthouse.
A chocolatey scent and column of steam rise from the Starbucks cup he’s got open on the desktop, into which he proceeds to empty three sugar packets. Evidently Corey is not going to be the sort of consultant who brings enough for the whole class.
I used to complain to Imogen about suck-up consultants and underlings who brought the occasional tribute, like a bottle of Opus One or Cask 23 during the holidays. Here’s my chance to prove I wasn’t full of shit when I said I don’t stand on ceremony and don’t like getting my ass licked. Corey’s nonchalant marking of territory in my office would irritate a lesser man, but that man is not me.
If I’m being honest, it is not effortless.
I put my cup of dishwater coffee on the desk, take a seat, and say, “Where’d you grow up, Corey?”
“Manhattan, Upper East Side. Why d’you ask?”
“Really? I’ve been trying to place your accent. Somehow, Upper East Side wasn’t what I pictured.”
“Oh. Yeah, my roommate at Choate was a scholarship kid from the South Bronx. I picked up an expression or two from old Big Jim. He was given to a colorful turn of phrase.”
Corey is not, as I thought, a working-class kid who thought the rough-and-tumble world of politics might be a place he could make his mark. Corey grew up on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side and attended an expensive boarding school that these days costs somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 a year; that’s the median household income in the US, spent on high school. He’s a wealthy kid who took on working-class affectations, modeling himself on the school’s alpha dog, perhaps? There’s gotta be a story there—
“So, messaging?”
Corey brings me back to the matter at hand.
“Yeah. I’ve been thinking we could open with an ad on small government. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.”
“Small government, huh,” says Corey, eyeing the newly purchased mechanical pencil I’m rolling over my knuckles. His lack of enthusiasm is palpable.
He leans back in my office chair, which emits a squeal in protest. This is probably a good thing because it looked as if Corey was getting ready to put his feet up on my desk. I manage to suppress a smile while he struggles to right the chair.
“Yes. Small government. Tax cuts. And Social Security and Medicare reform,” I intone, leaning forward, drumming the eraser end of the mechanical pencil on the desk top.
“Are you high? The Republican base loves Social Security and Medicare. Most Republicans, like most Americans, haven’t saved for retirement. You touch Social Security and Medicare, their golden years will be spent dying in the street. Probably not exaggerating here, though I do like to exaggerate.”
“But small government is the cornerstone of the Republican platform.”
I sound like a kid who gives the answer he was taught in school, and in the real world is discovering no one actually cares about the answer, like a little kid facing off with a schoolyard bully, whining, ‘But that’s not fair.’
“It is, but that’s not how we talk about small government to the base,” says Corey. “For the base, small government means no regulation. Like no mandate that folks have health insurance, no restrictions on
gun ownership. Small government also means no help for folks who aren’t Real Americans, so no foreign aid. Got it?”
“International aid is like one percent of the federal budget. None of those things will make the smallest dent. If the only thing we’re willing to cut is foreign aid then we’re not serious about small government, and there’s no way we cut taxes without ballooning the deficit.”
“Iz, you have to forget about the Republican platform. Start thinking about the Republican catechism. Think of ‘small government’ for Republican voters the way you think of ‘hallowed be thy name’ for Catholic kids. Priests and bishops know what ‘hallowed’ means—hell, they can say it in Latin. But a five-year-old Catholic kid has never even heard anybody use the word ‘hallowed’ outside of church. They can’t spell it, let alone define it. It’s just something folks memorize and parrot back because the powers that be told them to.”
“Catechism . . .” I say, taken aback at how openly Corey expresses his contempt for the Republican base.
“Catechism. It’s not for nothing Evangelicals vote Republican. These folks place more value in belief and belonging than in thinking—they believe in believing.”
“But Social Security is the biggest line item in the federal budget—it eats up a quarter of the budget. Medicare and Medicaid is another quarter. I pay 45 percent in taxes. How do I get a tax cut if half of government is off the table as far as cuts go?”
“Okay, listen. Republican donors and the Republican leadership are committed to tax cuts. Simple arithmetic means we’ll have to cut Social Security and the health care programs to cut taxes. But that’s not our problem. That’s the Speaker of the House of Representatives’ problem. Our problem is just to make sure the Speaker, Paul Ryan, has the votes in Congress to pass tax cuts, and getting the votes means not talking about cutting Social Security.”
Rules of Resistance Page 5
