But the visit to Farmer told Smolo the ground in Arizona was shifting more quickly and acutely than you could see from back in D.C.
“Something’s scaring this guy,” he said. “And not just because some rich donor passed along a threat. Something’s going on out here. I’ve got a bad feeling, Peter.”
Smolo was a superb investigator, Rena thought, but his friend was also emotional, and his emotions could sometimes slow him down.
“Then we don’t have a minute to waste, Walt. Go hard.”
Fifteen
Dallas, Texas
Matt Alabama liked to stand in the crowd at political events he covered, not in the pen with the traveling press corps. Standing on the floor of the auditorium, he could view the rally from the perspective of the average person in the audience. He liked to move around, too, so he could see up close how different people reacted to certain moments.
Congressman Omar Fulwood bowed his head, closed his eyes, and paused for a moment.
This was the correspondent’s favorite part of Fulwood’s stump speech—the anecdote in which the young Philadelphia congressman recalled his grandmother teaching him how to respond to cruelty and prejudice when he was a boy.
“She would get down on the floor with me, but she wouldn’t take me in her arms and comfort me. No, she wouldn’t do that. Instead, she would gently take me by my shoulders and stand me up straight.” Fulwood would take his imagined self by the shoulders. “And she’d say to me, in her stern, loving way, ‘Always remember this, Omar: You belong. Just as much as anyone else. It’s your school, too.’” Fulwood would release the imagined boy and look back at the crowd.
“Later, when I was older and I was complaining about something, she’d give me that same look and say: ‘Remember, O. It’s your country, too. You don’t need permission or special favors.”
Fulwood didn’t always use the story or tell it the same way. He would shift the emphasis depending on the crowd, adding or omitting different facts, though the basic story remained the same. But he talked about his strict, loving grandmother whenever he thought his followers needed a little tough love—some admonishment for expecting the government to give them too much.
It was a pleasure, Alabama thought, to see a candidate lead audiences rather than just pander to them. It was one of the many things he was beginning to like about Omar Fulwood.
The congressman was a tall, physically imposing light-skinned black man with a faint spatter of freckles on his cheeks. He was more handsome in person than on camera and not as soft looking. People who met him were surprised to see he was large enough to have played tight end in college.
He had made his mark in Congress quickly by finding issues where he and a handful of rising young Republicans shared common ground. Prison reform. Welfare reform. Fulwood had bonded with three young religious conservatives over their deep Baptist roots and their love of music. The Philly native had done a Desert Island Discs–style podcast with Rep. Elwood Cochran of South Carolina. They had to choose ten songs they could agree on if they had to live the rest of their lives together stranded on an island. When they were asked which among those ten they would choose if each could have only one, Fulwood had chosen “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. Cochran, a white former army chaplain, had chosen “The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding. Not so far apart.
Fulwood probably wasn’t ready to be president, Alabama thought. House members rarely make the jump directly—James Garfield was the last to have done it. And young Omar’s candidacy was hanging precariously. He’d shifted pretty hard to the left to run, a calculation to excite primary voters. He was more moderate a congressman than he was a candidate. But it hadn’t entirely worked. After coming in fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire, he’d managed third in Nevada and tied for first in South Carolina. Fulwood needed “a clean win somewhere and fast,” the Wall Street Journal had declared, probably next Tuesday, when eight states were up, including California, Texas, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
Two candidates stood in his way. Maria Pena had the progressive momentum. Billionaire Senator David Traynor of Colorado was leading Cole Murphy in the battle for the party’s center.
“You belong, too,” Fulwood was telling the crowd—quietly, almost intimately. “We belong together.” He let the phrase hang. “Our nation is its greatest, we are only truly strong, when we recognize those values that bind and unite, not divide us. That means the most fortunate among us need to recognize we are stronger when we all rise. Yes, they will need to pay more. History is clear that when the gaps are too great, we all suffer together.”
This was the meat of Fulwood’s message: He wove a picture of a place where even people who disagreed felt comfortable. Then he explained how to get there together. It was a message of racial unity mixed with economic redistribution. But it was not as angry as Pena’s message, or as vengeful.
“What are those shared values that bind and unite us? You know them. We all do. They are enshrined in our holy Declaration of Independence, in our Constitution and our laws.” He offered a careful, clever list:
“The right to pray as we want, believe as we want, speak as we want. The right to be equal under the law, and to protect ourselves from government interference. The right to have the chance to become whoever we are capable of being, regardless of the color of our skin or the size of our bank account. This is the gift our founders gave us. Who among us would say no?”
This year, when politicians were peddling anger, tribalism, and revenge, Fulwood was trying to argue for economic justice but make it sound like self-interest properly understood.
