We're with Nobody (18 page)

When politicians are confronted with their mistakes, a good template for responding would be, “Afternoon, ma'am. I'm here to pay my fine.” Unfortunately it rarely works that way. It's the secrecy, the air of entitlement, the evidence of chronic abuse of power, the not learning, and the lack of recognition that others make mistakes, too, that make powerful errors so loathsome. Michael and I are part of the system trying to influence voters, positively or negatively. We lay fires—a potentially destructive force, though we don't actually strike the match. If enabling the destruction of something bad can have a salutary effect, yet such an outcome is not assured, what, precisely, does that make us?

The problem, again, is that so much of American politics today is characterized by methodical distortion of the truth, which is how you end up with a candidate such as the one in Delaware who defaulted on her mortgage, lied about her education and dabbled in
witchcraft
, for God's sake, yet managed to win the primary by hurling unfounded accusations and innuendos at her opponent. It's bewildering, but it's no excuse to not care, or to allow yourself to be fooled. Attempting to undermine a candidate using irrelevant facts is to rely on a logical fallacy; like saying a candidate is a womanizer, and that therefore his position on balancing the budget is suspect, which doesn't naturally follow. If the same candidate has filed for bankruptcy, and his own business has been sued for nonpayment of bills and has had tax liens filed against it, it is logical to question his views on the budget. If he is a womanizer who uses his power to harass female staffers and to kill legislation aimed at equal rights, or both, then you've got something. It's not about who is most clever at insulting the other (at least, it shouldn't be) or at assassinating character in ways that have nothing to do with the ability to lead. It's about recognizing when bad traits have ramifications for the job the candidate seeks.

If, as a voter, you find yourself unsure, you can always search for the truth on your own, and you should feel free to shoot the messenger when it's clear that he or she is engaged in obfuscation. Don't fall for the kind of ruse presented by a certain vice presidential candidate who, after having lost her bid, publicly attacked the Associated Press for fact-checking her political record, as if that were an unreasonable invasion of her privacy. If you're putting yourself out there to lead the nation, your history matters—pretty much all of it.

The process of discernment isn't always easy. During the research trip when Michael and I escaped our captors at the Liberty Jail we were following tandem routes—the paper trails left behind by the candidates we were researching and the historic trail of the outlaw Jesse James. During the course of our research we'd repeatedly come across the ghost of James, who occupies a strange niche among American icons as a beloved murderer and bank robber. Most people are attracted to him. Brad Pitt played him, right? Yet he
was
a murderer and a thief.

As Michael and I compared the misdeeds of the various outlaws and lawmen on the Jesse James trail and, simultaneously, of the prospective outlaws and lawmen running for Congress, we liked to think our practiced critical eye enabled us to tell who was good and who was bad. But at times we found ourselves rooting for James. We discovered that we respected one of our opposing candidates more than the one who'd hired us.

Our misconceptions about James were a direct result of popular myth—something that also influences political campaigns. Our misgivings about one of our own candidates illustrated that we could remain objective even when it went against our political affiliations.

As we traveled from Missouri to Minnesota, along these tandem trails, we faced the same question again and again: Who, among the key players, was an outlaw and who was a lawman? As we sauntered into Northfield, Minnesota, and the old First National Bank, where Jesse James's gang was shot to pieces during a robbery gone bad more than a century before, we encountered a guide dressed in period Western garb. He was speaking with a small clutch of tourists who'd assembled to walk through the restored bank, the vault of which a teller had refused to open for the outlaws in 1876. Angered by this act of defiance, a gangmember had stuck a gun to the teller's head and blown his brains out.

The guide directed us to join the group and said he would shortly commence the tour, but we demurred. “You know, we don't really do the tours,” Michael replied, slowly shaking his head with the pained grin I'd seen so many times before. The guide, who wore a cowboy hat, indoors, looked confused. His expression demanded some sort of explanation. “We're here on business and we really don't have a lot of time, so if we could just go ahead inside that would be great,” Michael added.

Abashed, the guide protested that we might miss something without the guided tour.

“I think we'll be fine,” Michael said, already walking past him. “We're pretty familiar with Jesse James.” Always the dissidents.

There's a reason that Michael and I almost never take guided tours. It's the nature of our business that people are always trying to guide or otherwise influence our process of discovery, and we naturally resist, even recreationally. By this point, anyway, we'd become extremely familiar with Jesse James. Almost by happenstance we'd found ourselves at his birthplace in rural Kearney, Missouri; then in Liberty, Missouri, at the site of his first bank robbery and now in Northfield, the site of his last bank robbery attempt. We tend to notice when coincidental discoveries and random clues start to line up—it's a big part of our work—so we'd decided to run with the James Gang theme.

