Back on the road, I say, “Okay, that was racism. What you complain about with Darryl? That’s just cluelessness, ignorance bred of living in a backwater. But Clive? He’s a racist.”
“Jesus Christ, Iz. Clive is a racist misogynist. But don’t you think it’s setting the bar a little low to say just because Darryl doesn’t beat on mixed race couples and rape women, he’s not racist or sexist?”
“Darryl didn’t just not beat on mixed race couples or not rape women. That is ridiculous! He’s a decent guy.”
“Darryl voted for a man who refused to rent apartments to African American families and signed a consent decree with the Justice Department because of it. He voted for a man who bragged about assaulting women and over a dozen women accused him of doing just that.”
“That doesn’t mean he endorsed those Trump behaviors, Imogen!”
“Of course it does!” Her voice is shrill; she’s nearly shouting. “Darryl weighed those behaviors plus zero government experience and no plan for governing against Secretary Clinton’s years of service and reams of white papers and plans and decided to vote for Trump. Are you saying it was the zero experience he was endorsing?”
If I so much as open my mouth, we will be screaming at each other for the rest of the ride. Route 108 is running clear. The accident must have been further along the 120. If only I hadn’t missed the turnoff.
20
If it’s White, it’s Right
Monday, September 17th, 50 days until the midterms
Corey shows up for our 5 p.m. jobs messaging meeting with a bottle of whiskey under his arm and a pair of disposable plastic cups pinched between his thumb and index finger. He takes a seat, plonks the whiskey on the desk, and sets the cups beside it.
“Drink?” he asks.
“Not for me, no.”
“Mind if I do?”
“Be my guest.”
I’ve printed out two copies of my agenda, but he barely glances at his copy before pushing it to the side.
I jump in anyway. “You said security was Republican Messaging 101. But Darryl says jobs drove his vote, and you mentioned that DJT was a master of jobs messaging. I’m having trouble picturing how a jobs ad would work. Trump kept talking about mining jobs. I assume we’re not going to talk about mining jobs in Modesto. But I don’t even get why that worked in West Virginia. I took enough economics to know more mining jobs were lost to automation and cheap natural gas than to regulations. Do you really expect mining jobs to come back?”
Corey pours himself a stiff one, takes a drink, and contemplates his plastic cup.
“You’re still thinking too literally, Iz,” he says. “You sound like a Democrat. Messaging, particularly in the era of Trump, has to be engaged in symbolically.”
“The ‘symbolism’ of mining?” I don’t bother to keep the skepticism out of my voice.
I picture the blasted mountain tops, the scars of pit mining, and the coal slurry spills that deface coal country. These can’t be the symbols he has in mind. It takes a bit of effort not to ask, a task made more difficult by the fact that Corey is sporting a wolfish smile in response to my tone.
“You wanna talk about mining jobs? Picture a coal miner in your head, Iz. Got it? Describe the miner to me.”
This sounds suspiciously like the start of a guided meditation. At least he didn’t tell me to shut my eyes.
“I see a guy with a hard hat with a big light on the front of it.”
“Keep going,” he says.
I give a sigh to signal there’s a limit to how long I want to play this game. “Well, he’s covered in soot, or coal dust, like blackened by it, so the clean white area around his eyes and the whites of his eyes stand out.”
“Exactly,” says Corey, triumphantly. “Everybody pictures the same thing when you say ‘coal miner.’ Here’s the important stuff: A white man, more than that, a hard-working, long-suffering white man. That’s the part that matters. ‘Miner’ is just a symbol, a shorthand for hard-working, long-suffering white man.”
“So you’re saying we’re not bringing mining jobs back?”
“Jesus, Isaiah. Not even inbred, West Virginia high school dropouts think we’re bringing coal jobs back.”
Talking to Corey is a master class in territory marking. He pokes fun at my answer but doesn’t bother to provide one of his own, forcing me to ask, “So what’s in it for them? Trump won West Virginia by more than forty-two points, the highest margin in history.”
