1.
“How many Joe the Plumbers are there out there in Middle America?” Rush Limbaugh fumed on my car radio as I drove down Interstate 75 from the Detroit airport toward Toledo. “How many of you are tired of people running down the country?” For the last six years, he declared, the “drive-by media”—his term for the mainstream press—has tried to convince people “that this is a rotten country.” States like Ohio, he went on, were so foreign to elite journalists that they needed a visa to visit them.
As it happened, I was on my way to Ohio to interview people about their political views. It was mid-October, and I had decided to make the trip out of my own frustrations with the press. The coverage seemed so focused on the candidates and their campaigns and on the race between them that the concerns and attitudes of ordinary voters tended to get overlooked. I was especially exasperated by the readiness of TV pundits and Op-Ed writers to make sweeping statements about the state of the electorate without ever talking to an actual voter. I wanted to see if I could uncover some of the deeper, underlying currents in the body politic.
As my laboratory I had chosen a forty-mile strip of I-75 in northwestern Ohio. It offered a good cross-section of this key battleground state, stretching from an aging industrial city (Toledo), south to a college town (Bowling Green), down to a classic small town (Findlay). (See the map below.)
The region was home to hundreds of family farms producing corn and soybeans and to factories turning out everything from Wonder Bread to pumps, cranks, and cylinders for the auto plants of nearby Detroit.
At the same time, this region has been hard hit by both the recent financial crisis and the long and steady decline of its industrial base. According to a recent article in the Toledo Blade, Ohio during the Bush years has lost 315,000 manufacturing jobs, median income has dropped by more than 3 percent, and 330,000 more people have slipped into poverty. There have been sharp increases in bankruptcy filings, foreclosure rates, and visits to food banks. Today, a larger proportion of Ohioans live in poverty than at any time since the 1960s war on poverty.
In both 2000 and 2004, Ohio went narrowly for George W. Bush. To see how it might go in 2008, I focused on three counties: Lucas (home to Toledo), which was solidly blue; Hancock (home to Findlay), which was reliably red; and—sandwiched in between—Wood (home to Bowling Green), which swung back and forth. According to The Blade, Lucas was among the ten counties that fared the worst over the last eight years. The area was so coveted during the campaign that hardly a day went by that one or another of the presidential candidates or their running mates did not pass through. Shortly before my visit, Barack Obama had spent three days outside Toledo preparing for the third debate. It was during that stay that he had his ill-fated encounter with Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber. Wurzelbacher lived in Holland, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, and even as Limbaugh was extolling him, I was passing nearby.
Limbaugh remains an influential voice—an estimated 14 million Americans listen to him every week—and I pulled to the side of the road to jot down his tirade. What journalists “can’t get through their heads,” he raged, “is that Joe the Plumber is America. He’s Joe Sixpack.” He went on to attack Obama. For months, Limbaugh had been hammering away at him—for abetting terrorists, hating Israel, being corrupt, supporting socialism. Today, oddly, he was faulting him for his lack of passion. “He’s like a Stepford husband,” he said. “He’s cold enough to consort with terrorists. Cold enough to dismiss small-town America as ‘bitter clingers.’ Cold enough to take our guns away. Cold enough to take our money away.”
Such charges were standard fare on the toxic, overheated combine of right-wing talk radio, cable television programs, and Internet blogs that has so multiplied and festered in recent years. Americans who do not regularly tune in to it have little idea how nasty and venomous a campaign was waged there against Barack Obama. Day after day, night after night, a steady stream of poison was directed at him not only by Limbaugh but also by Sean Hannity, on his daily radio show and nightly Fox broadcast; by Bill O’Reilly, on Fox, the radio, and the Internet; by Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, and a legion of other ranting radio hosts; by Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, Monica Crowley, and their fellow pike-bearers in the blogosphere; by columnists like Jonah Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, Michael Barone (“The Coming Obama Thugocracy”), and Ann Coulter (“Obama’s Dimestore ‘Mein Kampf’ “), all joining together to produce firestorms of manufactured rage about Obama’s purported ties to Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad, and Karl Marx.
In one especially lunatic salvo, a conservative writer named Andy Martin claimed, in an hour-long special hosted by Sean Hannity on Fox News on October 5, that William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, was using Barack Obama as part of a radical political movement that would bring about a social revolution in America comparable to the ones in Castro’s Cuba and Chávez’s Venezuela. This allegation was then picked up and frequently repeated on conservative talk shows and blogs.
