The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (48 page)

Light rail looked like streetcars, slower and cheaper than regular rail or subway
trains. The plans called for forty-six miles of track, a single line from the airport
through Westshore to downtown Tampa and then up to the University of South Florida
and New Tampa. The tracks would follow some of the long-defunct tram routes that had
once crisscrossed Tampa. In 2010, the Hillsborough County Commission finally voted
to put a one-cent sales tax referendum on the November ballot.

Van Sickler had loved trains ever since he was a teenager riding the Cleveland Rapid
to Municipal Stadium and the Flats. He saw in light rail the answer to the sprawl
that had brought Tampa down. Building the tracks and stations would create jobs, but
more important, light rail would change the pattern of living. People would get off
the train and walk, and walking (without fear of traffic death) would change the urban
landscape, away from the shopping plaza, the parking lot, the gas station, and the
roadside sign to townhouses, cafés, bookstores, the kind of places that encouraged
pedestrians to linger, and their presence would spur other businesses to cluster,
and before long there would be density—Jane Jacobs’s heaven. Strangers would meet
in nontraumatic accidental encounters and exchange ideas. Tampa would become the magnet
for educated young people, tech start-ups, and corporate headquarters that its counterparts
with commuter rail had already become, putting the economy on a sounder foundation
than real estate had. The center of gravity would move back to the city, away from
Country Walk and Carriage Pointe, which would fade into irrelevance. If there was
an answer to the fatal growth machine, it was rail.

*   *   *

Karen Jaroch grew up in Tampa, the daughter of a retired military officer. When she
was sixteen, in 1980, she got up the nerve to hold a sign at the corner of Westshore
and Kennedy for Reagan and Paula Hawkins, a Republican who became Florida’s first
woman senator in the conservative sweep that year. That was Karen’s last public political
act for almost thirty years. She married a fellow student at the University of South
Florida who was the most liberal person she’d ever met, and at first they couldn’t
talk politics, but over the years, in her quiet, reasonable way, she brought him around
to her side. They were both trained as engineers and they lived next to a golf course
in New Tampa, an unincorporated boomburg on the northern outskirts of the city, and
raised four kids while Karen became a stay-at-home mom, a churchgoer, a PTA member,
and in every way an ordinary middle-class woman, down to her geographically indeterminate
middle American accent.

She had a square face and wore her dark hair in teased bangs, eighties-style. She
always voted Republican, though she didn’t like what Bush did with the Medicare prescription
drug bill and No Child Left Behind—too much government. She and her husband always
lived within their means, owned a $250,000 home, and when a couple she met at a dinner
party making far less than her husband said that theirs was worth $700,000, she was
appalled. “They were trying to make a buck off the bubble. They were going to live
in it a year and pay interest only. They had all these grandiose plans, and here we
were doing everything right. You knew it was trouble.” She blamed the government for
that, too—not deregulation, Wall Street, or mortgage lenders. The Community Reinvestment
Act of 1992 forced the banks to change their rules and give subprime loans to unqualified
people so that more Americans could be homeowners. It was government driving the banks,
not the other way around. Why would the banks want to lose money?

Still, Karen was never active in politics, until 2008. At the beginning of the year
she got her stimulus check from Bush—six hundred dollars—and she thought, “What is
this? Why are they sending this off to everybody? It’s not the role of government
to take money and redistribute it.” But she stayed out of the election, because John
McCain didn’t interest her. Then came Sarah Palin in August. Palin electrified Karen.
“I could relate to her in a number of ways—her spunk, conveying the views that I held
and saying it and not being ashamed of it. She was the same age as me, she was married
at the same age as me, her kids, being on the PTA, the way she viewed economics.”
Karen was a vegetarian, but it didn’t bother her that Palin liked to hunt as long
as she ate the meat. Palin wasn’t an elite—that was what Karen could identify with.
Tampa was under the control of a powerful business elite, people like Al Austin, who
built Westshore, people who had been making the same mistakes over and over with too
much government. Karen’s first political experience had been Reagan, an outsider who
came in and bucked the system. Like Palin. That was what Karen was looking for.

