The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (37 page)

Instead of 2010 Plan, Tammy was focused on the small steps that her leaders, the neighborhood
people she was training, could take. She organized an event at which a slumlord named
Mark King was called out for buying three hundred properties all over the city during
the housing bubble and allowing 20 percent of them to become uninhabitable. It was
covered in the local media, and the next day King showed up at the organization’s
downtown office asking what he had to do to stop getting bad press. Tammy recruited
Miss Sybil to speak at the event, telling her that the east side needed to have a
voice, which was how she became vice chair of MVOC. Miss Sybil told Tammy that people
on the east side were starting to organize neighborhood groups, feeling a few tremors
of hope. “Anybody that comes and throws you a line,” she said, “you’re going to grab
it.”

The job let Tammy see Youngstown in a new way, as if by walking streets and knocking
on doors and mapping neighborhoods she was able for the first time to get a broader
view of the place where she’d lived all her life and see it whole. She had always
put the blame on individuals for failing to help themselves. “One of the things that
would frustrate me is when you see a person who ain’t got nothing, ain’t trying to
get nothing, and don’t want nothing. An unmotivated person who doesn’t want to get
better.” There was a lot of that in Youngstown, but now she saw it as the problem
of a community. Generational poverty, failed schools, the loss of jobs—“A lot of it
is not that they don’t want. It is because the system is designed in some instances
like it feeds on people a little bit and messes up people’s minds. People get caught
in it and they don’t know how to stop it.” In her own life she had stopped it, but
she had never thought about politics—the city, the state, the country.

*   *   *

Tammy might have been the last black person in Youngstown to hear of Barack Obama.
She was so consumed with her kids, her job, her classes, her church, that she never
followed the news and wasn’t aware of a serious black contender for the presidency—who
had once been a community organizer, of all things—until the start of 2008. When she
had turned eighteen, Granny had told her to register to vote, to register as a Democrat,
and to vote for the Democrat. So she always voted, without paying attention to the
candidates. She knew more about the mayor’s races than the presidential. They talked
about politics a little at Packard, and in 2004 she couldn’t understand why so many
workers there—white women especially—everyday working-class people like her were voting
for Bush because of their religious beliefs. Mostly, though, she thought of politics
as a dirty business. Youngstown was one of the most corrupt cities in America—a judge
went to jail, the sheriff went to jail, and the congressman for most of her adult
life was James Traficant, a mob politician who remained popular in Youngstown even
after he was expelled from Congress and went to prison for bribery and racketeering,
because Youngstown was populist, anti-institutional, and Traficant made a flamboyant
career of telling powerful people to kiss his ass.

Her friend Karen from Packard was the one who got her interested in Obama. Tammy didn’t
think America was ready for that—she thought Hillary Clinton would be the nominee
because they’d accept a white woman before a black man. But she went with Karen to
hear Obama speak at Youngstown State in February, and Tammy was so impressed that
she went home and wrote up some notes on what he’d said. Over the summer she knocked
on a lot of doors on the east side in MVOC’s get-out-the-vote campaign. Some people
were saying, “We got a chance for a black man to be president,” and other people were
saying, “They ain’t going to elect a black president,” but she had never seen such
excitement about an election. Even her father volunteered for the Democratic Party,
making phone calls from the local office—he had never done anything like that. He
drank, ate, and slept Barack Obama. Her divorce and her new job had opened up a big
rift between her and her dad, but they came back together over Obama, phoning each
other to swap stories about canvassing. Once, her dad called and said, “If another
person tells me they are not going to vote for Barack Obama because they think he’s
going to get assassinated, I might kill myself.”

On election night there was a pizza party at the MVOC offices. It was the first time
Tammy had ever tasted Jameson’s. When Obama won, and he came out with his family to
give his victory speech, Tammy couldn’t quite shake a sense of disbelief. When she
was little, Granny had bought her the three-volume Ebony Success Library, about the
achievements of black people throughout history, and in turn Tammy always tried hard
to make her children proud of being black. During Black History Month at school, she
made sure they wrote their reports on people who weren’t the usual suspects. In fifth
grade her older daughter wrote about the civil rights activist Ella Baker, but the
teacher, who had never heard of Baker, rejected the report.