These outbursts were supplemented by a noxious barrage of e-mails, mass mailings, and robocalls claiming that Obama was pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, unpatriotic, a Muslim, a madrasa graduate, a black racist—even the Antichrist. Amounting to a six-month-long exercise in Swift Boating, these attacks, taken together, constituted perhaps the most vicious smear campaign ever mounted against an American politician.
Despite it all, however, Obama prevailed, winning 51 percent of Ohio’s votes to McCain’s 47 percent. How did he do it? Has negative campaigning lost its sting? How did Obama manage to carry Ohio? What does his victory say about the prospects for a long-term national political realignment?
2.
My base in Ohio was Perrysburg, an outer suburb of Toledo. I picked it largely because of its location, at the point where I-75, which connects Detroit to the Gulf Coast, intersects I-80/90, one of the country’s main east–west arteries—an area known as the crossroads of America. With a population of 17,000, Perrysburg has a storybook feel to it, with a charming main street lined with restaurants, pubs, a bake shop, a knitting shop, and a coffee shop named My Daily Grind. The town has excellent schools, a splendid public library, and a church seemingly every five hundred feet. A bedroom community for both Toledo to the north and Bowling Green to the south, its population is 95 percent white, with a median income of $75,000 per family. It’s the type of place Sarah Palin hailed as the “real America” and the type of affluent suburb Democrats have long sought to wrest from the Republicans.
On my first afternoon, I found a farmer’s market going up on the main street, featuring growers come from the countryside to sell their greens, gourds, dairy products, and baked goods. I began talking with a trim, well-dressed woman selling home-baked cookies. After working for years in the corporate world, Deb Normand told me, she had taken early retirement and was now happily baking away. She extolled the quality of life in Perrysburg, with its fine library and schools and people who “know one another and share recipes.” She also praised Sarah Palin. “I’m pro-life, pro-family,” she explained, adding that McCain’s selection of the Alaska governor “helped me feel better about the Republican ticket.” Very active in her church, Normand told me that she listens faithfully to Focus on the Family and its host, James Dobson, the national evangelical leader who declared that he would not vote for McCain as a matter of conscience but who then reversed course after he chose Palin as his running mate.
Walking down the street, I came upon a stall selling hydroponically grown lettuce, basil, and arugula. Arugula! The Republicans had blasted Obama for eating this “elite” green. Was its presence here a sign of liberalism? No. The farmer behind the counter was a lifelong Republican who “really liked Bush” and was now backing McCain. A self-described small businessman, he said he was worried that the Democrats would “raise my taxes and penalize me for being successful.” Obama, he added, was “too socialist.”
During my time in Perrysburg, I kept running into fervent conservatives. There was the nattily attired contractor at a high school football game who told me that life begins at conception, that the Iraqi people should be grateful for all America has done for them, and that Fox is the only “balanced” news network. There was the articulate youth pastor I spoke with at a local mega-church who identified himself as a “Milton Friedmanite” and who insisted that the less government, the better. And there was the regional sales rep I met at the bar of a Mexican restaurant who said he was going to vote for McCain but only by “holding my nose—he’s the most liberal Republican in history.” He said he used to listen to Rush Limbaugh but had given up on him for moving too far to the right. Yet he was now listening to Mark Levin, who was if anything even more extreme. As for Barack Obama, he said, “I don’t believe him when he says he’s a Christian”; some, he added, call him the Antichrist.
I did come across some Democrats while in Perrysburg. At My Daily Grind, I met Hank Holland, a retired locomotive engineer and former union member who told me that he was voting for Obama—and that he had plenty of company in Perrysburg. “For a long time I felt very lonely here,” he said, but over the years quite a few like-minded people had moved in. Still, he said, the town was somewhat unusual for that part of Ohio, sheltered as it was from the economic storms buffeting the state. Years ago, he noted, his wife’s family had moved to Rossford, a blue-collar suburb wedged between Perrysburg and Toledo. “It used to be a good, safe place to raise a family,” he said, “but it’s really taken a hit over the years, and now there’s nothing downtown, not even a grocery store.”
There are far more Rossfords than Perrysburgs in today’s Upper Midwest. Once upon a time Rossford was a proud glass-making center, dominated by the giant Libbey-Owens-Ford Company, which supplied windshields to the booming assembly lines of Detroit. In 1986, however, it was purchased by the UK-based Pilkington, which, through automation, cut the workforce sharply. Today, just 330 people work at the plant, compared to the 6,000 who once worked there and at another factory in Toledo. Rossford is full of the type of disgruntled working-class voters that Democrats hope to appeal to, and in an effort to find some of them I stopped by Rossford Lanes, the local bowling alley. It was a league night, and amid the hum of activity inside I managed to wedge in interviews with several bowlers between frames. They were filled with laments for what once was.
