RS: Bush Like Me - Ten weeks undercover in the grass roots of the Republican Party

I never felt any longing to go to Orlando, Florida. What I felt, in traveling south to volunteer for the campaign of George W. Bush, was an obligation. Let me explain by first saying something about the critics of our president. A great many of them like to laugh at George Bush for not reading books and for being uninterested in visiting other countries. But a lot of those same people are guilty of the opposite offense. They prefer to read books and travel abroad rather than actually getting to know their own country face to face.

These critics do a terrific job of mocking his mental deficiencies and dismissing his supporters as hapless morons, but they do not do a very good job of explaining the nature of his support. The few dissident commentators who bother trying to explain the Bush phenomenon seldom do more than reach for the nearest Marx-inspired academic cliche. They will tell you, for instance, that Republicans are a vast intellectual underclass cynically manipulated by the rich through a mesmerizing cocktail of yahoo enthusiasms, xenophobic fears and ancient superstitions -- and those same people will insist, if forced to offer an opinion on the subject, that one should feel sorry for most of them.

This is the wrong approach. As a professional misanthrope, I believe that if you are going to hate a person, you ought to do it properly. You should go and live in his shoes for a while and see at the end of it how much you hate yourself.

This was what I was doing down in Florida. The real challenge wasn't just trying to understand these Republicans. It was to become the best Republican I could be.

Republicans are everywhere, but everywhere is not a good place to look for them. For my purposes I wanted to try to catch them in their ideal habitat. That was why I chose Orlando. For me, it is hell on earth, the worst city on the planet, a place that would make me long for Kinshasa or Volokolamsk. But for Republicans, it is ideal: a scorching-hot paved inland archipelago of garish shopping malls and stadium-size steel-and-glass Baptist churches, a place with no nonhuman life apart from the caged animals at the theme parks, and an entire economy organized around monstrous temples to fake experience.

I arrived in early June, moved into a cheap hotel, called the local Republican office and offered to volunteer. They told me to come on by. So I went, arriving early on a Tuesday morning at their small strip-mall office on the east side of town.

My cover story was a travesty, an idiotic tissue of halfhearted lies. I said I was a New York City schoolteacher named Tom Hamill, in Orlando to spend a summer with a girlfriend who was from the area. It was the best thing I could come up with to explain my Northern accent, my lack of local connections and all that free time.

The story's only saving grace was that the truth was so much more unbelievable. Republicans are paranoid enough to expect a mole from the Kerry campaign, but I was far worse than that -- a dissolute, drug-abusing anarchist who reads the battle diaries of Vietnamese generals on rainy days, roots for Russia at the Olympics and once published an article titled "God Can Suck My D**k." I was, in short, the most offensive individual who could conceivably be planted in the campaign of George W. Bush. I was tempted to feel guilty about this. But in the end I figured that it was only fair. Since John Ashcroft has made it easy for FBI agents to infiltrate anti-war groups, it seemed to make sense that an anti-war journalist should infiltrate Ashcroft's party.

Orlando is the crucial city along a stretch of interstate called the I-4 corridor, a swath of central Florida running from Daytona Beach to Tampa. Home to 3.7 million of Florida's 9.3 million registered voters, it has the bulk of the state's undecided voters and is therefore the key to winning Florida's twenty-seven electoral votes. When I got there, I expected a teeming, ultramodern NORAD-style campaign headquarters, where I would have to work my way up a giant totem pole. But in fact what I found was -- nothing at all. For all intents and purposes, there was no campaign for George Bush in Orlando in early June. There was only one paid staffer, a central-Florida field director named Vienna Avelares, and a corner of a table at the local Orange County Republican Executive Committee. If the Republicans were building an electoral Death Star somewhere, it sure as hell wasn't in Florida.

The situation was completely disarming. Vienna, a gregarious Puerto Rican single mother who insisted on introducing herself as "Vienna -- like the sausage," seemed desperate. I had planned on doing a good job anyway, but after meeting her I had a genuine desire to help get things going.

After just a week of coming in every day like this, I became -- along with a young blond Sean Hannity fan named Ben Adrian, who also volunteered at that time -- one of the most important Bush people in all of central Florida. Within a few weeks, we would both be given keys to the office and offered full-time jobs.

