The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (10 page)

And on the morning of December 5, 1985, during a show about incest, she stood by with
the microphone as a white, late-middle-aged, conservatively dressed, nearly inaudible
woman in the audience confessed that her son was her father’s child, and the young,
dark, heavy, puff-haired host with the giant bronze earrings suddenly asked for a
commercial break, hid her own crumpling face with her hand, cried into the woman’s
shoulder, wrapped her arms around the woman for comfort, and said, “The same thing
happened to me.” She had been molested by various male relatives almost continuously
from ages nine to fourteen. (Five years later, the world learned that at fourteen
Oprah had borne a son who died after five weeks. Her drug-addicted sister sold the
story to a tabloid for nineteen thousand dollars.)

Letters poured in, the switchboard was overloaded, ratings soared. She had broken
the silence for millions of women, and in that moment Oprah Winfrey became Oprah—Everywoman
battling and overcoming victimhood, girlfriend of everyone watching the show. Fame
and money were not enough: to be Oprah, she had to find the secret path to the hidden
wound inside every member of her vast and isolated audience. Then her greatness could
be theirs, too. Her material and spiritual success were not a privilege that set her
apart but the mark of triumph over suffering that connected her to every one of them.
She invited them into her life through her public struggles with the pounds, which
she kept taking off and putting on again, like so many women (she ate the way she
spent and gave, impulsively and lavishly), and the wedding to Stedman Graham, postponed
year after year (but he was perfect for her: tall, handsome, light-skinned, boring,
a corporate marketing executive, author of
You Can Make It Happen
and
Build Your Own Life Brand
).

Her bond with her viewers was unbreakable. Many of them had never had a black person
in their living room before, except on a sitcom, and she made them less lonely, more
tolerant and open, more curious about books and ideas, while they made her unimaginably
rich. As she got bigger and bigger, from $100 million a year to $260 million, from
$725 million net worth to $1.5 billion, from “Unforgivable Acts Between Couples” and
“Women Who Are Allergic to Their Husbands” to “Change Your Life” and “The Seat of
the Soul,” from Laurie the abuse victim to Maya Angelou the abuse victim, she never
lost the love of her audience. As she spent more and more of her on-camera time with
her friends Tom and Julia and Diane and Toni and Maria and Arnold and Barack and Michelle,
celebrities celebrating celebrity, her most loyal friends were still her seven million
day-in-day-out viewers. As the end of a typical day had her flying back from Rancho
La Puerta to Chicago on her private jet (“It’s great to have a private jet. Anyone
that tells you that having your own private jet isn’t great is lying”) to attend Stedman’s
book party on the top floor of Michael Jordan’s restaurant, arriving in a state of
rage because the
National Enquirer
had just published unauthorized photos of the ornate marble, satin, velvet, and silk
furnishings in her lakefront condo, her most ardent supporters remained the aging
lower-middle-class women from Rockford and Eau Claire who lined up for hours outside
Harpo Studios on the Near West Side.

They had things that she didn’t—children, debts, spare time. They consumed the products
that she advertised but would never buy—Maybelline, Jenny Craig, Little Caesar’s,
IKEA. As their financial troubles grew, she would thrill them by selecting one of
them and wiping out her debts on the air or buying her a house, or ramping up Oprah’s
Favorite Things at Christmas to give away luxury items like diamond watches and Tory
Burch gray flannel totes. But being instructed in Oprah’s magical thinking (vaccinations
cause autism; positive thoughts lead to wealth, love, and success), and watching Oprah
always doing more, owning more, not all her viewers began to live their best life.
They didn’t have nine houses, or maybe any house; they couldn’t call John Travolta
their friend; the laws of the universe left them vulnerable to mugging; they were
not always attuned to their divine self; they were never all that they could be. And
since there was no random suffering in life, Oprah left them with no excuse.

JEFF CONNAUGHTON

In 1987 the revolving door that was supposed to send Wall Street bankers into high-level
positions at Treasury landed Connaughton a junior staff job on the Biden for President
campaign, at twenty-four thousand dollars a year. He traded his brand-new Peugeot
for his parents’ 1976 Chevy Malibu because he could no longer afford the lease payments.
That was all right with him.