The bank bailout, then Obama’s stimulus package, Cash for Clunkers, the auto bailout—spending
was out of control, and it seemed like big business was in collusion with big government.
Someone was making money, and it wasn’t the little guy. Karen didn’t know that a third
of the stimulus was tax cuts, and she didn’t need to, because she was against it as
soon as she heard about “shovel-ready projects.” People like her who had done what
they were supposed to were being asked to bail out the freewheeling spenders, again
and again, with no end. Judging by his actions, Obama didn’t believe in the American
ideal that hard work pays off and you get to keep what you earn. His communistic father,
the one he wrote a whole book about, and his radical mentors painted other ideas into
Obama’s psyche.

Karen began to fear that her America, the country she’d grown up in, would not be
available for her children. One day, she was helping her son study for his midterm
exam, which was on ancient Egypt, and it got her thinking. At the beginning, everybody
farmed the land along the Nile and gave rice to the Pharaohs, but then the Pharaohs
wanted to build pyramids for their own glory, and they started taxing the people.
The same thing happened in Rome. The same thing was happening in the United States.
The country was in decline, and her kids might not have her opportunities.

Karen was a longtime listener to Glenn Beck—he got his break on talk radio in Tampa
back in 2000—and because he was now saying so much of what she felt, she DVRed his
new TV program on Fox News. The Glenn Beck show caught fire right after the election
of Barack Obama, almost three million people tuning in every afternoon. In early February
2009, a few weeks after the inauguration, Beck told his viewers to meet one another:
“There are more of you out there than you know.” Hearing that inspired Karen to spend
ten dollars and set up an online meet-up site to organize the first gathering of the
Tampa 9/12 Project. Beck’s crusade was based on nine principles, such as “America
Is Good” and “I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to,”
and twelve values, including Reverence and Hope.

On March 13, 2009, people gathered for viewing parties in Hebron, Kentucky, and Golden
Valley, Arizona, and other towns all across the country. Eighty people met at the
Tampa Ale House. It was five in the afternoon and the Glenn Beck show was on. There
was a video about September 11, 2001, the bravery and unity that followed the attacks,
and then Glenn Beck was standing backstage of his set, with his blond brush cut, pinstriped
suit, and sneakers, close to the camera, his face filling the frame, choking back
tears. “Are you ready to be that person you were that day after 9/11, on 9/12? I told
you for weeks, ‘You’re not alone.’” Beck looked upward and extended his arms. “I’m
turning into a frickin’ televangelist!” and his voice was breaking, his eyes puffy,
his features swelling with the hangdog hurt of the thousand failures and grievances
that he carried for the millions of people watching him. He wiped away a tear. “I’m
sorry. I just love my country, and I fear for it. It seems like the voices of our
leaders and special interests and the media, they’re surrounding us—it’s sounds intimidating!
But you know what?
Pull away the curtain.
You’ll realize, there isn’t anybody there! It’s just a few people that are just pressing
the buttons, and their voices are actually
really weak
.” He leaned in closer and his eyes went hard. “The truth is, they don’t surround
us. We surround
them
. This is
our
country.”

The strangers who gathered at the Tampa Ale House didn’t watch the whole show. They
were more interested in talking to one another. Karen had always been shy, right through
adulthood—just taking on the school spelling bee for the PTA scared her—but now she
found herself growing bold. “We all knew each other, in a way,” she said. “We didn’t
know each other, but we all felt connected. We had never had a voice and we were starting
to create our own voice.” They were people like her—not country club Republicans,
just people who felt something was wrong. And she had brought them together. That
was the beginning of Karen Jaroch’s life in politics.

Summer brought Obamacare and a nationwide rebellion. On August 6, Tampa’s Democratic
congresswoman, Kathy Castor, held a town hall meeting in a room that was far too small
for the fifteen hundred people trying to get in. Things descended into chaos when
members of the 9/12 Project, enraged by Castor, enraged by Obamacare, enraged that
the doors to the jammed room had been shut on hundreds of protesters, started shouting,
“You work for us! You work for us! Tyranny! Tyranny!” until Castor gave up trying
to speak and had to be escorted out. Karen was there, and the next afternoon she received
a call from a producer at CNN. Could she get downtown to appear that night on Campbell
Brown’s show? Three hours later she was sitting alone in a studio with a satellite
link, the voice in her earpiece out of sync with the small video screen just beneath
the black hole of the camera where she tried to keep her gaze, feeling like a deer
in the headlights.