Here I want to make a general observation about the social aspect of working for Bush. It's very different than it is working for a Democratic candidate. Corny as this sounds, it is much more egalitarian and brotherly than most Democratic campaigns. Almost every Democratic campaign I've seen has let itself be seduced by the Primary Colors paradigm -- the hip clique full of mildly sexually adventurous twentysomethings who have been working on their memoirs since high school and dream of that chance to wear Versace sport coats and crack jokes on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

If you've ever hung out with the Tricia Enrights and Joe Trippis of the world, you know that the operative vibe of the Democratic insider is wisecracking cool. It is not a reach to say that the ideological vision that mainstream Democratic politics has offered America since Clinton has been the supercool high school, the party of the popular kids. For all the talk about the Democrats being the party of inclusion, it really doesn't feel that way from the inside.

That's not true of all Democrats, of course. I thought it was very different, for instance, in the campaign of Dennis Kucinich. For the most part, these people were motivated by something other than ambition, and just being part of that campaign meant you were in a besieged minority, with the whole world out there laughing at you. Kucinich supporters stuck up for one another, because they had to.

You get that same besieged fraternal feeling in a Republican campaign office. There is no M*A*S*H ensemble-cast repartee. Nobody wears T-shirts that mean something, and nobody looks cool. As I would later find out, most Republicans hate "cool" ("They all think they're so cool and artistic," griped one woman as she watched Fox coverage of Democratic delegates arriving in Boston). Many of the parent volunteers I met were especially bitter because they think that cool is what liberals use to lure their children away. Which they might very well be right about, of course.

In my first month on the campaign, I did not meet many people who came into the office with the serious intention of working hard for the president. I did, however, meet a great many very lonely people who came in because they knew the Bush offices were the one place where they could share certain deeply held ideas without being ridiculed.

Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"We'd just have a big breeding farm in Colorado," he said. "Course, it'd be a security problem if they got out, you know, if you had rogue clones running around. You'd have to have a special security force to maintain 'em."

In my first six weeks on the campaign, I saw only one black person enter our offices. He was a recently released armed robber from Newark, New Jersey, who was the guest of a local female Republican politician. The ex-con was not particularly interested in Republican politics, although he did say something about wanting to hit Christine Todd Whitman in the face with a brick. I urged him to support the president, even though he couldn't vote. He didn't make any promises.

In mid-July a girlfriend came down from New York to visit me. I recruited her to help me with an idea I'd had to at least temporarily diversify my office environment. We decided that she would pose as a reporter for Vibe magazine, call our offices and ask whoever answered the phone if she could interview our "black volunteers."

"Penny" got my officemate Ben Adrian on the phone, and he instituted a frantic search that lasted several days. We thought at first that we might have a black professor from the University of Central Florida (sixteen miles away) on our volunteer list, but he turned out not to be available. Then Rhyan Metzler, the local Republican Party operative, gave us the number of an elderly man in Sarasota named Johnny Hunter.

As the chairman of the Federation of Black Republicans for the Republican Party of the State of Florida, Johnny was used to being called to this sort of duty. On the phone with "Penny," he explained that his job involved traveling around the state to meet people. "Wherever they need me," he said, "that's where I be rolling to." Finally, Ben came through with someone more local. He managed to persuade a thirty-seven-year-old Promise Keeper Christian named Lorin Jones, a phlegmatic fellow who was recovering from two brushes with congestive heart failure, to come in for an interview.

We scheduled it, but "Penny" never showed up. I wanted to be there for what I knew would be an excruciatingly awkward situation; the lone black volunteer, dragged into the office to show off to the media, surrounded by a bunch of nervously small-talking white Republicans waiting for the no-show journalist.

Exactly this situation materialized. The bespectacled Lorin sat surrounded by me, Ben and a few other folks from the campaign, and treated this anxious clock-watching crowd to a lesson in the vagaries of black urban existence: "My dad was a drinker," he said. "He cared about the bottle more than he loved us. But what my mom did was, she worked -- she was there in the afternoon; she wanted to see what we were doing in school.... "

"I know what it's like to have a parent who'll put a belt on my butt," Lorin continued.

A few minutes later, "Penny" called to cancel, citing car trouble. Lorin hung in there for a few minutes. Our older volunteer coordinator, Don Madden, came over to chat; the two of them apparently went to neighboring schools in California. Don's school, Don said, was great at basketball, but, he said, winking at Lorin, "You were probably the only guys who could have beaten us."

