We're with Nobody (12 page)

“Someone was just here asking for that same information,” a courthouse clerk in a remote town in Kentucky told me one summer afternoon of research. Like a character in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, my first instinct was to slowly peer back over my shoulder, half expecting to see a nondescript man in a dark suit standing in the corner holding a newspaper just below his eyes. Instead, there was only a short, scruffy fellow donning a John Deere cap, waiting impatiently to pay some traffic tickets.

Later, sitting in a records room with twenty strangers, I found myself periodically pulling away from the stack of documents I was reviewing to scan the room, attempting to determine whether the guy in the blue shirt and khaki slacks or the girl in the white dress with the pink cardigan around her neck was poring through the same stack of documents, discovering some tidbit of information that I hadn't come across. One looked up at me briefly, smiled and went back to work. Was that her?

I ordered dinner in the hotel dining room that night, subtly checking each table for the same people from the records room, or someone else who'd ordered the same meal I was having, surmising, with no basis in fact, that all political researchers must eat shrimp pasta with a beer. But then I reminded myself that Republican researchers more likely opt for the filet mignon and a ten-dollar glass of red wine. So I looked for that.

Even on the plane ride home, I inconspicuously moved my eyes to the person sitting in the cramped seat next to me to see what he was reading. Maybe that person was doing the same thing to me, which is why it's always a good idea to stick to the in-flight magazine.

I talked with my candidate and the campaign manager and informed them that someone else had been asking questions and collecting material. “Who were they? Who were they with? What were they looking for?” they asked. In most every case, they become a little freaked out that this “person” even exists.

Sometimes we're able to determine what they were searching for and what they received. Sometimes we aren't. In one instance, we actually filed an open records request seeking all of the open records requests that had been filed in the previous few months. They didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know in terms of factual information, but they did give us an idea of where the opposing campaign might be headed in terms of attacks, and the things about which they were most concerned.

Conversely, our own information requests have sometimes been revealed. During an Arkansas race, a local newspaper reporter responded to claims by the opponent that our research had been “unethical” by filing an open records request for
our
open records requests. The opponent had charged that our candidate used proprietary insurance records to obtain information about health violations at the opponent's restaurant. What the reporter found was that those so-called proprietary records had been public, provided to us by the state health department, so there was no impropriety. Still, the opponent managed to inject me, identified as “a paid researcher,” into the campaign.

In another race, our candidate filed suit against the opponent—an incumbent public prosecutor—because he would not release information that Alan had requested concerning the operations of his office. The local newspaper identified Alan as a researcher hired by the campaign, and when the reporter called our office for comment, I answered the phone. He asked what we expected the records to show. I said, “Without seeing them, I have no idea what they'll show.” Even that was more than I wanted to say.

The fact that we're doing research should never be the story; the findings are what matter. But the road has ears and you never know who's listening. Maybe a newspaper reporter, maybe another researcher, or maybe just a busybody. Alan and I have learned not to talk business while conducting business. That lesson presented itself one day in a hallway outside of a county records room as we sat on a bench sorting through some property documents and discussing their importance.

“I know where that is,” a voice suddenly said as I read off a street address to Alan. We looked up to see a woman staring at us. Not knowing who this person was and immediately feeling reckless for being overheard in such a public place, we both nodded as Alan quickly said, “We've got it, thanks.” Then we were gone.

There's no annual Opposition Researchers Convention that we know of, and even if there were, I feel confidant that no one would show. Just a banner, a table scattered with blank nametags and some empty chairs.

Party crossover among political researchers is limited, partly because connections are with your own party, but mostly because it's a matter of commitment, loyalty and trust. We have worked for Republican candidates only twice, both times in races where no Democrats were involved. It was oddly discomfiting, yet interesting to catch a glimpse of the inside of the opposing machine, which is no doubt another reason campaigns stick with researchers who share their ideology. It's like driving into a strange town, stopping for a moment to get your bearings so you can figure out exactly where you need to go next.

Single-party races are a breed of their own. It's tougher to develop contrasts between candidates when both have records of wreaking havoc on the environment or baselessly shouting down tax increases or condemning same-sex marriage. Which candidate owns more guns? Which one is more rabid about closing the gates on immigrants? Which one would outlaw abortion in every single instance? The hot-button issues that either party likes to bring to life during a campaign can become even hotter when they decide to go after one another.

Sometimes, the lines between good, bad and simply weird become hopelessly interwoven. The adage that “all politicians are the same” is far from true. No two are ever really alike. That fact was confirmed for me as I stood late one night on a ballroom dance floor as a candidate whom we were researching sashayed partnerless in fluid motions in front of me. I watched with a combination of awe, disbelief and wonderment.