“Centrality in the narrative,” says Corey, enunciating the hell out it. “CIN for short.”
Needless to say, he pronounces like ‘sin.’
“Centrality in the narrative? What the hell does that mean?”
“Exactly what it says: being at the heart of the story. Trump talked about miners, he put them on the national stage. No more talking about unarmed black men being shot by police. Or women not getting paid the same as men or how things every one of us has said to women at least a couple times constitutes sexual harassment. Those people should stop their whining: they’re not the victims here. The victims are the hard-working, long-suffering white men who built this great nation, and the frickin’ Democrats are letting women and minorities cut in line.”
Separate from making the hair on the back of my neck stand up, this stuff doesn’t compute for me. It sounds like magical thinking.
I push back. “The AP just reported that unemployment rates rose in every county in West Virginia last quarter. But you’re saying that’s not a problem, you’re saying, we don’t have to bring back jobs. We just focus on ‘the narrative,’ we just talk about mining, in Modesto.”
Corey waves away my objection with a Trumpian wave.
“Mining’s just an example, probably doesn’t make sense for Modesto. There are other examples. You better write this down.” Corey dictates, leaning forward to keep an eye on me, as my pen speeds across the notebook. “Steel workers, manufacturing jobs, oil workers, policemen, military. Just picture the job, and if the image is white, it’s right.”
Corey and I eyeball each other.
I have no idea what he’s thinking.
What I’m wondering is, how should I respond? That is, how would a white, straight Peter Thiel respond to this, as opposed to a mixed-race, straight Peter Thiel. ‘If it’s white, it’s right’ is about as clear an expression of racism as I can imagine. It is the most racist thing I have ever heard in a work environment. It makes me wonder if he knows I’m mixed race and is baiting me. How would he treat me if he knew that I’m mixed race? It’s not as if he treats me with an awful lot of respect now . . .
Case in point: without asking if I have any other questions, or if the meeting is over, Corey gets up, grabs the whiskey bottle, and heads out.
Corey presented a white jobs message as good, all-purpose Republican messaging. I can see that, like the appropriately crafted security message (one with a racial subtext), it speaks to the racist elements in the Republican base. But is there a jobs message or a security message, for that matter, distinct from the race message? What was it in the jobs message that spoke to the swing O-O-T voter?
Everybody and my sister have done endless critiques of Clinton’s campaign. And a bunch of folks have criticized her for not focusing on jobs. But I really don’t think it’s the case that Clinton didn’t talk about them. In fact, she had a hundred-day plan for creating jobs. It involved investing in infrastructure, strengthening trade agreements, and investing in innovation. As Imogen pointed out, the plan was something like forty pages long. And it had footnotes.
Trump had slogans. His website had a couple bullet points, and Trump had slogans.
But Darryl, whose driving issue was jobs, didn’t see anything for himself in Clinton’s jobs plan. He voted for Trump. Why?
Is the lesson from centrality in the narrative that what Clinton’s jobs plan needed was a lot of pictures of white guys at work? So that a guy like Darryl could see himself in her plan? I want to say this is silly,
but I remember how excited my Asian friends in high school were about Yao Ming. Of course, nearly twenty years later, I can still name only one Asian guy playing in the NBA. Anyway, Clinton’s campaign materials must have had some pictures of white guys.
For the time being, what I’ve got is race, Dangerous World, and a push strategy. If Corey is to be believed, the Darryls of this world will wait to hear how the media and pundits respond. I don’t expect the media to take equating Black Lives Matter with terrorists lying down. This is my justification for releasing an ad that got nothing more than a shrug from my focus group of one, Darryl Gniewek. Looks like I’m going with Dangerous World.
21
Off to the Races
Saturday, September 22nd, 45 days until the midterms
As part of his unofficial duties, Darryl garners info from ‘casual’ Reed encounters at Sunday 8:30 a.m. services at North Valley Covenant Church. This is really taking one for the team. Darryl is not a regular churchgoer, he’s a self-described Christmas and Easter Christian. He also really likes sleeping in on a Sunday morning.
