The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (50 page)

“Nobody was getting converted,” he later said. “This was about endurance.”

The town halls appeared on TV news, and they gave the impression that everyone in
the district opposed health care reform, even though many people who attended (and
many who didn’t) were in favor or undecided—but theirs were the quieter voices, and
sometimes when they spoke up they were shouted down, and as the month went on, the
people with quieter voices, having watched the raucous earlier meetings on TV, decided
not to bother coming, so that by the end of August the Tea Party in Perriello’s district
believed that the congressman was ignoring nearly unanimous opposition.

The spectacle of the town halls was so ugly that the old civic groups, the Rotary
Clubs and garden clubs, nonpartisan pillars of the community, stopped issuing courtesy
invitations to their congressman to come meet them for fear of being embarrassed by
protests. And Perriello also noticed that the traditional trade associations, like
the ones for small businessmen and community bankers, which used to give their members
useful fact-based information and explain how they were negotiating the best deal
possible with the government, now wilted under the popular heat and refused to play
ball.

By the end of that first summer of the Obama administration, one could have the impression
that most of the country was in open revolt against a president who had won a resounding
victory just nine months earlier.

Perriello cast a difficult vote for health care, and after the bill passed in March
2010, a Tea Party activist posted what was supposed to be Perriello’s home address
outside Charlottesville, urging people to go make their views known. It turned out
to be the address of his brother, his brother’s wife, and their four children, and
the next day someone cut the family’s gas line.

Perriello began to feel that the first politician to inspire him was also leaving
him hanging out to dry. On the one hand, Obama had “an unbelievable willingness to
do what I got into politics to do, which is to take on the problems that neither party
has had the guts to touch for my entire life.” On the other hand, the president spent
his first year trying to cut deals with Republicans who were never going to give an
inch, and he went out of his way to let bankers discredited by the financial crisis
avoid taking a fall. The president talked about “a new era of responsibility,” but
it didn’t seem to apply to those guys. The Obama team was full of unimaginative advisers
who were too friendly to Wall Street and didn’t know how to create jobs on Main Street.
“If you only know other people on Wall Street who make six or seven figures, all you’re
trying to do is get back to the nineties,” Perriello said. “Well, in the nineties
people in my district were losing a crapload of jobs.” The elites were biased toward
other elites, even after they had failed massively. “Empires decline when elites become
irresponsible.” Obama was a progressive insider, not a populist outsider, and Perriello
got no cover from the administration when he went out to face his struggling, irate,
misinformed constituents.

The din of shouting in town halls and on AM radio, cable TV, and the Internet; the
hostile and anonymous commercials filling the airwaves, paid for by the coal and insurance
companies and the Koch brothers; the entanglement of cash, interest groups, and spinelessness
on Capitol Hill; the strangely ineffectual Obama White House; the ongoing depression
in the Piedmont: amid all this, who would know or care about Red Birch, and Perriello’s
efforts on its behalf?

Six Republicans challenged him. The winner of the primary was a go-along-to-get-along
state senator named Robert Hurt. One day in August, three months before the midterms,
Perriello began vomiting and couldn’t stop. For several nights he got no sleep. After
two years of coffee and Diet Coke all day, and scotch or Jack Daniel’s in the evenings,
and never enough water, he was completely dehydrated.

November came. On the day before the election, Perriello was frantically campaigning
alongside Senator Mark Warner in Martinsville. At the Sirloin House the two politicians
went table to table greeting diners, some of whom didn’t want to look up from their
cheese fries. Dean Price was there—he’d shown up to say hi and good luck—and he and
Perriello exchanged a hug.

“You’ve put up with a lot, I’ve put up with a lot,” Perriello told him, “but we’re
on the right path, the path of righteousness! You know I believe in what you’re doing,
keeping that money in the community instead of sending it to petrodictators.”

The news cameras were rolling, and Dean picked up his cue. “It’s what I call the leaky
bucket effect. Ninety cents on every dollar of oil and eighty-six cents at the big-box
stores leaves the community.”