Lorin laughed uncomfortably. "We were OK," he said. "We were pretty good. Our college was pretty good at basketball."

Then another staffer came over to say hi. He knew Lorin from past campaigns and asked if Lorin was planning on coming in to do phone banking. Lorin answered that he wasn't, that he was busy setting up a school-supplies giveaway charity event in his neighborhood. The staffer laughed.

"Oh, come on," he said jokingly. "I know how you people don't like to work." Lorin, who was halfway out the door, stopped at this. His smile disappeared. For a moment, he was genuinely pissed off. "We don't like to work?" he said. "That's all I do is work to make you white Republicans look good."

The staffer, a jovial guy who I normally liked quite a bit, said nothing and simply slapped Lorin on the back, laughed and helped him out the door.

Vienna also chimed in after Lorin left. The two of them didn't like each other, having once disagreed at a community meeting.

"I don't like that guy," she said. Then she explained: "After that meeting, we really got into it. We were really shouting. He called me a spic. And so I said to him, 'Hey, I may be a spic, but at least I wasn't brought to this country as a slave. I was born here.' "

I ended up getting to know Lorin Jones a little. He was an odd, sincere person who interested me largely because he was by far the most dedicated, effective and intellectually honest Republican volunteer the party had in the area, and yet the campaign more or less completely ignored him.

A devout Christian, Lorin supported Bush not only because of the social-religious issues, but because he sincerely believed that state financial aid had had a corrosive effect on the black community and that communities should support themselves through charity. He was the living incarnation of the "thousand points of light" idea. He ought to have been a poster child for Republican values.

"In my neighborhood, you can go up to anybody and ask where the black Republican lives," he said. "And they'll lead you right to my house. But they respect me because of what I've done."

And I saw this. At a function I would later attend in his neighborhood, I met several people who had been converted to Bush by Lorin. He was working round-the-clock for the president, but the campaign was just trying to turn him into another Johnny Hunter. "All they want me to do is start clubs," he said. "Tallahassee keeps calling and bugging me to start black clubs. And I hate that, because I think that puts us all in boxes. I think we should be going out into the community more."

Lorin believed that Republicans could win twenty percent of the black vote -- not the usual ten percent -- if they were smart about it. All they had to do, he said, was visit black churches and hand out fact sheets showing the Republican and Democratic stances on social and religious issues. "You wouldn't even have to campaign," he said. "You'd get an extra ten percent right there."

I must have heard him put forward that plan a half-dozen times, but no one did anything except smile and nod.

Some of the Republicans, however, were willing to help Lorin -- sort of. A smallish contingent of five YRs (Young Republicans) met Lorin in front of an Office Depot in a white suburban area one Saturday to man a booth for soliciting school-supply donations for kids in Lorin's neighborhood. They worked cheerfully throughout the afternoon, giving away hot dogs and helping Lorin get a good amount of stuff.

But when it came time a few days later to actually give away the stuff in Lorin's West Orlando neighborhood, none of the YRs showed up. I was the only white Republican who made it. It was a remarkable event. More than 200 people, mostly single mothers and their children, showed up at a funeral home called Gail and Wynn's to receive the book bags and notebooks Lorin had gathered to give away in one of the reception rooms.

I helped distribute bags to the children. "Vote for Bush," I managed to whisper a few times.

That day Lorin confided to me that this might be his last go-round with the Republicans. "I think this might be it," he said. "I think I might be done with these people."

During my time on the campaign, I noticed an unusual phenomenon. The more involved a person was with the campaign, the more likely he was to be politically moderate. Most of the core group of our office -- Vienna, Rhyan, Ben, Don -- were quietly pro-choice or socially liberal in some other respect. It was the casual volunteers and the people whose only involvement was a bumper sticker who were likely to rant about liberals being traitors and agents of Islamo-Fascism who should be exiled from the country or jailed, etc.

I saw this clearly one weekend at a local gun show, where we were manning a voter-registration booth. I rotated with Rhyan and Vienna that weekend, and all three of us were quietly freaking out at the sight of all these fat weirdos from the sticks buying huge assault rifles and Confederate bumper stickers with messages such as IF I'D KNOWN THIS WOULD HAPPEN, I'D HAVE PICKED MY OWN COTTON.

"Man, I'm glad I'm a socially liberal Republican," whispered Rhyan at one point, laughing.