This week, Darryl’s sacrifice was in vain. Mike Reed did not sign off on the Dangerous World spot. Reed said that while he supports a strong law-and-order message, and he believes that dissolution of the family structure has undermined certain communities, Dangerous World looks to him like race-baiting.
After the tepid reception Dangerous World got from my focus group of one, Darryl Gniewek, I’m relieved to get a rise out of Mike Reed and Dave Grady. More than that, I’m encouraged that there are politicians across the aisle still willing to stand up to race-baiting.
My political consultant, as might be expected of the author of the Rubber Glove Incident, says, “What a pair of spineless, nutless pussies. Reed supports the Great DJT, who said of the lethal violence in Charlottesville that there was blame on both sides, that Black Lives Matter is the same as the Ku Klux Klan. Dangerous World is no different. Reed and Grady just want plausible deniability. I say fuck ’em. Let’s run the ad.”
Given that neither Reed nor Grady can admit that they had a conversation with Darryl about Dangerous World without admitting that they broke campaign finance law, I don’t see how objecting to the ad provides any deniability to either of them. This is great.
Corey warns me not to expect much from the release of Dangerous World. Because of the PAC’s budget, which he characterizes as ‘trivial,’ he argued that we forego focus group message testing of the ad. He said focus groups of likely voters aren’t the real audience for our work anyway. Given the budget, we can’t make the ad buys, even in Stanislaus County’s small local media market, necessary to reach the district’s voters. The strategy, or hope, is that the ad is sufficiently controversial to receive media coverage. He says we’ll just dip our toe in the water and see if the ad’s got what it takes to ‘trigger the libs.’
Effectively, what Corey’s strategy means is that we post the video to RAPAC’s website, send press releases to the big California news outlets, and purchase Google AdWords linked to the election. Everything goes live around eleven in the morning. We type the search terms into Google and Bing and are reassured to see links to the RAPAC website come up near the top of the searches; we click through to the site and click the video. Everything appears to be working smoothly.
And then . . . nothing.
Corey sticks the Wall Street Journal under his arm and heads out.
Darryl and I sit in front of the desk in the bullpen, watching the number of site visits, keeping an eye on the RAPAC inbox, hitting the refresh button.
“Is it stuck? Nothing changed . . .” says Darryl.
“Hit it again,” I say.
Nothing happens.
“Reopen the browser,” I say.
Darryl reopens the browser. It’s not stuck: nothing is happening.
Corey wanders back in a while later, mutters “Gotta eat more roughage,” and tosses the Journal in the trash. He heads into the kitchenette and returns with some of our crappy coffee. He wanders over and looks over our shoulders at the desktop screen.
“Whatcha looking at?” he asks. “Porn?”
Corey’s act is starting to wear a bit thin. I note that Darryl’s not doing that good a job of keeping the distaste off his face either.
“What does it look like were doing?” I say. “We’re monitoring the response to Dangerous World.”
“Jesus. You guys are green. It’s still six weeks to the election. Internet searches on the race are a little trickle. It’s gonna take days for this to get picked up, if it gets picked up at all. Find some porn to pass the time. Or go get lunch. That’s what I’m gonna do.”
Corey heads to the door.
“And if we have press inquiries?”
He pauses in the doorway and gives me a look. He fishes in his pocket and comes up with his cell phone and waves it at me.
The quiet following his departure is beyond anti-climactic. It’s depressing. We could take care of the next FECA filing, I guess. But the due date’s not imminent, and it’s so tedious it basically has to be imminent to get us to do it.
Darryl and I debate the benefits of lunch at Mocha Magic on 16th versus Java District on 11th. Java is closer, but both are reachable on foot. Darryl mentions the wait staff at Java. “Ashley’s really friendly,” he says. By which he means Ashley’s really cute, but because she’s jailbait, must be discussed in code.
