We're with Nobody (14 page)

“Is it not a public record?” I asked, cutting to the chase.

It was, she said, but it contained private information that could not be disclosed. Here then, was one of those “special” records: a public-private one, which was technically available but could not actually be seen. In the end, after much pleading and, at one point, my suggestion that perhaps someone higher up might be able to settle the issue, the woman at the window at least told me that the case did, in fact, involve a lien for failure to pay state income tax, albeit for property in another state. The exact address she wouldn't give me. It wasn't entirely satisfying, but it was enough. So much for the fiscal responsibility platform, dude.

As with any club, the membership rules of the Utah voting district were at times inscrutable, and subject to change. There was no huge controversy in the candidate's background, and he couldn't exactly be portrayed as a danger to the fold, but there were clues that could be discerned up close, on the ground. Bits and pieces that emerged in the race, including that tax lien, were enough to convince the voters that he was less attractive than the incumbent, whose personal political doctrines were known. In the end, the opponent lost.

Utah was a perfect example of why it's risky to research candidates from the quiet sanctuary of your office. People often ask Michael and me how the expansion of the Internet has changed the way we do our work, and the answer is that in some ways it has simplified things, as it has for everyone. Many of the records we once had to dig up in libraries and newspaper or courthouse archives are now available online. But it has also complicated things by moving the debate further from that documentation, and it has meanwhile given people—including some who work for political campaigns—a false sense of understanding of the issues at hand. Campaigns may operate under the assumption that they can come up with a list of search words, assign a volunteer to Google the necessary documentation and build their case around that. But there, in Salt Lake City, was the contraindication. Even on the ground I was only able to get bits and pieces, and the most telling among them never came up during any of our Internet searches.

The Internet seems to be supplanting every other conduit and repository of information, but everything is not there yet and I'm not sure it ever will be. The life of a place and the life of a candidate do not unfold electronically.

Chapter 14
Michael

M
y first thought on this cold and rainy Monday morning is that there's no possible way I can crawl out of this bed. And if I do, I'll just fall on the floor and die anyway. Oh sure, they'll find me, but not until they break down the hotel door days from now.

Anyone who's ever worked on the road has thought about the possibility of this happening. I had felt it coming the day before on my flight to the Northwest but convinced myself for the moment that it would pass. All these years traveling and never once had I been really sick. The plastic thermometer I bought when I landed now read 102. My meeting with the candidate and his campaign people was at 8:00 AM. What was I supposed to do?

“I'm sorry. I know you flew me two thousand miles and are paying me all this money to conduct this research, but I'm not really feeling well, so I think I'll just stay here in this great hotel you're paying for and sleep.”

No, I have to go. There are deadlines to meet. It's all about deadlines. The temperature outside is hovering in the thirties and I'm on fire as I take my seat a noninfectious distance away from the candidate and his campaign manager at a breakfast meeting, where we begin going over their suggestions and ideas. Everything is blurry. Every fiber of my body feels like a rubber band stretched to its popping point. If self-combustion can, indeed, occur, then I am just minutes away from becoming a smoldering ash pile on the floor beneath my plate of scrambled eggs.

“Are you OK?” the manager asks in a somewhat sympathetic-sounding tone while looking puzzled over my apparent lack of coherency in answering their questions.

“Yeah, I'm fine. Just a little tired I guess from the trip yesterday,” I reply.

But who am I kidding? If I look as bad as I feel, I'm not kidding anyone. The first day is the worst. Even without the flu, there's the added stress of getting your bearings in a new town and locating all the places you'll need to go to collect information. Mondays are always tough, and though I'm certain I'll perish at any time, I manage to make it through this one and stumble back to my hotel—to a bottle of aspirin and room service. All I want is a bowl of hot soup, and the only kind they serve is split pea. So that's what I get, as I will every night for the next week.

The following morning I awake shivering. I'm a degree hotter and I begin to worry about something someone once told me about high body temperatures: that a person's brain can actually begin to cook and sizzle and finally just melt. I had bought a fuzzy green stocking cap stamped with some unfamiliar logo the day before at a drugstore. The thought of my brain melting into something already so unattractive is scary and depressing. But I'm cold, so I put it on, along with a pair of jeans over a pair of sweat pants I had packed with the intent to go for a run. A t-shirt covered by a dress shirt covered by a hooded sweatshirt covered by a sport coat blanket my upper body. I rarely drink coffee, but today I gulp as much as I can muster and head out again, hoping the caffeine will keep me standing.