It was especially powerful coming from an African American, Alabama thought. For Fulwood represented something rare at the top of American politics, though few recognized it. While black politicians had risen to the top before, often they had atypical African American stories. They were people of mixed race or privilege or both. Not Fulwood. He was a great-great-great-grandson of slaves, raised middle class by a postal worker father and bookkeeper mother. His ancestors had come here in chains, not by choice, and epitomized the great dark stain of the America myth—the fact that “these truths we hold as self-evident,” including equality under the law and equality of opportunity, were lies. If Fulwood were successful, if he made it to the presidency with his message of belonging, he would touch that lie, wash it away a little, in a way no other American political figure ever had, including no black American president. If the descendant of slaves could rise and become the Jeffersonian ideal of the American intellectual statesman, then maybe the country really did work as it was supposed to.
He was arguing, in much the same way author James Baldwin had two generations ago, that the only way for America to move ahead was through one Americanism.
The message was probably too subtle, and it had not sparked the same momentum as Maria Pena’s more explicitly racial calls for economic justice or David Traynor’s promised fantasy that the billionaire entrepreneur was going to “fix” what was broken and create new alliances. But it was Fulwood’s message, Alabama thought, that connected the ancient chords of American memory to the current moment.
Fulwood’s events featured troupes of young volunteers who called themselves the We Team. These young people, aged fifteen to twenty-five, were recruited and organized through social media and chat apps managed by Fulwood’s campaign. At rallies they stood together wearing distinctive blue T-shirts with WE TEAM emblazoned in red and white. The teams were usually situated on one side of the auditorium where they could be easily seen by the crowd and the cameras. And they were a distinct visual element of Fulwood’s rallies, a hundred or more fresh faces of all races and creeds standing together. And whenever possible, the We Team was majority white.
Matt Alabama didn’t see the skirmish start or the first punches thrown. Being on the floor with the crowd, he didn’t have the panoramic view of the journalists in the pen. He first heard someone near him call out, “Oh, no.” Then he saw someone
pointing. People shooting videos of Fulwood’s speech on their phones began to aim their cameras at the growing melee.
A few were close enough to pick up some audio. Police later would distinctly make out the words, “Get the fuck off me, whitey,” but were unable to find any visual footage to establish who exactly had uttered them. The video images were striking because of how many people in the We Team seemed to be engulfed in the chaos. There appeared, tragically, to be a racial dynamic to the violence. White We Team members were fighting with black. Fulwood’s attempts from the podium to quell the violence proved useless. He sounded weak and a little pathetic, frankly, repeating the word “please” over and over, a point that critics taunted him for in the coming days.
It took security and police to finally restore any semblance of order to the rally, which by then was a shambles. The news media never settled on just a single term to describe what had occurred. But national talk radio host Dash Zimbalist called it a race riot, picking up the phrase from the conservative conspiracy website True Flag, and that characterization got wide circulation. Footage of those five minutes would come to define the short-lived campaign that winter of Omar Fulwood.
Police would make arrests, the second campaign event in three days to feature them. Pena’s event two days ago, the brick thrown at Bakke yesterday. There would be the debate tonight. This was not just some change in tenor. It was not easy to penetrate a campaign rally. There were security and metal detectors and guards. This took planning. This, Alabama, thought, was something else.
Sixteen
Capitol Hill
Washington, D.C.
Washington was a funnel, and the higher you went the more secrets you knew. Rena and his political communications expert Jonathan Robinson were trying to jump to the top of the funnel.
They were sitting in a small conference room in the offices of Senator Llewellyn Burke. At the table with them was Phil Hurd, the consultant who’d run Upton’s last campaign and contracted to produce the oppo book to protect Upton during that race.
Next to Hurd sat the former Senate majority leader Susan Stroud, the woman who, until last fall, had held one of the highest parts of the funnel of power and money in her hands.
Stroud had risen from the Biloxi city council to the U.S. House of Representatives and then the U.S. Senate. There, aided by an intense focus on detail, the patience of the saints, and a superior understanding of the male psyche, she rose to become the first female Senate majority leader in American history. She held the job for ten years.
Late last October, however, the changing nature of the Republican Party caught up to her. To protect a valuable national security secret, Stroud had limited the reach of congressional hearings probing a terrorist attack in Africa. Some conservatives on her right had hoped to use the hearings to weaken President Nash and thus, in theory, help the GOP in the next election. After Stroud did what she thought best for national security rather than politics, the party retaliated. The right wing in her conference mounted a coup, led by Dick Bakke, threatening to block all other legislation if Stroud remained leader. To almost everyone’s surprise, she lacked the votes to stop them. She announced she would remain in the Senate until she retired at the end of her term, a little less than two years away. In her place, the GOP picked Travis Carter of Idaho, a coy and reticent man whose underlying ruthlessness—and true role in Stroud’s demise—only began to fully reveal itself after he had come to power.
“Thank you, Susan, for this,” Burke said as they began.
Stroud’s presence was Rena’s idea. He’d called Burke that morning and asked if he could get the former majority leader to do a favor for Wendy Upton. They wanted her to help them decode the dark money flooding the parties.