In the end, the grandma-made food at Mocha’s, in particular the free cookie that comes with the sandwich, ends up carrying the day. Snickerdoodle: yeah. We take our time, lingering for mochas with our cookies, and strolling the few blocks back to the office.
When we get back to I Street, I head to my office, thinking I’ll talk to the ad agency about adding Tamir Rice to the video. My usual account executive is out, and maybe that’s why I don’t get any pushback when I ask her assistant to update the ad with Tamir Rice and his murderer.
The minute I’m off the phone, I start having second thoughts. Am I playing with fire? It feels like I’m playing with fire. I’ll just update the ad. I don’t have to post it on the website; I can keep it in reserve.
There’s a solid tap on my door, and without waiting for me to answer, Darryl opens it and sticks his head around the edge, his face alight.
“I checked the messages, just for fun, like hitting refresh? We’ve got messages from the Modesto Bee and Channel KCRA 3, requests for comment about Dangerous World!”
So it turns out Corey was wrong on this one.
It takes him half an hour to make it back to the office. He sets himself up in the conference room with the speaker phone and, after admonishing Darryl and me to “Watch and learn,” goes to work.
The calls follow the same script. The journalists ask RAPAC to respond to the Delgado campaign and other Democrats’ charge of race-baiting and racial stereotyping.
Corey’s response: “The ad sheds light on the Democrats’ record on security issues. All these attacks took place on Obama’s watch. Voters have a right, some would say a duty, to consider security when they make their choice as to who will represent California’s 10th Congressional District.”
For an awful moment, I think the Bee reporter is going to leave it there. Corey shoots an ugly look at my hands on the conference room table, and I realize I’m beating a tattoo on the table top with the eraser of my mechanical pencil. The speaker phone is probably picking it up. I still my hand.
The Bee reporter, thankfully, is pressing Corey on the inclusion of pictures from Black Lives Matter marches among pictures of terrorists. She sounds appropriately skeptical.
Smooth as silk, Corey says, “These demonstrations have led to property damage and injuries. They threaten and disturb the peace. Our president and commander-in-chief has made clear he believes they include domestic terrorist elements. We stand with the president in his strong support for the forces of law and order which protect this great nation.”
And then the reporter is brusq
uely thanking Corey for his time.
Is that it? Why doesn’t she push harder?
Corey disconnects the phone and looks at us for a moment before he congratulates himself.
“I think that went pretty well. I think that was just the ticket. We are off to the races, boys.”
Needless to say, Corey’s satisfaction is a little unsettling, given my real objectives with Dangerous World. Imogen’s assessment, delivered via text, doesn’t help: “Dangerous World is evil and also seriously dangerous messaging. You better hope you’re right about this, Iz.”
I’m wondering if Corey was right, that the ad didn’t go far enough. Maybe we do need Tamir Rice. Darryl may not have known who Tamir was, but no matter how deep the budget cuts at the Modesto Bee have been, there has to be a journalist left there who can summon the appropriate response, the requisite moral outrage, to Dangerous World 2.0.
22
Endangered Species 1
Sunday, September 23rd, 44 days until the midterms
What’s for dinner?
Imogen has grabbed takeout the last few nights, three nights to be exact. But who’s counting? Imogen, that’s who. She texted me to this effect an hour ago.
“Provisioning score: Mo = 3, Iz = 0. Feed me, Iz!”
So it’s my turn to do the hunting and gathering. We’ve been here roughly four weeks, not even full weeks, so about a dozen dinners and it feels like we’ve already exhausted the dining options of Modesto and environs. I may have to take the extreme measure of (gasp) buying groceries and cooking.
Cruising along the 99, trying to remember what exit I take for Sprouts, I have to hit my brakes to avoid hitting the convertible in front of me. The woman in the passenger seat is pointing at a billboard on the side of the road, and car and driver have slowed down to take a look. Who slows down to look at advertising? A mangled car wreck, sure, but advertising?
Rules of Resistance Page 8