The political campaigns we work for take us down their own sets of trails. Some are longer than others, some are smooth and productive, some are borderline dangerous and some are simply frustrating to traverse. The same must have held true along the various trails the James Gang and the lawmen who pursued them traveled. In both cases, however, the lines sometimes become blurred. Outlaws and lawmen cross boundaries, and it may become difficult to tell the good guys from the bad. The truth isn't always found at the end of the trail, but when it is we usually have a beer.

On the final stop of this particular Midwest tour we visited the small, clapboard house in St. Joseph, Missouri, where James last lived and where, ultimately, he was shot to death by one of his own men in 1882. We'd finished our work for the day and decided to stroll around the homestead, where we came upon an exhibit documenting the 1995 exhumation of James's body, which put an end to long-standing rumors that he had lived out his life incognito.

“They dug him up,” Michael observed, with some satisfaction. They'd gone to the source, to literally unearth the facts. It turned out that the man buried in the grave actually was James, so in a sense they didn't find anything they already didn't know. As research projects go, it was something of a wash. But it confirmed the truth. The circumstances of his death, as previously reported, were now officially fact, which is saying something, in our book. And make no mistake: Despite the popular spin, and the possibility that he was good to his mother, Jesse James was, on balance, a very bad man.

As we moved to the wall of the house where James was standing when he was shot, which still bore its fateful bullet hole, Michael wondered aloud whether they'd found the actual bullet—a natural question for someone who makes his living poring over shreds of telling evidence. Then, as we silently stared at the bullet hole, his cell phone rang; he answered, listened, muttered a few uh-huhs and said, “We can be there next week.” He hung up and looked over at me. I didn't even ask where. It was time to move on.

Michael and I fervently believe that the voters need to understand the sources of the information that guides the political discourse, and we like to think we're uniquely positioned to help them do that. It helps that we both love hearing and telling stories, and that during almost two decades spent traversing the American political landscape we've uncovered countless tales that are interesting, illuminating and, in our view, important. Once we started working on this book, friends and associates occasionally asked if we weren't fearful that given the clandestine nature of our work we might become professional pariahs after it came out. It is something we'd thought about, but ultimately we wanted to tell those stories, and along the way, to highlight the fallacies of undertaking undocumented political attacks.

When we began pitching the idea of this book, a few publishers immediately envisioned a tell-all account, full of boldfaced names, and were disappointed to find that wasn't what we had in mind. We aren't here to name names or to reveal confidences, but instead to relate stories that we think say something bigger and more fundamental about politics and America. It isn't always about good guys and bad, but a candidate's record matters; it's the necessary underpinning of the debate, which need not be derisive for its own sake. Choosing an elected leader should not be like speed dating, nor should it resemble a criminal lineup. It should be a careful consideration of documented facts. And after the work is done, it's best to accept the outcome, to consider how the playing field has changed, and to reassess what you might look for in a leader the next time around.

In the case of that prickly campaign issue involving the candidate who was my friend, and the question of what our research of him said about us, the answer came when I felt obliged to tell him what had happened, though carefully, so as not to betray our campaign. He was gracious about it. “No problem,” he said, not even bothering to ask what we'd found, perhaps because if it had mattered it would have likely already come out. With a laugh, he added, “Next time I'll let you know I'm running early on, and you can work for me.”

Chapter 18
Michael

F
or one minute I find myself just staring at the text message that's popped up on my phone. It's only a few words, a single sentence, but it has stopped me cold.

“Can you tell me exactly what you do for a living?”

It's a question that Alan and I often get, but rarely answer to anyone's satisfaction. It's a little difficult explaining exactly what we do, and even harder to describe why we do it. Sometimes we say simply that we work in politics, or help on political campaigns, or do research for political candidates. Most times, it's enough of an answer to ensure that there's not a follow-up. Most times.

But this is different. The reason my eyes are locked at this moment on those eleven words is that the message I've just received is from my teenage daughter.

She's on her way to meet the parents of her new boyfriend and she understandably wants to be able to tell them about her father and her father's job. It's a little different than just being able to say that your dad's an insurance salesman or a lawyer or a teacher. Those don't really require much explanation. But an opposition researcher? So I just sit with phone in hand and wonder why, after all these years, I had never fully explained my work to her and to my son.

Maybe I thought they wouldn't understand. Maybe I was worried they would see my work as sketchy. Maybe I felt they would be embarrassed. I love my job, and I have never placed much import on other people's opinions of it. But these were my children. So as they grew up, I just never discussed it much. After all, part of what makes Alan and me good at our job is an ability to stay in the background. We had always been most comfortable as outsiders on a trail, never really having to define ourselves as good guys or bad guys, never having to really align ourselves outside the realm of the broader venue of the Democratic Party itself.

Her message arrives one afternoon toward the end of a long campaign season—a season that has not only raised a daughter's question to a father's consternation, but one that, for Alan and me, appears to be our last together.