His first assignment, before he’d even left Atlanta, was to find twenty people in
Georgia to write the campaign a two-hundred-fifty-dollar check. Do that in twenty
states, and the candidate qualified for federal matching funds. It was one of the
hardest things Connaughton had ever done, but the fear of failing spurred him, and
he begged everyone he knew in Georgia to write a check. He succeeded, and in the process
he learned how fundraising worked: you didn’t have to convince anyone that Biden was
going to win, or even that he was right on the issues—only that
you
needed this, as a favor. “Do it for me.” What mattered was who did the calling. But
when he asked the ex-girlfriend who’d been a member of Phi Mu and now lived in Georgia,
she refused: she’d heard, thirdhand, that Biden “would sell his own grandmother to
be president.”

It was the first post-Reagan election. Like every campaign, Biden’s was chaotic and
sleepless, fueled by improvisation and junk food: we don’t know what you’ll be doing,
just show up in three days. In March, Connaughton rented a room outside Washington
in Alexandria, Virginia, in the house of an official with the potato chip trade association,
only to learn upon arrival that he would not be working in the campaign’s Washington
offices, but out of Wilmington, Delaware. Biden for President occupied a huge empty
store in a downscale office complex on the edge of town, with dozens of desks stretching
out across a blue carpet. The path to the White House had been climbed from less glamorous
base camps. Connaughton’s success at dialing up checks in Georgia meant that he would
be a fundraiser. It sure as hell wasn’t politics as he’d imagined it the night of
Biden’s speech in Tuscaloosa, but he was determined to be a good soldier. “Just tell
me where to go,” he said. He was given a desk and began working twelve-hour days,
commuting two hours each way from Virginia, eventually spending Tuesday through Thursday
nights at a Days Inn near the office.

Connaughton worked under Ted Kaufman, Biden’s veteran chief of staff, an El Greco
beanpole with an elongated jaw and a dome of curly hair. Kaufman stood in the innermost
Biden circle, and when the senator’s sister, Valerie, introduced Kaufman to Jeff,
she said, “You’re lucky to be working for Ted, he’s so close to Joe he doesn’t have
to worry.” Connaughton wished he’d had the presence of mind to ask, “Do people worry?
Could you please elaborate on that in a couple of paragraphs?” The implication was
pretty clear: “You, on the other hand, ought to be really worried because you don’t
have any kind of relationship with Biden, and Bidenland is strewn with mines, some
marked, others not.”

Kaufman and Connaughton hit it off. They were both MBAs and decided to run the fundraising
operation like a company. Connaughton helped draft the strategic plan, constructing
an organizational pyramid of captains and subcaptains. The more money the subcaptains
raised, the more access to Biden their captain received. Connaughton kept track of
the contest and decided who got a lapel pin, who got dinner with the candidate. He
also set up a system for contributors. If one of them wanted to see Biden, he needed
to donate at least a thousand dollars. Connaughton would tell big-time donors, “For
fifty thousand dollars I can get you dinner with the senator at his house. For twenty-five
thousand I can get you dinner with the senator, but not at his house.” And some of
the check writers would cough up the extra twenty-five just to be able to tell their
friends, “I had dinner with Joe at his house in Wilmington.”

After Gary Hart was caught fooling around with Donna Rice on board the
Monkey Business
and became the year’s first victim of scandal and media frenzy, Biden became a strong
contender for the nomination. Connaughton worked all day at his desk in the giant
blue-carpeted room, took no breaks, drove back to Alexandria at midnight, fell into
bed exhausted, then woke up in the morning and headed back to Wilmington to do it
again, thinking: “I am living my purpose right now.”

One day that spring, Biden showed up at the Wilmington office, looking great in a
turtleneck and aviator sunglasses. He greeted the campaign workers—many of whom had
been with him since he was first elected to the Senate at the age of twenty-nine,
in 1972—and gave them a brief pep talk about the progress of the campaign. It was
six years since Connaughton had last seen Biden in Alabama, all those unanswered letters
ago. If Biden recognized him, he gave no indication. As the senator turned to go,
Connaughton imagined running to catch up, standing in his path, declaring: “I invited
you down to the University of Alabama three times. The last time, I promised you I’d
help you become president. Here I am.” Instead, he went back to his desk.

Connaughton rose in the ranks, putting together fifty-thousand-dollar fundraisers
with trial lawyers and the Jewish community in southern cities. He started traveling
with the candidate, and if the plane was delayed, or if on arrival Biden talked too
long or not long enough, Connaughton caught the flak from donors. He and Biden never
spoke.