Campbell started in on her. “I’m all for civic engagement, but explain to me what
the point is of shouting down your congresswoman, of yelling at them. What does that
really get you?” Karen tried to answer, but Campbell interrupted. “I’ll let you finish,
but nobody was being heard there, that was total chaos, everyone yelling.”

“People are frustrated,” Karen said, bangs falling over her left eye. Her head shared
a split screen with Campbell’s, or occupied one-eighth of the screen alongside the
three pundits—a Republican strategist, a cable analyst, and a Web writer—invited on
the show to talk about the incident. “Middle America feels disenfranchised. We are
not being listened to. Our congresspeople are rushing things through,” she said. “People
are scared they’re going to lose their health care. It’s going to create huge deficits
that are going to outlast my children.”

Campbell asked who her leaders were.

“We’re grassroots,” said Karen, soft-spoken but standing her ground. “We’re local
organizations. I’m not getting a dime from anybody.” She felt that Campbell was twisting
things against the Tea Party, making it seem as if they’d been rowdier than they were.
It didn’t matter—the people she knew got their news elsewhere. Afterward, her friends
in the movement congratulated her on standing up for the forgotten Americans and making
the mainstream media look biased and stupid.

Then came rail. Nothing Obama and Congress did got Karen as energized as the proposal
for a taxpayer-subsidized light rail system in Tampa. The issue took over her life
for the entire year 2010. She started a group called “No Tax for Tracks” and boned
up by reading an antirail report from the Heritage Foundation. She argued that the
system would cost too much, wouldn’t create jobs, wouldn’t have riders, had failed
elsewhere, would burden the area with decades of debt. When a fact threatened to undercut
one line of argument, she would switch to another, for Karen’s real objection to the
referendum went far beyond dollars per mile.

In the nineteenth century, rail was the future of transportation, the engine of American
wealth. In the twentieth century it was a boring topic for public policy and budget
experts. In 2010 it symbolized everything that the American right feared and hated—big
government, taxes and spending, European-style socialism, a society in which people
were forced to share public services with strangers and pay for them. Rail was a threat
to the lifestyle of New Tampa, where the line was supposed to end. In New Tampa you
drove to the supermarket once a week (instead of walking or taking the bus every day
like in the city), then loaded up the minivan at Home Depot on weekends. Karen gave
speeches decrying the influence of urban planners and warning against Agenda 21, a
nonbinding United Nations “sustainable development” resolution from 1992 that many
Tea Partiers regarded as a Trojan horse for world government, a danger to American
sovereignty, and an ominous threat to its single-family homes, paved roads, and golf
courses. The fact that President Obama made intercity high-speed rail a centerpiece
of his stimulus bill only confirmed their worst suspicions. So streetcars were absorbed
into the national fury and became the Tampa Tea Party’s signature issue in 2010, as
tax cuts and abortion had been to earlier generations of conservatives.

Once, backstage before a televised debate with Tampa’s mayor, Pam Iorio, who was the
main political force behind light rail, Karen mentioned that her husband had recently
been laid off from his job as a civil engineer. They were about to lose their health
benefits and were going through a tough time.

“Karen,” the mayor said, “won’t this initiative put him back to work?”

“No, your plan isn’t going to create any jobs,” Karen said. It was a sacred principle,
and she wouldn’t let her family’s misfortune weaken her. The battle against rail felt
to Karen like David against Goliath. There were a lot of powerful forces on the other
side—the Chamber of Commerce, the South Tampa elite, the editorial page of the
St. Petersburg Times
, and Commissioner Mark Sharpe—and rail proponents spent more than a million dollars.
On Karen’s side there was another tireless Tea Party organizer named Sharon Calvert,
whose Dodge Durango was festooned with bumper stickers declaring
DON’T TREAD ON ME
and
TAKE AMERICA BACK!
There was David Caton, an ex-pornography-cocaine-alcohol-Quaaludes-Ativan-and-masturbation
addict turned Christian crusader against porn, homosexuality, and rail. And there
was Sam Rashid, a Karachi-born businessman in Brandon, with the forbidding stare of
a professional poker player (which he was), who funded right-wing political candidates,
including Mark Sharpe—until Sharpe turned sellout, liar, and RINO by supporting the
rail tax, an unforgivable breach, whereupon Rashid vowed to punish him by having him
defeated in the midterms, along with his beloved rail.