Perriello lowered his voice. “Once this craziness is over in a couple of weeks, let’s
sit down over a beer.”

There wasn’t time to say more. Perriello was on his way to the next joint—Pigs-R-Us—and
the day had barely begun.

The next day a woman named Lorna voted at the Ridgeway Ruritan Club, a one-story cinder
block building on a wooded side street near the speedway south of Martinsville. Then
she positioned herself on the sidewalk with a sign that said
HURT
. Lorna was a retired schoolteacher, about seventy, short and round inside a green
woolen coat with a peaked hood. The rims of her sunglasses had a leopard-skin pattern,
and under heavy lipstick her mouth was tight.

“This country is not socialist, we are founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” Lorna
fairly spat, “and I will riot in the street if I have to. I have never been so ashamed
of the way that man has diminished the presidency. He doesn’t dress properly, he calls
certain people enemies, and he talks about certain networks. He is just what he is,
a Chicago agitator. He does not have presidential qualities, he doesn’t represent
all the people. We had statesmen—now all we have are politicians. I have never seen
a president who has tried to change this country—this country does not need changing—fundamentally
transform this country and we don’t need that from a Chicago agitator.”

Lorna listened to talk radio and watched Fox News because the others were so obviously
biased—that David Broder column yesterday, saying Obama was so much smarter than everyone
else! And then there was Al Gore, living in his mansion and flying on his private
jet, yet Lorna was supposed to pay everything she had in taxes after she and her husband
never went on a cruise and didn’t buy extravagant cars and saved every penny he made
working as a supervisor at the DuPont plant so they could enjoy life together and
he could golf after retirement, but then they never had the chance. If he could hear
her running off her mouth like this, he would turn over in his grave and say, “Lorna,
shut up,” but now that she was retired from the school she could say what she wanted,
and she had a lot on her mind. “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to
tell me I can’t eat french fries or Coca-Cola—no way! They want to tell me what to
think. I have thought for myself all my life and I’ve done okay. I came from nothing,
and I have never been so despondent as I am now. You can’t be the super force around
the world if the economy is weak. I just hope and pray that this country can get back
on the right track.”

Lorna’s fury was ebbing. She hadn’t mentioned her congressman once.

That night, Perriello and his family and staff waited for the results in the offices
of a small financial services company, above a wine bar in historic downtown Charlottesville,
the prosperous apex of the Fifth District.

“All right, everybody,” Perriello called out, “we outperformed in Danville by a thousand
votes!” A cheer went up. At eight o’clock half the precincts had reported and Perriello
was trailing 53 to 45 percent, but those were mainly rural areas. Charlottesville
started coming in, but Hurt’s lead held. Perriello’s press secretary was trying to
keep the networks from making a call. Perriello gave a wry smile. “We’re surging back!
Not really. But we’re doing better. Let’s keep closing that number.” At eight thirty
Henry County finally reported, and Perriello got killed there. Red Birch hadn’t made
a dime’s worth of difference.

He lost, 51 to 47 percent. He came closer than other Virginia Democrats who were defeated,
including long-serving ones, including ones who had taken safer votes. The aide who
had traveled the district in early 2009 looking for projects to fund told Perriello,
“We hit a gale force wind.” Across the country it was a rout for the president’s party.

Perriello gathered his family together. Some of them were crying. He was the most
cheerful person in the room.

“I’ll tell you this—I don’t know why, but I feel great. We left it all on the table.
Not everyone who lost tonight fought for forty million Americans to get health insurance
coverage and cover preexisting conditions. Not everyone who lost tonight came up with
a national energy strategy. This is the way we do things—high risk, high reward, leave
it all on the table.” Perriello was smiling. “I kind of feel a weight lifted.”