Alan was off on a different project, and I'd met up with the candidate at a local restaurant to go through the usual list of questions we always ask at the beginning of a self-research project. After dinner, several cocktails and a lengthy conversation, I was asked to follow the candidate home to collect some documents I needed for my report. And, of course, I complied when I was invited to see the dance floor the candidate had built in the house. A mirrored orb hung from the ceiling and music played as the dancing demonstration commenced. I can only imagine that my expression at that moment was that of a dog with a slightly cocked head, staring in confusion at something it didn't quite understand or comprehend.

So I just watched, trying to smile pleasantly and nod as the dancing candidate swooshed past me and back again. Any normal person would have been asking himself the same questions: How in the hell did I get here? When can I leave? Is this person going to ask me to dance as well? Please, God, no.

While dancing candidates may be the exception, the element of strangeness they lend to our work can be curiously refreshing amid weeks of plowing through pages of often-dry information. And if someone's willing to two-step across a dance floor in front of you in the middle of the night, that person is most likely going to be pretty open about themselves, which makes our job a little easier.

Such was not the case with our Florida congressional candidate who had just finished chewing me out over the phone during a conversation that was supposed to be routine. “I'll get back to you on the research,” he told me as he hung up. He never did.

Sure enough, just as I tried to explain to him, his opponent in the race discovered the information he'd believed could somehow be kept hidden if he didn't hire us to do the research. According to the local newspaper, the candidate had been accused by his opponent of cheating several people out of tens of thousands of dollars several years back. One of those he reportedly cheated came forward to share his story.

The candidate told the paper that he was “astonished” that his opponent would stoop to such dirty politics. But no one else was, including us.

A few days after he lost the race, Alan and I got a note from the now-former campaign manager, who said it was finally clear why the candidate shunned the research, because then he would have had to test it in a poll, and word would have gotten out. He'd told the candidate that he would be attacked, but he refused to believe it. He got pissed off, the manager said, arguing that since they hadn't attacked him when he was the mayor, they wouldn't go after him when he ran for Congress.

If only those bowling balls would all land in the same place. . . .

Chapter 13
Alan

T
he security line at the New Orleans city hall is maddeningly slow. New Orleans officially refers to itself, without irony, as the City that Care Forgot. The city claims both the highest percentage of native-born residents and the highest murder rate in the United States, which says something about familiarity; if you have the misfortune to get shot there, you have a greater chance of knowing your assailant than elsewhere. It also helps explain why the locals are prone to confusing weapons searches with opportunities to get caught up with each other.

Only a visitor from the oddly caring universe beyond Lake Pontchartrain would object to such interruptions of daily life as being stranded in traffic during carnival season by the umpteenth miles-long parade snaking its way through the city, blocking every possible transportation route, during which an old woman riding in a grocery cart, dressed entirely in feather boas and pushed by a man wearing only a chef's apron, proceeds to slosh beer on the hood of our car and shout, with surprising gusto, “Go to hell, assholes! Happy Mardi Gras!”

The response of the cop on the corner? “Happy Mardi Gras, Colleen!”

Passing through the slo-mo security line at city hall requires the presentation of photo ID and, judging from what we observe up ahead, chatting with the guards about Reggie Jackson and someone's auntie's recipe for crawfish étouffée, utterly mindless of the fact that there are twelve people waiting behind you in line. No one else seems bothered in the slightest by this, but by the time my turn to pass through the security screen comes, I've become nostalgic for care. In part, this is because Michael insisted that we stay out the night before until 3:00 AM drinking whiskey and dropping cash like drug dealers in what turned out to be a pretty awesome strip club. And I say that as someone who normally hates that kind of place. I ended up leaving before Michael, and the walk home, down Bourbon Street, had been a surreal slice of avant-garde cinema verité starring heat-seeking prostitutes, rent boys and drag queens—the only other pedestrians out at that time on a weeknight, who responded to my passage by launching themselves toward me, one after the other, while issuing a succession of profane offers and ultimatums. I'd never seen so many gold teeth up close.

This coterie of furies hounded me all the way back to the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, where the last of them finally fell away, muttering in loud dismay. A few short hours later, Michael and I received our wakeup calls in the form of light knocks on our respective doors, followed by the familiar command, “Housekeeping!” Multiple cups of strong coffee served only to send waves of agitation through the ransacked temples of our bodies, and did nothing to prepare us for this security line. My head is pounding, I feel a little wobbly and I've begun to sweat profusely. Michael can barely speak.