One day, on a flight to a fundraiser in Houston, Connaughton was told to brief Biden
about the event. He carried the briefing book up the aisle to the first-class cabin
where Biden was sitting with his wife, Jill.

“Senator, can I speak with you for a minute?” Connaughton asked.

“Just gimme what you got,” Biden said, hardly looking up.

Biden apparently didn’t remember Alabama. Long after Connaughton went to work for
him, his boss would butcher the original connection, saying, “I’m glad I met you when
you were in law school all those years ago.” Biden always had time for strangers,
especially if they bore any relation to Delaware. If you were family, or part of a
small circle of long-serving aides, like Kaufman, and you “bled Biden blue,” as the
senator liked to say, then he was intensely loyal. But if you just worked your ass
off for him for a few years, he ignored you, intimidated you, sometimes humiliated
you, took no interest in your advancement, and never learned your name. “Hey, Chief,”
he’d say, or “How’s it going, Cap’n,” unless he was ticked off at you, in which case
he’d employ one of his favorite terms for male underlings: “dumb fuck.” “Dumb fuck
over here didn’t get me the briefing materials I needed.” It was both noun and adjective:
“Is the event leader a Democrat or a Republican? Or are you too dumb fuck to know?”

Connaughton was doing the hard, thankless, essential work of soliciting money, and
for this he was forever stigmatized, because Biden hated fundraising, the drudgery
and compromises it entailed. Some of his colleagues seemed to spend half their lives
dialing for dollars—Alan Cranston, the California senator, made call after call soliciting
five hundred bucks while pedaling an Exercycle at the gym—but Biden hardly ever called
anyone. As a senator from a state the size of some counties, he’d never had to raise
much money, and he didn’t adjust well to the financial pressures of a presidential
campaign. He resented any demands placed on him by the people who helped him raise
money and the people who wrote checks, as if he couldn’t stand owing them. He didn’t
hang out with the permanent class in Washington, but left his Capitol office every
evening, walked across Massachusetts Avenue to Union Station, and took Amtrak home
to his family in Wilmington. Remaining Ordinary Joe became a point of aggressive pride.
He was as incorruptible as he was ungrateful.

In Washington, elected officials considered themselves a higher breed. They were “principals,”
had shown the moxie and endured the humiliation of standing before the public, and
in their eyes, staff were a lower form of human beings—parasites that attached themselves
to the front man for the ride. Connaughton knew that he had nothing to teach Joe Biden,
a political natural who had been doing this for almost two decades, with a fingertip
feel for what the American people wanted. Connaughton was thoroughly expendable, unless
he could prove himself a workhorse.

“He saw the uncertainty in my eyes,” Connaughton later said. “I was so new to it.
I had been trained on Wall Street and I was coming into a completely different world.
I had an outsized view of our relationship because I’d waited so long to join him.
From his perspective, I was just one more guy who’d shown up to work on his campaign.
I was attracted to power. There were not a whole lot of issues in the forefront of
my mind. I wanted to be part of a small group of people that moves into the West Wing
on Inauguration Day to run the country. That’s the ultimate game in Washington. And
after his campaign failed, I was lost.”

In early September, Connaughton took a break from the campaign to attend the Alabama–Penn
State game. He was driving through the Pennsylvania countryside when a news bulletin
came on the radio station: Biden, at a debate in Iowa, had plagiarized a speech by
a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock, even stealing Kinnock’s identity as
a descendant of coal miners.

As an isolated case it would have been a story without legs. But having already brought
down Hart, the media—Maureen Dowd and E. J. Dionne in the
Times
, Eleanor Clift in
Newsweek
—smelled another scandal and they competed to dig up other Biden faults: lines lifted
from Hubert Humphrey and RFK; a badly footnoted law school essay that resulted in
a failing grade; exaggerated claims about his past. Then an incident recorded by C-SPAN
in a New Hampshire resident’s kitchen surfaced. Biden had agreed to wear a mike for
an entire, unedited campaign event—a first in political history. He was brilliant
for eighty-nine of the ninety minutes, but he had spent his whole career saying too
much, and just before the end, a voter asked him about his law school grades. Biden
snapped, “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” then made at least
three false statements about his education while taking the guy’s head off.