People could pick and choose whether someone was an important inventor or activist,
but a black president—nobody could deny that. It wasn’t just black history, it was
American history. Afterward, Tammy hung a framed picture of the forty-fourth president
on the wall behind her office desk. It showed Obama on election night, waving to the
throng in Chicago, above words he had spoken during the campaign: “Our destiny is
not written for us, but by us.”

DEAN PRICE

Barack Obama was the first Democrat Dean ever voted for. It was a no-brainer—if Obama
had been a white man, 80 percent of the country would have gone for him. Obama, not
John McCain or Sarah Palin, came to Martinsville, Virginia, in the August heat of
that election year and told a crowd in the community college gym, “I will fight for
you every single day. I will wake up in that White House thinking about the people
of Martinsville and the people of Henry County, and how I can make your life better.”
Obama understood that the old system had failed, and whether or not he knew about
biodiesel, he kept talking about a new green economy. That was music to Dean’s ears.

In 2008, the rest of the country started to catch up to the Piedmont. After the Wall
Street collapse in September, millions of people lost their jobs, and January, the
month when Obama took the oath of office and promised “a new era of responsibility,”
was the worst month in decades. Huge companies like General Motors were on the verge
of extinction. Wachovia Bank, which had once been a pillar of Winston-Salem, went
under, along with other banks from Wall Street to Seattle. One establishment institution
after another trembled and fell. Writers were using terms like “the Great Recession”
and “the end of the suburbs.” It was the worst time since the worst time of all. Dean
believed that the American people were ready for radical changes. Electing a black
president was just the first of them.

Dean’s congresswoman in North Carolina’s Fifth District was a Republican in her sixties
named Virginia Foxx—a stout woman with short gray hair and a degree in education who
had been a reliable backbencher for George W. Bush. The district ran from the Blue
Ridge Mountains on the Tennessee border to just west of Greensboro, with no town larger
than twenty-five thousand people, and 90 percent of the residents were white. In other
words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro
three weeks before the election) called “the real America,” by which she did not mean
fallow farms and disability checks and crack. Foxx was reelected easily, but in 2008
she seemed like a relic of the past, and so did her constituents, and maybe even her
party.

On the other side of the state line, in Virginia’s Fifth District, a small earthquake
was taking place. Virgil Goode, the anti-immigrant, pro-tobacco, conservative Democrat
turned Republican incumbent, was opposed by a young lawyer and self-described practitioner
of “conviction politics” named Tom Perriello. Perriello was thirty-four but looked
like a college wrestler preparing for the opening clinch—short and broad-shouldered,
with a wide flat face, a muscular jawline, and an edgy stare. On the day he was supposed
to decide whether to run, he was stung by fifty yellow jackets, went into anaphylactic
shock, and staggered into the woods outside his parents’ house near Charlottesville.
His father, an obstetrician, happened to see him from across the lawn, grabbed the
EpiPen that was on hand because of his mother’s recent allergic reaction, ran out
to the woods, and injected his son as Tom’s eyes rolled back in his head. Perriello
didn’t know if it was a sign from God, but he chose to take it that way and declared
his candidacy for Goode’s seat.

No one really understood what Perriello did for a living—he called himself a “national
security consultant,” a “social justice activist,” and a “public entrepreneur.” He
listened to “conscious hip-hop” music and raised his glass of Jack Daniel’s to “a
better world.” The fact that he was single, once wore a beard, and had spent much
of his short adult life in New Haven, New York, Sierra Leone, and Darfur gave the
Goode campaign a fat target for the modern version of sectional-cultural warfare.