Robinson had prepared a slide deck that would help, illuminated now on a large monitor on the wall behind them. The first slide detailed the money traceable from big donors during the previous presidential campaign, three and half years ago.
Nineteen different people had each spent at least twenty million dollars in public “contributions”—more than a half-billion dollars. But that was only a fraction of the total money billionaires had spent trying to buy the last election. In all, the PACs and super PACs had amassed a war chest of $1.7 billion in 2016—the vast majority hidden in the dark 501(c)(4) “donor-advised funds.” Some givers even created what the Washington Tribune called “ghost corporations,” dummy organizations that bundled money on their own and in turn gave that to the PACs, which hid the donors even more.
There were few clear patterns in the list. There were two megadonors from Nevada, the Grantland family of Reno, who ran the biggest natural resources firm in the United States, and Trotter Cardoff of Las Vegas, the biggest casino chain owner in the world. Stuart Sherman ran a hedge fund in San Francisco and gave to Democrats. Phil and Gwen Aiken of Illinois owned a packaging company. Wilson Gerard was a major Silicon Valley venture capitalist and owned a hedge fund whose trading strategy was completely algorithmic.
There was a diet store chain owner, an electronic stock trading company founder, real estate and entertainment magnates, and more hedge fund bosses.
Half the people on the list backed Republicans, half Democrats.
The only common denominator was that everyone on the list was a self-made billionaire.
There weren’t as many people, Rena noticed, from the new digital economy. That group tended to be younger, and for some reason they weren’t trying to personally influence the political system—not this way, though their firms now had huge lobbying efforts.
Robinson’s second slide listed the PACs and super PACs—not the individual donors. It was a longer list, more money, almost all dark. Traditional PACs were bound by federal limits on how much of it someone could contribute, and donors had to be named.
But super PACs had no limits on the donations they collected and didn’t have to list their donors. Technically, super PACs couldn’t give money directly to a party or candidate, but that distinction had been rendered all but meaningless. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United said money was equal to speech and began allowing these super PACs to do virtually anything they wanted. The ruling transformed politics in the United States almost overnight, turning super PACs and the billionaires behind them into the new true political power. The so-called experts were only beginning to try to trace the effects. Behind most of the super PACs was a major political consultant or professional strategist.
“There’s more dark money on the Republican side,” said Robinson, himself a Democrat, “because the GOP super PACs are better funded. But the Democrats are catching up.”
Robinson touched a key on his computer. The next slide included three columns—the super PACs, the candidates to whom they gave, and, to the extent he and Ellen Wiley had been able to identify them, the donors associated with each PAC.
The people in the room knew the basics of how the system worked.
But seeing the figures in black and white—and how much money was really involved—was startling.
Rena asked: “Anyone on this list give money to stop Upton in her last primary?”
“There wasn’t huge money against her,” said Hurd, Upton’s consultant from that race. “A group of right wingers called the Arizona Freedom Caucus worked against her. They got this talk radio guy, Cal Carter, to run. But it was pretty clear Wendy was going to win. So the big donors stayed away.”
Burke turned to Stroud.
She had played this money game in spades as Senate majority leader. Stroud raised money for her own PAC and even more for an “affiliated” super PAC she controlled. That was part of the leader’s job now—raising and bundling dark money and distributing it to loyal members of the party.
And it was the means by which congressional leadership imposed party discipline: hand out money to senators in tight races to help them keep their jobs. They, in turn, would be loyal to the leader.
Stroud had lost the job because she’
d antagonized some of the billionaires who fueled the PACs.
“This is where we need your help, Susan,” Burke said. He’d already shared the secret overtures to Upton about the vice presidency and the threat that had followed. Upton was a Stroud protégée.
“We need to know who on these lists—either the billionaires or the PACs—might hate Upton enough to threaten her,” Burke said.
Stroud looked back at him uneasily.
“I know we’re asking a big favor,” Burke added in that plain, sympathetic voice people found so convincing. “Some of these people are friends and have been backers for years.”
He gave her a look.
Burke and Stroud were people who made their living persuading even richer and more powerful people to help them. Now they were negotiating with each other.
“But we’re trying to help a good person. A great senator. And you probably know better than anyone else who might have a feud with Wendy. I’m just hoping you might feel freer to help now.”
Freer to help, Rena thought, because Stroud had been deposed. She no longer had to play the supplicant to these billionaires to maintain her power. She could now simply be a senator. A citizen.
And she was free to be candid, if she were willing to be, about secrets to which almost no one outside of the Senate majority leader, the Speaker of the House, and a handful of others were fully privy.
It was one of the paradoxes of Washington. Powerful figures rarely shared what they’d learned until after they were out of power. And even then, only a few did so. Their wisdom might have been put to use to help reform the system. The reason that so rarely happened was simple—and disheartening. Half of all former senators—and a third of House members—now became lobbyists after they left office. It was a legal scandal, a form of bribery, Rena thought. It should be outlawed. And it was equally split across parties.
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