“May I help you?” asks a courthouse clerk on my first stop of the day. I can't figure out why she's staring at my feet until I look down to notice that my sweatpants are about three inches longer than the bottom of my jeans. She must think I'm wearing pajamas. I don't care.

“Yes, ma'am, I'm looking for some tax information.” She moves her eyes between my green hat and my ankles and speaks to me in a tone that is alternately filled with pity and wariness.

It's like that everywhere I go. Security guards ask me why I'm here; government employees don't know whether to help me or ask me to leave. As I walk past the reflective window of an office building I get my first full look at myself. If I didn't feel so wretched, I would laugh. My appearance lies somewhere between homeless and mentally challenged. A mentally challenged homeless man who wants to see all the tax records on a political candidate. In a way it's helpful because no one takes me very seriously. For the first time I can remember, no one asks me who I'm with or for whom I work. Mentally challenged homeless guys are never with anybody. As I trudge the streets from building to building, I expect someone to hand me some spare change at any moment.

On my fourth flu night, I call down for room service. By now they know me.

“Good evening! Split pea tonight?”

“Is that really all you have?” I ask hopefully.

“It's our specialty,” he replies in a cheery tone.

“Isn't there maybe a can of chicken noodle stuck on the back of a shelf somewhere?” I plead.

“We have our Chicken Oscar that's very good. But it's not a soup.”

“Just bring me the split pea.”

Anyone who's ever eaten split pea soup knows that a week's worth is a gastronomical nightmare. Split peas are actually dried, peeled and split seeds. And though they're a great source of protein, they also contain certain sugars that our digestive enzymes are incapable of breaking apart for absorption. Once in the lower intestine, the sugars are metabolized and form carbon dioxide, hydrogen and, yes, methane gas.

This combination of flu and extreme intestinal discomfort proves particularly troublesome when part of my research uncovers the fact that the opposing candidate owns a restaurant that's been cited more than a hundred times for health code violations. The suggestion is made that I visit this restaurant for lunch. All that's going through my mind is the thought of those health inspectors who found mold in the ice machines, cockroach infestations, employees washing their hands without soap, and food preparation sinks directly connected to the raw sewage system. I'm more than queasy. A person's dedication to his job can go only so far and I believe I've done my duty. There's nothing in the job description that states I have to subject myself to this (or keep subjecting the public to me). But then I wonder if they might serve a nice broth.

Sick or not, there are no excuses in political campaigns. Time is too short and the stakes are too high. When you've got two weeks left to finish a project, as I do on this one, no one cares how you feel. The job comes first and you get it done. It's all about deadlines. You live by deadlines and you can most certainly die by deadlines.

The word “deadline” actually has a deadly origin dating back to the Civil War. In the official records of the Union and Confederate armies is an obscure inspection report from Confederate captain Walter Bowie dated May 10, 1864. The report describes conditions at the infamous prisoner-of-war camp for Union soldiers at Andersonville, Georgia. In it, Bowie wrote, “On the inside of the stockade and twenty feet from it there is a dead-line established, over which no prisoner is allowed to go, day or night, under penalty of being shot.”

The word, of course, has evolved into simply meaning a time limit to complete some activity. And though crossing a deadline today generally won't result in being shot, it can sometimes feel like it. Alan and I have worked under more deadlines than we can count since our days as reporters.

The most brutal editor for whom I ever worked was a city editor who was terrified of our managing editor. Her way of trying to please him was to feed him as many news stories in a day as possible, much like throwing meat at a hungry tiger. She would take stories from other cities and attempt to “localize” them, inventing some idiotic angle that she believed would interest our readers. Two hours before deadline she would lay two more story assignments on my desk. An hour before deadline there would be another. Thirty minutes before deadline one more might find its way over.

“See if you can make a few calls on this,” she would say. It was her favorite line and I came to despise it. I learned then that deadlines can do two things to people: They can paralyze us into total inaction or they can bring out our best efforts. It's all in the way we handle them.

Deadlines bring about rushes of energy from the adrenaline they unleash. The exact scientific actions on the body are complicated, involving receptors and glands and organs and secretions. The heart beats faster; breathing is more rapid; energy levels are higher. Adrenaline is great. Hell, they even give it to you if you're in cardiac arrest.