*   *   *

Once, when Ryan was around thirteen, Dean took him to the big Labor Day flea market
and gun show in Hillsville, Virginia. On Dean’s recommendation, Ryan spent his money
on a bubble gum machine. The idea was to put it in the convenience store next to the
biodiesel refinery in Bassett and start making a little money. “It was sort of a lesson
to teach him,” Dean said. “The reason most people stay poor, in my opinion, is they
don’t know the difference between an asset and a liability. Most people thought their
homes were an asset, but they were a liability. The best way to tell the difference
is if something puts money in your pocket, it’s an asset, and if it takes money out
of your pocket, it’s a liability, very simply. Buying a bubble gum machine and getting
a return on that asset I thought was a very valuable lesson.”

The next year, when Dean’s truck stop company was liquidated and he lost the store,
the bubble gum machine had to be taken home and put away in a closet. Dean hated for
Ryan to lose his investment that way. But Napoleon Hill said that with every adversity
there was a seed of equal benefit.

Dean was looking for that benefit.

He felt useless around the refinery. His shares in Red Birch Energy had been diluted
to almost nothing, and Gary and Flo were running the place. Dean told Gary that his
whole approach was wrong—Gary was trying to make a lot of money fast instead of building
up the business. They were losing potential customers for licensing the Red Birch
model because Gary was quoting exorbitant prices—it had happened with a businessman
up in New Jersey. “A pig gets fat,” Dean told Gary, “and a hog gets slaughtered.”

“What did you say?” snapped Gary, who was quite overweight. He was now on the hook
for the entire debt of the company, nearly a million dollars, which obliged him to
sign over the deed to his house and boat as collateral. As far as Gary was concerned,
Dean was always willing to spend anybody’s money but his own. The third partner, Rocky
Carter, wanted to be bought out because his construction business had taken a big
hit with the housing bust, but Gary couldn’t afford to pay him off. Debt had all three
of them entangled like snakes.

Gary and Dean argued constantly. “I don’t like you anymore,” Gary told Dean one day.
“You’re not the person I started with.” He began to question whether Dean was mentally
stable, insinuated that Dean might end up like his father. That pissed Dean off more
than anything else. He was down and his partner was undermining him.

In the winter of 2011 everything started to unravel at once.

First came the tax case. Henry County, Virginia, had indicted Dean the previous September
for failing to remit almost ten thousand dollars in meals taxes. On January 27, 2011,
he was found guilty of a misdemeanor and ordered to pay a twenty-five-hundred-dollar
fine and a hundred dollars in court costs on top of the outstanding taxes. That same
winter, Red Birch was audited by the IRS. Because Dean was on the board, with his
tax liability, the company’s permit to make fuel was pulled, and Red Birch went out
of business for seven weeks.

In March, Dean resigned his office, relinquished his remaining stock in exchange for
ten dollars, and gave up his paycheck. The IRS lifted its hold, and the refinery started
up again without him. That was the end for Dean Price and the biodiesel company that
had taken from him its name and inspiration. Not long after his departure, a notice
appeared on the Red Birch Energy website. It said, “Recent change in ownership and
management,” which linked to a “press release” that announced: “
Dean Price
,
a former co-owner of Red Birch Energy, Incorporated,
is no longer associated with Red Birch Energy and has not been a part of the company
since April 2011 in any way.
”

Yet Gary continued to get wind that Dean was talking about Red Birch and about himself
as part of it. In July, Gary sent him a letter.

Dean,

It is really difficult for me to get to this point in our relationship and write this
letter to you, but you have chosen this path for me to take and leave me with no choice.
I have made several attempts to get you to communicate with me to no avail.

I realize your life is upside down right now and I really hate adding to that burden
but again, I have no other choice but to come to the following conclusion.

The conclusion is that you are out there representing RBE as you see fit and that
will not work for us …
I’m truly sorry, but I have to insist that you cease from representing Red Birch Energy
in any way going forward.

Dean, as you know, we have been providing Health Care Insurance for you and your family.
As you will not be involved with us any more, we will have to cease providing that
coverage to you effective September 1, 2011.