We have both been directly employed by politicians in the past, and we've occasionally been offered full-time political jobs during the course of our research projects. But for eighteen years we've continued to operate on the fringes, on our own, without conventional jobs. It's great being independent, and I suspect we work harder than a lot of people who enjoy the seeming security of regular jobs. But we've always both known that if either of us was offered the perfect professional segue, our alliance might end, and midway through a project in the Northwest it looks like that may finally happen.

The Oregon Coast is a supremely beautiful place, and it's refreshing to be doing research in a series of pleasant, progressive cities. But as we travel the highways south from Portland through Salem and Eugene and back up the windswept coast, Alan has other matters on his mind. He's debating whether to accept a high-level federal job that's been offered to him, and as a result he's frequently fielding calls from White House aides. While I'm inside a series of courthouses plowing through records, Alan's standing out front on the phone. The job is a presidential appointment, and is really too good to pass up. It's sad to think that Oregon may be our last foray into the field as a team.

“So, what do you think?” he asks me over lunch. “What do you think I should do?”

Of course there's some hesitation. After all, we've worked together for two decades, first sitting across a newsroom as reporters, then as business partners, traveling thousands of miles together on a road trip that seemed to never end. Even when we were working in separate places, it always seemed we were riding together in a crappy rental. I recall a June evening on the road, solo, for a U.S. Senate campaign, traveling from Dodge City, Kansas, to Kansas City. One of those nasty Kansas storms had blown up during the drive, with winds to seventy miles per hour, reports of twisters and the most amazing lightning display I'd ever seen. As I approached the city, talking on the phone with Alan, an incredible bolt illuminated the sky, striking a nearby storage tank that held fifty-eight thousand barrels of unleaded gas. It was startling and my phone actually crackled as the humongous fireballs roiled upward. Though he was six hundred miles away, my first instinct was to say, “Holy shit! Did you see that?”

Sure, we can irritate one another, but in a world of discontent where nothing seems to last, our biggest disagreements usually center on where to eat. We don't socialize with each other much when the campaigns end, and each of us maintains separate sets of friends. But no one knows us any better than we know each other. The thought of going it alone is, well, a lonely one. But for Alan it's an exciting possibility, offering the chance to participate in the political process at a high level, on the inside. For a writer and a researcher, the possibility of being granted such unimpeded access is seductive. It would be the ultimate research project.

“It's a great job. And I'm pretty sure that if I were in your shoes, I'd do it,” I say. But I can't resist one caveat. “From now on, you won't be out there on your own.”

There's nothing wrong with being with somebody unless you pretend you aren't—unless you're posing as an objective reporter or an honest elected official when you are secretly beholden to someone, or unless, deep down, you see yourself as being aligned with no one. It becomes glaringly apparent that there's a huge difference between being sort of with somebody, for a while, such as during a summer campaign, and being very much
with
somebody in a high level of government. Maybe Alan had forgotten how it felt.

The issue, in a way, has been a subtext of all our research projects. As independent researchers, we tend to be viewed as useful resources who are potentially beyond anyone's control. The majority of what we find is public domain. We are bound by campaign confidences, and we know everything that's potentially damaging to a campaign. We are both valuable and potentially menacing. With few exceptions, we research Republicans and Democrats, for Democrats. But in the end we
choose
to be leashed. The implication is that we could get loose at any time.

When our plane back from Oregon lands in New York late that night, Alan checks his e-mail to find a final offer from his prospective employer. It seems to contain everything he's asked for and now it's just a matter of accepting. As we jump into separate cabs, he tells me he needs to look it over one last time.

“I'll let you know something by Monday,” he tells me. “But it's going to be awfully hard to say no.”

I had the great fortune one summer to work as a mannequin repairman. It was by far the strangest job I've ever held, and without a doubt the most interesting. My friend Byron got me the position and together we worked in a Texas facility that received damaged mannequins from regional department stores, all in line for repair.

A brand new, high quality, fiberglass mannequin can cost hundreds of dollars. Prices have come down over the years with new production methods, but mannequins are still expensive, especially when a store chain might buy hundreds. So when they become damaged it can be more cost-effective to have them repaired than to buy new ones.

If you ever really take the time to look around a large department store you'll find that mannequins come in an incredibly wide variety. There are male mannequins and female mannequins; Caucasian mannequins and African American mannequins; baby mannequins and pregnant mannequins; headless mannequins and torso mannequins; bald mannequins and mannequins with molded hair; large-breasted, sexy mannequins and muscular, athletic mannequins; slender mannequins and heavyset mannequins. There are even translucent mannequins and mannequin “systems” that allow the owner to start with just the bust and mix and match different body parts.