When I finally arrive at the stool on which the uniformed policeman is receiving company, she looks at my Mississippi driver's license and very noticeably frowns. I'm not talking about a look of minor disapproval; I'm talking about an expression that requires exertion. I know where this is going, and I'm not up for it. My discomfort with being awake and forced to work has been waiting for just such a moment to find its voice.

The cop, still nursing her theatrical frown, hands my license back to me, positions her other hand on her hip—the universal signal for “I don't
think
so,” and levels on me a gaze that aptly conveys her complete dissatisfaction with the geography of my birth. Not only am I from beyond the boundaries of the known world (i.e., past Lake Pontchartrain), I'm from Mississippi, where the state flag incorporates the Confederate symbol.

Which is true. I viewed the civil rights era from the vantage point of a white child in Mississippi, which is to say I assumed that families the world over passed the smoldering ruins of fire-bombed churches in their station wagons on the way to Mammaw's house. It was only later, as a teenager, that I realized something had actually been terribly, uniquely wrong. Over time, despite my lack of culpability, I became accustomed to occasionally serving as a convenient scapegoat for civil rights–era crimes, typically by people in the North. (Although I once received a reprimand from a
German
, to whom I responded that if my homeland had been responsible for the Holocaust I would most assuredly keep my opinions about other people's human rights violations to myself.) I've come to terms with this. However, on this particular morning, I'm not feeling very agreeable when the cop expresses her unspoken yet obvious displeasure with the state that authorized me to drive.

“What?” I demand to know. Basically asking for it.

“Mississippi—that's a state I don't like. Done some bad things to black folks,” she says. “Mm hmm. Sure did.”

I'm thinking, “OK, the judges will accept that. Some very bad things were done to black people in Mississippi way back when. But now I'm supposed to hear about it from someone in Louisiana?”

“Like it wasn't bad in Louisiana!” I shoot back.

She stares at me for a long moment, thinking. Then, to my surprise, she grins, and in the beguiling dialect of the Lower Ninth Ward, or perhaps Treme, exclaims, “I heard
dat!
It was
worser
here
,
” and gives me a high five. Afterward I feel as if I have passed through more than the security portal; I have now successfully entered one of the few places where New Orleans pretends to care—its
fraternité
. And with that, I am free to proceed into the city's disorganized, mildewed city hall. Little do I know that this right of passage will be the high point of my day.

“Where's the clerk's office?” Michael blurts out, preemptively, as I await him, just inside the perimeter. The guard points toward the elevator and summons the next visitor in line. She is satisfied, apparently, and barely gives Michael's driver's license a glance.

What follows is, for us, painful, made more so by the caustic mix of caffeine and slowly degrading alcohol coursing through our irregularly pulsing veins. Despite my momentary triumph in the security line, it is only with great difficulty that I can concentrate on the blurry records. At one point I leave the room and return to find Michael sound asleep with his head resting on a docket book, his briefcase open beside him, revealing a telltale tabletop sign decorated with daisies drawn in different colors of Sharpies, with the name “Amber” scrawled across in childish script—a gift from one of the dancers the night before.

Despite all of this, we soon begin finding great stuff, tying our candidate's campaign contributors to the awarding of government contracts—a surprisingly common enterprise among elected officials, as you may have noticed. Our somnambulant success stems from a healthy matrix, I like to think. It's not so much that we could actually do it in our sleep as that even when we're weary—for whatever reason—we know how to get on the ride. We are not easily diverted, even by our own efforts to find diversion. An evening spent in consort with strippers, followed by a morning spent enduring low-grade agitation in the bowels of a musty government building, is oddly conducive to our kind of work. In the best cases, our off-road forays actually serve to rejuvenate us, preventing us from becoming oppo automatons—the functional equivalent of computerized search engines. We are, ultimately, two naturally subjective guys with an unwaveringly objective agenda.

The problem with our New Orleans effort is that everything about it—the actual work and our quest for collateral entertainment—is so relentlessly productive. It's hard to keep it up around the clock. Such are the hazards of attempting to balance the execution of gravely important, occasionally mind-numbing tasks with local stimulation. Sometimes we go too far. But the work should be fun. Life is short.

Our two weeks in New Orleans follows a particularly enervating stint in Baton Rouge, which had left us yearning for stimulation. Most state capitals are uniformly bland government towns, but you'd expect Baton Rouge to be an exception, Louisiana being a culturally rich state where people aren't at all surprised when their governor serves time. And yet, in Baton Rouge we endured a week of institutional doldrums, eating the same Chinese buffet every day, spending countless hours combing through legislative journals, breathing fumes from the petrochemical refineries that line the riverfront. At one point Michael began loudly pounding on a broken copy machine at the state library, which caused something of a stir. It's pretty obvious when we're getting worn down by a summer of nonstop, highly detailed trouble. New Orleans is close to home, but we're here for two weeks, and what's next up I can't even remember now.

