We're with Nobody (8 page)

I've been in the area for three days already and so far haven't found much that's of use for the campaign or even for my own entertainment. The former is obviously my priority, but to come up empty on both counts is hugely disappointing. There are some interesting vistas in this part of the New Jersey–Pennsylvania border country, and some cool bridges across the Delaware, and beyond the more densely populated areas the people are agreeable in an unpretentious, blue-collar way, with an obvious appreciation for bad local pizza joints where everyone knows their name. But it's mostly miles and miles of houses clad in vinyl siding, toll roads and, in the comparatively fortunate areas that have access to on- and off-ramps, a predictable succession of chain hotels, Burger Kings and shopping malls. To give you an idea of how the locals do not spend their time, when I stopped at my hotel's front desk one morning, dressed in my jogging togs, and asked the receptionist if she could recommend a running route, she looked at me blankly and said, “I'm sorry. I'm not sure what you mean.”

All that's left, after a long day of doing research in such a place, is either to retire to your hotel room or drive across the eight-lane highway to the Chili's bar to watch whatever game is on TV. I do not really follow sports, though I'm easily mesmerized by movement on the screen, and in such situations I must concentrate on keeping up with the score and the names of the teams in case someone saunters up to the bar and asks a challenging question such as, “Who's winning?” It's embarrassing to appear to be watching a game on TV and not even know who's playing. Likewise, it's humiliating to spend three days doing intensive research in a small town and come up with nothing of value or interest. You know there has to be something there. There's almost always something there.

So when the mayor emerges from his office I'm all eyes and ears. I listen, with growing disappointment, as he responds to the couple's interrogatories and entreaties with seeming empathy. He's actually quite solicitous, and seems to share in the prospective groom's bewilderment over the fact that the marriage license fee is greater than the cost of filing for divorce, which strikes the prospective groom (and me) as unreasonable and illogical. The mayor offers no explanation for the difference in fees but advises the couple to speak with the judge about the procedures for getting a license. He then gives them the judge's name and even looks up the phone number, which seems to satisfy them. After the groom-to-be makes a few rambling closing remarks, the couple exits through the cracked plate glass door. The cop and I exchange a glance, which basically says, “I saw that, and I guess you saw that,” and return to our respective reading materials. The mayor looks at me as he leaves the room, though he doesn't seem particularly interested. In the bound volume that lies accusingly before me, the township council adjourns for the day.

Back at my hotel room that night, I go through copies of the mayor's campaign finance reports and find that the contractor he had pushed the council to use is there, as are numerous other contractors for whom he oversaw the awarding of comparatively lucrative contracts, which could indicate a conflict of interest. It might not have been that bad if the contractors had adequately done their jobs, but that wasn't the case, as was evident in the notations in the minutes regarding recurring infrastructure problems that kept popping up long after the contractors had supposedly finished.

As the abuse of political power goes, what happened in the tiny township was a small thing. A few contractors contributed to the mayor's campaign, got some work out of it and ended up doing a crappy job. But it represented a failure of government that manifested itself in the failure of concrete sidewalks. Should an old lady carrying her groceries home from the store have the misfortune to trip on a buckled sidewalk and break her collarbone, it would be possible to trace the nexus of the episode to the minute books.

The same was true of the midwestern councilman's vote against permitting a center designed to aid stroke victims. The vote was buried in the minutiae of the minutes, and at first glance might have seemed innocuous, sandwiched between votes on unimaginably boring inside-government activities, and shrouded in sleep-inducing language about property values and the like. But if you look closely, you don't have to be a stroke victim to recognize that the guy has his own agenda, and that, in this case, it doesn't dovetail with the greater public good. Likewise, the congressman who worked for a business that made millions by relying on Chinese labor, rather than the employment force in his home state: Who, precisely, would such a representative represent?

Because all politics is local, the abuse of the system in the tiny Jersey township illustrates a problem we see across the nation, a problem that is cumulative in scope. The same type of systemic abuse that results in poorly built sidewalks in an out-of-the-way township resulted in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Small opportunities lead to larger opportunities; small abuses tend to escalate. It's all just a matter of scale.

Chapter 8
Michael

S
tanding about five foot five, she's a manly woman, troll-like in many ways. And though she might very well reside under a bridge, she works in a local government office in Missouri. From the expression on her face, we can tell this is going to be unpleasant—a trip to the dentist and a prostate exam wrapped into one.

“And what am I going to do for you today?” she asks in a voice that is irritating, frightening and tiring all at the same time.

It's only Tuesday and it's already been a long week of research. All I can manage is to look at the floor and whisper to Alan, “You do this, please. I just can't.” The reason I can't is because I know that the request we're preparing to make is going to unleash an unpleasantness so great in scope as to leave only two options: run away or get beaten to death in front of a legion of bureaucrats who might very well join in the bloodletting.

In another situation, it could have been Alan asking me to handle the troll. But I know he's irritated already at having earlier had lunch at a chain restaurant. Alan hates chain restaurants and has been known to drive all the way to another city to avoid them. Don't ask me why that is, but I suspect when he leaves this Earth, his obituary will read: “In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to any restaurant that has no more than one location.” One formulated burger and he's ready to rumble.