Alan always tells people, “We live for deadlines.” He's right. The political seasons in which we work are, for the most part, about six months of continuous deadlines. The actual core research we conduct for each campaign takes between three and five weeks. We have always touted our ability to meet deadlines and provide quick turnarounds. In eighteen years we've never crossed a deadline yet—never been shot or even fired upon. To expand on the famous motto of the U.S. Postal Service: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor flu stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

Deadlines are finite, but their importance is relative. Everyone has them and most everyone believes theirs are tougher or more important than the next guy's. I know I do. It is true, however, that missing any deadline carries a cost. A few years ago in California, a large corporation was told by a judge that it wasn't entitled to $1 million in attorney's fees for a case it won because its attorneys were literally sixty seconds late in filing the legal paperwork required to collect those fees. More specifically, the law firm's courier was late because the attorney in charge of filing the paperwork waited until forty-six minutes before the deadline to give it to the courier who then got stuck in traffic and had to wait at a rail crossing for a long train to pass. When he arrived at the courthouse it was closed. The judge in the case wrote that, though regrettable, “The entirely foreseeable obstacle of traffic in Southern California in the late afternoon . . . cannot justify an enlargement in time.” In other words: You missed the deadline; it's your loss.

It is ironic in a way that the candidates Alan and I assist by adhering to our and their strict deadlines end up employed by one of the worst deadline-missing organizations in the world: the federal government.

“If you don't set a deadline in this town, nothing happens,” President Obama said in 2009, right before Congress missed a deadline to pass his health care reform. An administration sets deadlines and Congress ignores them, largely without consequence. Obama warned Congress in 2009 to pass health care reform by that August. It didn't happen until March 2010. The deadline for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay was the end of the president's first year in office. It didn't happen.

“Any talk of deadlines is an absolute waste of time,” one Democratic senator said.

The federal government even managed to miss all thirty-four deadlines set by Congress for requiring energy-efficiency standards for consumer products, costing Americans tens of billions of dollars more for energy. But while our government may miss its own deadlines, it doesn't look kindly on us when we do it. Wait until after April 15 to mail your income tax return and see what happens. Even failing to complete the ten-year U.S. Census form on time carries the threat of a fine. Try having to explain how you got busted for a census violation on your next job application form.

Miss enough deadlines and you get replaced, unless of course you're the only one who can do your job. Just ask BP. A month after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest man-made oil spill in U.S. history, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar blasted the giant petroleum producer, saying BP had blown “deadline after deadline” in its efforts to stop the leak. Yet, at the same time, the federal government acknowledged that it had to rely on the company's equipment and expertise to close the hole. It's like a drunken tow truck driver who causes a massive multicar pileup in the middle of town. Sure, says the police chief, we'd like to arrest him, but he's got the only tow truck in the city and he's the only one who knows how to drive it.

The challenge is to know when a deadline is getting in the way of what really matters, when it's going to prevent you from pursuing a late-breaking lead. Also tricky: believing you can meet multiple deadlines by possessing the ability to do more than one thing at the same time. No one possesses that ability. It's a myth. Studies consistently show that the human brain cannot fully focus on more than one thing at a time. We may be able to shift our focus faster than somebody else can shift theirs and believe we're doing two things at once, but that's about it. And even then it's tough to maintain effectiveness at each task. The next time you're at a sporting event or a party, try holding a conversation with the person next to you while listening to the conversation of the person on the other side at the same time. Then, just for fun, trying doing it drunk.

When we're working on four or five campaigns at once, shifting focus (and occasionally drinking) becomes the only way to adhere to deadlines. There is no prioritizing. You can't tell yourself that one campaign is more important than another and, therefore, can wait. You can't not return calls from an anxious campaign manager in need of a quick parcel of information just because you're in the middle of another job. Several times Alan and I have been hired because the researcher who was initially brought on board couldn't be reached after he'd turned over his initial report. In this business, even after the deadline is met, you have to remember that nothing is over until the polls close.

Adrenaline is great for helping you meet deadlines, especially when you feel like crap. The problem is that, much like split pea soup, you can't subsist on it forever. In the end, it's unsustainable. Fortunately for me, this hellish week has ended and I'm actually beginning to feel better. As I leave the hotel room, I toss my fuzzy green stocking cap in the trash. It had been a good cap but its usefulness has reached an end and I don't plan on ever wearing it again.

“God, what happened to you?” Alan says when I walk into the office on Monday morning. He already knows, of course, but it's his way of acknowledging that I'd had a tough trip.