For a long time the great mystery for the half of America that voted Democratic was
why white people living in small, obscure places and getting poorer year by year were
simultaneously getting more Republican—why the kind of Americans who, a century before,
had passionately supported William Jennings Bryan were now voting in overwhelming
numbers for the party that wanted to deregulate Wall Street and zero out the capital
gains tax—why, along Route 29 south of Charlottesville, there was a great big
GOODE
sign outside an overgrown shack. But in 2008, times had gotten bad enough in the
Piedmont for some people to turn in the other direction. Perriello made it easier
for them because he didn’t use the typical language of big-city liberals—he talked
constantly about God, was for guns, hedged gay marriage, and sounded radical on economics,
denouncing the “corporate capture of government” and the big banks and multinationals
whose collusion with Washington made it impossible for the little guy to compete.
Perriello sounded for all the world like a twenty-first-century Bryan. He wasn’t—his
friends were human rights activists and Washington think tankers and
New Republic
writers, eastern elites who spoke the language of insider baseball and progressive
causes—but in the Fifth District he raised his voice with genuine passion for the
hard-pressed farmer, the out-of-work seamstress, the small merchant. He didn’t find
the great mystery in American politics very mysterious. “The core assumption is that
somehow these poor working-class people are benighted for voting against their self-interest,”
he said. “Tell me a rich Democrat that doesn’t vote against their pure self-interest.”

On November 4, Perriello swept the better-educated precincts around the university
town of Charlottesville, where turnout among young people was high because Obama was
at the top of the ballot (Perriello said that Barack Obama was the first politician
in his lifetime who inspired him), and he cut into Goode’s advantage in the worse-off
towns and rural areas of Southside, down along the North Carolina border. On election
night the polls showed Perriello ahead by 745 votes out of 315,000 cast. Goode demanded
a recount. Six weeks later, Perriello was certified the winner.

His victory in a conservative district was one of the biggest upsets of the year,
and one of the races that made 2008 look like a watershed election. Perriello was
Dean’s kind of politician, and Virginia’s Fifth was the district where Dean had built
America’s lst BioDiesel Truck Stop. In retrospect it seemed inevitable that the two
men would cross paths.

One of Perriello’s first moves in office was to send an aide around the district,
which was bigger than New Jersey, to find out what his new constituents needed from
the stimulus bill that was moving through Congress. Around the farms and small towns
of Southside, the aide found signs of life in renewable energy: a dairy farm outside
Danville that was making electricity out of manure; a nursery just across the road
where a former Goodyear engineer was testing crops for energy yield; a landfill in
Martinsville where officials wanted to turn methane gas into electrical power. No
one had told these people to do any of it, and they were just the kinds of businesses
that Perriello wanted to highlight, tangible examples of a new economy in the Piedmont
that didn’t look like the past. Instead of enormous factories and big-box stores that
sucked the wealth out of a community before abandoning it, these were small-scale
projects that created five or ten jobs at a time and kept the money local.

Eventually, Perriello found out about Red Birch Energy.

*   *   *

Dean had worked up a pitch, a PowerPoint slide presentation, and he was taking it
to any audience that would listen. He always brought along three jars, one containing
canola seed, the second canola oil, and the third biodiesel fuel, with a golden liquid
in the upper half and a sediment of dark-brown glycerin waste below. He started with
his come-to-Jesus moment, the week Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He told the story of
Red Birch Energy and gave the quote from Jefferson about the cultivators of the earth,
along with a lot of figures about energy yields from canola and the advantages of
biodiesel over regular diesel, and made a strong case for smallness over bigness and
the need to keep money local. The farmers and truck stop owners would be the new oil
barons! Let the wealth trickle down from
them
, not from Wall Street! He asked how many people in the audience had heard of peak
oil—never more than 15 or 20 percent. Dean firmly believed that there would be one
Red Birch or there would be five thousand, and he closed with the story of Roger Bannister,
the first man to break the four-minute mile: within five years of his feat, more than
a hundred other people had done it. “He walked through a threshold. He showed ’em
that it could be done. That’s the way we feel about Red Birch Energy.”