During the height of the campaign season we're gone more than we're home, returning every few weeks for a few days to pay bills, touch base with friends and family, finalize our latest oppo report, search the web for hotels and restaurants and addresses and whatever at our next destination—all while fielding calls from campaign staffers and consultants eager to know when we'll finish our work or wanting follow-up research, or setting up conference calls with pollsters who need assurance that their questions are supported by our documentation. The pace doesn't slow from May to October. Our lives become a blur of airport terminals, highway signs, building directories and document files. At one point I ended up in Arizona, and I no longer even recall why. All I remember is burning my fingers on the rental car's door handle because it was so hot, and staying in a nice hotel at the base of a mesa.

Touring the country like this can make us feel like
Natural Born Researchers
on an interstate rampage. We may research twenty candidates in a single summer, and the travel, the research and dealing with the campaigns can be intense. It's all so negative, and even we have our limits. At such times the need for entertainment becomes more pronounced, particularly after spending hours on an interstate highway in a cheap rental car that weaves unpredictably. We often take the long way back to our hotel in hopes of happening on some odd roadside attraction, such as our encounter with Chatty Belle, the World's Largest Talking Cow, a fiberglass bovine that stood proudly beside her mute, vandalized calf on a Wisconsin highway shoulder, not far from an empty tractor-trailer that once held the largest replica piece of cheese in history—seventeen tons of it—in honor of the real hunk of cheese that was featured at the 1964 World's Fair.

A lot of what passes for opposition research today is done exclusively on the web by people with no real knowledge of the local context, but we, for many reasons, find it useful to get to know a place, up close and personal. It's not only because the web is notoriously unreliable, and that some records aren't available online. It's also because you get a better sense of the context. Any reporter will tell you that you get a better story when you go to the scene of the action, rather than conduct interviews over the phone. Though she never came out and said it, Chatty Belle was clearly repping for the dairy lobby, which hinted that our subject candidate's history of voting for dairy price supports might not cause much consternation there.

Invariably there's a lot of free time, after the government offices close for the day and on weekends, and at such times we may find ourselves piloting a rented boat on a shimmering Minnesota lake or hanging on every sonorous word uttered by a beautiful Creole woman leading a tour of a Mississippi River plantation house (one of the rare occasions when we opted to take the guided tour). It's definitely more fun when the nature of the research calls for us to travel together, though on solo trips there's a better chance of meeting and getting to know someone new.

The trips offer a view of the United States we wouldn't otherwise be likely to see. Our vantage point is much like it was of the Statue of Liberty that day in Jersey City—from behind. We see homeless people in Des Moines, staggering down the street with their shoulders hunched and heads down, while the candidate we're researching is off in Washington, voting to subsidize the multinational corporations that fund his campaigns. In Cedar Rapids we pass a group of cocky young guys working on a car in the parking lot of the Tastee Freez, as if transplanted from a Bruce Springsteen song, and notice that the whole town smells like cereal, owing to the Ralston and Quaker Oats mills. In Dallas we visit the Texas Book Depository and gaze out the window from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK; in DC we stop at the Dupont Hilton on Embassy Row and see the spot where Reagan was shot. In Minneapolis we visit what used to be the great falls of the Mississippi, which have eroded away, and I imagine the eagle aeries that once were clustered around the falls, which were held sacred by the Dakotas but are now supplanted by parks and the ruins of factories; meanwhile, a few blocks away, stands a ridiculous statue of Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air—an example of local culture defining itself by imagery invented by TV.

Beyond finding something useful for the campaigns, we're inspired by seeing how the behavior of local politicians illustrates what's going on in America—how politics influences and is influenced by the people we meet or observe along the way. We compile our cultural audits from a variety of sources, and have gotten pretty good at finding entertainment along the way, though sometimes both endeavors are challenging—for reasons vastly different than in New Orleans. Sadly, many places, including most of the midwestern corn belt, are studies in bad architecture and soul-sapping ennui. In such cases we sometimes resort to inventing games, such as searching for quirky businesses and signs. In particular, for some reason, we've focused on beauty parlor names: Hair Explosion, Glitz International by Mavis, Hair by the Sea, Shabazz Hair Care Oasis of Red Lick. One of the salons was close to home—Tina's Magnificent Beauty Closet, so we were aware when it later burned, and was rebuilt as, simply, Tina's Beauty Closet, the magnificence apparently having gone up in flames.