It was late July, and a new recruit was talking in my ear -- let's call her Susie -- and she was an opinionated, middle-aged fundamentalist-Christian mother of five. Originally from West Virginia, she was working the phones for Bush and sounding off on humanity's declining morals and the agents of the international liberal conspiracy.

I squinted in apprehension, sensing a Jesus conversation on the way. "Uh, no," I said.

"My oldest," she began, "has a three-year-old and has been with the same girl for six years, and he will not marry her."

"Oh, occasionally," she said, sighing. "He will tell you right off.... He encourages her to go and to take their little daughter, and he tells you he's hopeful that God doesn't come, or nothing happens to him before he rededicates his life. But he's definitely not living a life that either honors God or is even pleasing to himself."

I took a deep breath. Throwing out Left Behind -- that runaway best seller in which God comes to earth and literally yanks the believers to heaven, leaving piles of still-warm clothes and dentures behind with the condemned -- was like being a novice wizard and saying a spell for the first time. I wasn't sure it would actually work. It did.

A half-hour later, the phone in the office rang. It was Susie, inviting me to dinner with her family. It was the act of a good Christian. I must have sounded lonely. "I'm making fettuccine Alfredo," she said.

One of the great cliches of liberal criticism of the Christian right is the idea that these people are wrongheaded because they profess to know the will of God. H.L. Mencken put that one best, and perhaps first: "It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely."

These criticisms sound like they make sense. But I think they are a little off-base. The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.

Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.

Which brings me back to Left Behind. Who gets left behind? Nobody, that's who. How could they leave us behind? They couldn't live without us. Even their most intimate family meals would seem lonely if we were missing.

At first, the vacationing New York schoolteacher Tom Hamill didn't say much at the dinner table. Speak when spoken to, help serve the fettuccine, pass the white bread and margarine. Ask politely about her son's senior year at high school, her twelve-year-old daughter's home schooling, the job her husband lost two years ago -- or maybe it was five. Smile in placid agreement as Susie compares Massachusetts Democrats (like Tom's real-life mother) to Al Qaeda. A cozy family dinner in Anytown, U.S.A.

Dinner started at about seven. John Kerry was set to accept the nomination at the FleetCenter in a few hours. Dinner Table wondered if the terrorists would strike. "No, no," Susie said. "The criminals wouldn't attack their own kind."

I concentrated on my food. Grace was easy: Just hang your head. But once they moved into politics and religion, I began to worry that my silence was becoming conspicuous. Susie was shooting me searching looks. I noticed her husband, the wiry gray-haired dad with the slow voice and the henpecked posture, was watching me whenever I chewed. Like he was checking to see if I would swallow. Finally the discussion switched to the high school one of her sons attended; he had a couple of crazy teachers there, a mean lady and a guy with man-boobs....

Susie's husband and older son were still talking about the man-boobs teacher. "Whaddya mean, which one?" the younger said to his dad.

Only Susie heard me. "No!" she screamed. "Did you hear what he said? A transvestite works at his school!" She turned to me in horror. "Is he allowed to dress like a woman?"

"Oh, yeah," I said. "Totally normal guy, except that at some point, he started reading all kinds of . . . "

"Yeah, books," I said. "It started . . . he was reading Agatha Christie books at first, then he got really into detectives. Next thing you know, he's reading Nietzsche. You know, the German philosopher."

"And he comes up to me one day and says, you know, 'Well, since there's no God, I might as well be gay!' "

"And he starts talking like this, and his appearance got more and more strange. . . . He started coming into work in drag. . . . "

"The thing is, I'm the one who gets in trouble," I said. "Like, there was this one little girl. I caught her listening to 50 Cent -- you know, the rapper -- and I started telling her about the torments of hell, and how she'd pay in eternity and all of that. And the principal comes up to me, and he's like, 'Stop, you're scaring the children!' "

"And I'm like, 'I'm scaring her? Are you crazy? This girl is seven years old. She needs to know about these things!'

"We have kids now, because they know you're a Christian, they go out of their way to make your life miserable," I said. "I know this one guy. They'll take his Bible from his classroom and snort cocaine off it, right in front of him!"

"They'll get suspended for a week," I said. "But then they're right back in there."

The table fell silent. The kids slowly started to slip away. Soon the only ones left were me, Mom and Dad, and a nearly empty bowl of fettuccine. Forty minutes in, my fork was still scraping the plate.