The repair facility in which we worked held every type. And though they each seemed to be different in some way, they all possessed a common denominator: Every one was flawed. Maybe they were missing an ear or a finger or an entire leg. Maybe the joint that attached the arm to the shoulder was damaged so that the figure could no longer be placed into a waving position. Maybe they were just cracked or chipped or bent. So many things can happen to a mannequin to make it unattractive to shoppers. Our job was to make them attractive again.

To walk into a room of people donning surgical-type gowns and masks holding manufactured body parts in one gloved hand and sanders or glue or paint brushes in the other might seem a bit unusual. But we mostly took it seriously. Working with fiber glass required us to wear the protective clothing and, in a weird way, allowed us to feel like surgeons, albeit half-assed ones. Spare and replacement arms and legs lay in various parts of the facility like piles of amputated limbs left by battlefield doctors during the Civil War. We worked hard that summer, but try as we might, some mannequins were simply beyond mending. Their usefulness over, they were stripped for parts and cast aside. Mannequin repair is a cold and unfeeling business.

At the end of each day, every mannequin in the process of restoration was placed in its own open-faced locker. The eeriness of walking into work each morning before the lights were turned on to see a row of lifeless, naked figures in various poses and stages of repair, staring blankly back through the dimness, was something I took with me when I left—along with a gold translucent torso of a woman that lit up when I plugged her into the wall.

The mannequins we repaired that summer also left, back to the floors of the department stores from which they came. And though now temporarily free of defects, the truth is that the shoppers who pass by and maybe stop for a moment only really care about what's on the outside—the image that the mannequins present, the packaging that envelops them, the illusion that what is seen can somehow transfer to real life.

And so it is, as the first Tuesday of November rolls around and a long campaign season nears its end, that the shoppers who are voters try to overlook the imperfections that have so skillfully been worked over to select a new batch of elected leaders. By now, Alan and I have long since finished our work, have found the flaws in these living, breathing candidates, and have more or less left the building. By now, it's rare for anyone from our campaigns to get in touch with us, even for last-minute follow-up questions or document requests. They're working to get out the vote and the voters are preparing to exercise their power.

It's always strange to us that the election utterly determines the value of our work, but the final outcome is beyond our control. So much has been invested, so much energy and money expended. Now it comes down to a roll of the dice. The next two, four or six years will be shaped by a small percentage of capricious voters—some who've taken the time to study the candidates' backgrounds; some who enter the voting booth and select the first name in each race, knowing nothing about any of them; some who vote religiously because they feel it's their patriotic duty, or who do so to cancel their spouse's ballot; some who've spent hours posting rabid comments on various websites, or who look out the window, see that it's raining and decide to stay home.

All those television and radio ads that pummel us in our easy chairs and cars for weeks. All that direct mail and e-mail that suffocates our mailboxes and inboxes. All those debates and newspaper articles and yard signs and angry blogs and charges and countercharges. Is it worth it? Does it tell us anything useful or meaningful? Is it all illusion, or is it real?

There's an old parlor game in which players are lined up in a row and the first person is given a written sentence to memorize and then asked to whisper it to the next person. The sentence is whispered to the next player, and so on down the line, ending with the last person usually blurting out some discombobulated, confusing version of the original message. The game is called “Gossip,” but it always begins with a fact, and everyone usually gets a good laugh at the end. Alan and I represent the first players in that row. The facts we gather, the flaws and defects we uncover, are as pure as possible; each is documented, tied up in a concise package and delivered. We may be asked to make suggestions on where it goes from our hands and how it is used, but most times it just gets passed down the line. Everyone in that line, from the campaign manager to the pollster to the media firm to the candidate and all those in between, have a responsibility to keep those facts straight and accurate. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don't. There are, of course, the occasional dirty tricks and smear campaigns fabricated by the Karl Roves of the world, and they are the ones that make the most headlines. While integrity is the goal, don't be fooled. Every campaign wants an advantage, an edge, and they will reach and stretch and walk the line to get it and to make their candidates look great.

Is it illusion? Without documented facts, the only way to really find out is to put a candidate in office, hold your breath and see what happens.

Each campaign season starts with feelings of invincibility and excitement, and thoughts of what could be. And each one concludes in simple victory or defeat. Like everything in life, campaigns are stories—stories that are conceived, written and told over a period of a few months. The best storytellers are the most successful, and everybody involved in politics plays a role in unfurling those sagas. Comedy, tragedy, drama—it's all there. For us, each research report we deliver is a story unto itself and we write them as such. Start at the beginning of a candidate's life, work through every facet of his or her career—whether it be as a politician or businessperson or teacher or doctor or judge—and end with the race now being run.

“What's the best thing you ever found on somebody?” From those who know what we do, that's the one question Alan and I get most often. What they're asking, of course, is what's the
worst
thing we ever found. Best is often substituted for worst when it pertains to the pleasure derived from the misfortune or pain of others.