“Yes ma'am,” Alan says slowly. “We're going to need to look at all the campaign finance reports for these individuals.” He slides her a piece of paper with the names we're looking for as I stand to the side, nervously sipping a bottle of water. She stares at it for a moment and then asks how many years' worth of reports we want.

“All of them,” Alan says, standing firm in preparation for the aftershock.

Of all the documents we examine during the course of a campaign, finance reports—the listings of the individual contributions received by a candidate and the expenses of the candidate's campaign—are often the most voluminous. They're important because they can unveil donors who may have questionable relationships with the candidate, or special interest groups with positions and agendas that might cause voters to question or reconsider their support for a candidate. They reveal the sources of a candidate's money, from friends and neighbors or from giant foreign corporations that spill millions of gallons of oil into American waters. They are important and they can number in the thousands of pages.

The puckish clerk repeats Alan's answer as if she didn't really understand it the first time, then stares back at the names.

“We're talking nearly twenty years' worth,” she says as if this fact might change our minds.

“Yes, we know it's a big request, but we're going to need to see them,” he says.

“Well, before I can even look at this, you're going to have to fill out this form,” she shoots back. “And then I'm going to have to talk to my supervisor.”

As she shoves the lengthy, and mostly useless, request form into Alan's chest, her voice becomes even more agitated and strained. She tells us that we can't just walk into her office and ask for something that might take her all day to find. After all, she says, she has work to do. And even if our request is approved by higher powers, don't we know that she'd have to find a dolly to haul it all out here?

I manage to just keep my mouth shut this time, but Alan can't. “Isn't
this
your job?” he asks as he waves his hand in a circular motion in front of her face. “Isn't helping people who need public records what you do? I mean, we'll be glad to help you roll that dolly right on out here.”

I choke on the mouthful of water I've just sipped in my attempt to keep from laughing. The lack of air coupled with the flames shooting from our clerk's eyes keeps me in check. Everyone has met someone like her. She's one of those people who, out of a sense of entitlement and stubbornness, insists on driving in the left lane without passing, bottlenecking traffic because she can and always pretending she doesn't see you. She's the person in front of you at the Subway sandwich shop who painstakingly orders every possible extra and every possible condiment on her foot-long, all while quizzing the sandwich maker about the caloric intake of each one, oblivious to the ten people waiting behind her. Yet question her actions or inconvenience her in any way and she will cut you into bite-size morsels and chew you up.

Difficult people are a big part of opposition research. Unhelpful government workers with an automatic “no” reflex are very common. Time and again, they stand in your path: people determined to avoid doing any work by thwarting your very best efforts. You enter the records office, the workers are seated at their terminals, perhaps eating pasta salad from a Tupperware container or talking on the phone to a blabby family member, and no one looks up. “Excuse me,” you say, and finally one person, likely the most recent hire, grudgingly makes eye contact. You tell her what you're looking for. She says you'll have to officially request that information. You'll have to 
fill out the form
. You say OK.

She rises slowly from her desk and shuffles to the counter. When she sees what you want she says, “That's in the archives.” She lets you think about this. Maybe you'll say, “Oh, OK, sorry,” and leave. When you don't leave, when you say nothing but don't move, she adds, “It would have to be retrieved,” as if your request is still, at this point, contingent on some as-yet unproven theory, the implication being that this would be a very big deal. You say, “OK, retrieve it.” She asks if you're aware that there is a retrieval fee, which can be as much as twenty dollars, plus one dollar per page to copy, and that it could be hundreds of copies, and that the very retrieval process itself could take up to three days. She makes it sound like an impossibly time-consuming and expensive proposition—the public records equivalent of a manned space mission with no guarantee of a successful return to earth. “No problem,” you say. She looks at you as if you're evil.

The only way around such difficulties, aside from finding an alternate clerk, is the seemingly useful public access computer. Such terminals have been installed in courthouses across the country, ostensibly for your convenience, but also to lessen the burden on the employees who would otherwise have to help you. Yes, they contain the information you're likely looking to find, but be warned: Trying to operate some of them can result in intense cranial discomfort, trancelike spells, loss of hair, embarrassing crying jags and recurring nightmares. These computers are usually set off by themselves in some corner of the offices that house them, banished from normal functioning society. No matter what you do or how hard you try, you'll likely never understand how to use them and, in the end, the clerk whose time was supposed to be saved by these technomonsters will be forced to come over and help you anyway.

One regret I have through my years of doing research is that I didn't collect all of the instruction sheets that most every clerk's office in the country posts next to each public access computer. No two are exactly alike and each can be as difficult to decipher and as frustrating as a Greek tragedy written in Chinese on the back of a postage stamp.