Yep, that sounds just like me, a pro-life Christian-rght Republican who wants a Clone Army who can be killed with impunity!

You sure this isn't SATIRE?

Part of my job, I soon came to understand, was to be supportive when people like portly Tampa sheriff's deputy Ben Mills came in to share their very serious utopian ideas -- like the benefits of having a society guarded by a clone army. "We'd save a hell of a lot on benefits and medical expenses," he said. " 'Cause you know if they got wounded..."

"You could just shoot them," I said.

"Exactly -- pow! Just shoot 'em dead, right in the ground."

I'd say bomb Matt Taibbi's e-mail with some kind words about his adventures in Florida, but for all the publications he writes for, he doesn't have an e-mail address for any of 'em!

what a coward...

Some of the 9/11 terrorists lived here for years. They lived next door to us, they drove on our roads, shopped in our stores, saw us every day on the street. They experienced life here and the people here, and they still flew the planes into the buildings. So convinced were they of their superiority that nothing would change their minds.

I dunno, spodefly - I thought the way that you linked the 9/11 terrorists and the Democrats was eloquent beyond words.

We believed that he was homeless and we went out of our way to help him not only offering monetary help but even fixing his car and giving him money for lunch.

Odd that little Matty didn't mention the cadging, ain't it?

When I saw this small info tidbit in Vienna's reply, I went back and waded through the whole thing to see if Matt allowed that he was basically grifting.

It was a gagger, but the last bit was definitely pure fiction.

I stopped reading after he mentioned the title of an article he wrote (in the 1st or 2nd paragraph). I just don't want to get my hands dirty anymore with 'RAT crap. Mostly, I try to think of these people as brainwashed, lost and deluded; but increasingly I'm thinking that they knowingly make themselves vessels for use by the evil one. Maybe they're so far gone that they just can't see it anymore, but....it's difficult to have sympathy for that!

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Odd that little Matty didn't mention the cadging, ain't it?

I think Matty is a typical democrat...he expects others to provide for his needs and wants. It's one of his basic human rights, so he has no obligation to show gratitude or even acknowledge others charity as an act of compassion. He's entitled to it. It brings to mind the old saying: "Bite the hand that feeds you."

Vienna is truly distressed by this article. She's a sweet lady and could really use some encouragement. Please send her a note of support.

I hope all liberals, and nobody else, believes that this is what the grassroots of the GOP looks like.

I have yet to read a liberal writer's description of a "normal Republican voter" that bears any resemblance to anybody I know.

I can only conclude that they are a.) visiting a parallel universe, b.) too blind to see us as we are or c.) making it all up.

Not sure of the exact name, but there are a couple "federated" Black Republican clubs in Florida, and I would assume, like most federated GOP clubs (e.g. the YRs), they have some sort of state organization.

Rhyan (yeah, with an "h") Metzler works at the Orlando HQ. I've had a few dealings with him over the years, and he certainly seems the type to call himself "socially liberal."

The Orange County YRs do a school item drive every year.

While I can't vouch for what was said over a private family dinner, most of the throw-away facts here ring true. Face it, the Orange County GOP got "punk'd." Sure this is a hit piece by a whiny northeast liberal (I know the type, I grew up in Connecticut before moving to Florida), but he does succeed in pointing out some of the party's faults. I'd rather see an intellignet discussion of the issues raised than knee-jerk claims that this is all false. What is this, DU?

As you can see, I'm not claiming it is all false. I'm claiming we should do a little fact checking and see if it is true. That in itself is intelligent, and if we find out it's true, we'll report it.

But seeing as how this guy has worked for the New York Times, and considering their culture of manufacturing stories, I'd have to say it's only intelligent to question this reporter's veracity...

Questions lead to answers.

My cover story was a travesty, an idiotic tissue of halfhearted lies.

A self-admitted liar. Then there's nothing to be gained by reading anything else he wrote.

I have lived in several Florida counties; I have volunteered many times for the Republican Party.

This article is a made-up hallucination from a self-confessed America-hating drug addict.

Disgusting beyond disgusting.

I feel sorry for the Republican men and women misquoted and mischaracterized in this hit piece. If any those great people attacked in this article happen to read my post, all I can say is to remember Jesus' words:

¹¹"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
¹²Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
St Matthew 5

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