One of the most confusing and maddening examples was a three-columned sheet filled with an alphabet soup of the codes required to use the computer. At first glance it seemed simple enough. If I'm looking for this . . . just enter this code. Easy! Want to look for tax liens on a piece of property? “The screens that will assist you in this search are VTAS, RXPN, RXPS, or RXDT,” reads the sheet. Once I entered one code, more information was required, such as a property parcel number, which more often than not I didn't have. In the rare instance that I did, there was an entire substratum of information that required even more codes. If I managed to successfully drill down into that data, I'd have better prayed that I didn't have to go back because the information I just accessed would evaporate in the blink of a computer screen and I'd have to start the whole process over again. There was little hope of success in this endeavor and few options but to ask the clerk for help. On her fourth trip over, she looked at the terminal and proceeded to tell me that I was operating in the wrong “session.”

“Session?” I asked. “What does that even mean?”

She flipped over the instruction sheet and pointed to a sentence that read, “You may view a document at any time, but you must be using the ‘A' session and you must be on the RXEN screen.”

I just looked at her and then back at the computer. I had absolutely no clue what in the hell she was talking about. Session? How would I know I'm in the wrong session? How did I get in this session? How many sessions are there? What exactly is a session? Forget it. I don't even care. The whole point of the public access computer had been negated. In the end she was forced to move me from my chair and find the information I sought while I peered over her shoulder.

If I were stranded on a deserted island, one of the things I would most like to have is a public access computer and an instruction sheet. It would keep me occupied for years.

Walking into a tax assessor's office in Minnesota one afternoon, I found Alan sitting in front of a computer nearly in tears. It wears on you. The entire system, from filling out forms to paying fees to arguing with rabid government workers, will beat you down, tempt you to just leave empty-handed, force you never to return. But Alan and I do return. We've learned to endure it, to outlast them. To cannibalize a line by Steve Martin from the movie
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
: “I could tolerate any insurance seminar. For days I could sit there and listen to them go on and on with a big smile on my face. They'd say, ‘How can you stand it?' ” I'd say, 'Cause I've been to courthouses and government offices from Florida to Oregon. I can stand
anything
. The tactics used to frighten you away or deny your right to review public documents are seemingly endless. One common device is to try to scare you with fees. To this day, the ultimate fee-diversion effort was one that came from an Oregon state agency that attempted to charge an estimated $200,000 for a list of fairly easy-to-compile information.

“The agency is, of course, willing to do this,” read the e-mail from its communications office. Of course it is. So I'm thinking, “OK, I can drop them a check in the mail for nearly a quarter million dollars or buy, say, a new house with no mortgage, or perhaps join a feed-the-hungry program and send a dollar a day to a starving kid for the next 547.95 years.” Tough choices for sure.

The kicker to all this was the last line of the message, which read, “Additionally, can you please tell me how you intend to use these materials?”

My reply very simply pointed out that I had requested similar information in other states and knew it should be a fairly straightforward process with costs that are minimal at best. I appreciated their interest in my intended use of this information, I stated, but since these are public records, that information is not required.

Ten days later, after a few more e-mails and counter-e-mails, I received the information for which I had asked. And the total cost? Nothing. Zero. No charge. Free.

But for every scare tactic or surly jerk in a records office there's often a counterbalance, a supremely nice and helpful person, like the librarian in the special collections section of the University of Utah library. My search for an obscure masters thesis written some twenty-five years earlier by a candidate now running for Congress led me to the librarian, who combed through library records until he found what I was looking for. And while it was being copied, he asked me to sit and talk to him about politics, about voter apathy and about his hopes for the country. Later, I received an e-mail from him that read, “It was really good to meet you. I hope your visit to the University of Utah's library was productive. I enjoyed our conversation. Have a good summer and let me know if you need anything from the library here.”

Such niceties, however, are rare and are certainly nowhere to be found at the government office in Missouri. For three days, an odd battle has continued between us and our disgruntled troll. But we are not to be defeated. Try as she might, she has been unable to throw up enough barriers to stop us from our intended mission. She has been unable to convince her supervisor to halt our request for the campaign finance reports we seek. And though the retrieval process has been slow, she is, piece by piece, bringing out the documents we've requested. Watching a hostile civil servant wheeling a dolly stacked with paper is, in a strange way, a rewarding moment.

“Do you think she hates us?” Alan asks.

“Pretty sure,” I say. “I mean, look at her.”

After three consecutive days of us, she no longer walks with the air of defiance we had witnessed that first afternoon. She only speaks when we have a question. She looks tired, and part of me feels bad that she has lost a battle she was so confident she would win. It's not easy being a government employee. For the most part, the work is tedious and the pay is low. And when two smart-assed strangers walk in and ruin half your week, the job likely seems that much harder.

For a moment I wonder what her life must be like beyond her bureaucratic day job. Does she have a family, and do they find her as troublesome as we do? Does she gripe about the amount of laundry she has to wash, screaming at her children, “I'd have to have a dolly to haul all those clothes to that washing machine!” But then, I think, maybe she's the exact opposite when she's at home. Maybe she's the sweetest, most caring and giving woman in her neighborhood. Maybe people come from miles around just to be in her presence and absorb some of her at-home charm.

“I kind of feel sorry for her,” I tell Alan.