Bush Like Me

I arrived in early June, moved into a cheap hotel, called the local Republican office and offered to volunteer. They told me to come on by. So I went, arriving early on a Tuesday morning at their small strip-mall office on the east side of town.

My cover story was a travesty, an idiotic tissue of halfhearted lies. I said I was a New York City schoolteacher named Tom Hamill, in Orlando to spend a summer with a girlfriend who was from the area. It was the best thing I could come up with to explain my Northern accent, my lack of local connections and all that free time.

The story's only saving grace was that the truth was so much more unbelievable. Republicans are paranoid enough to expect a mole from the Kerry campaign, but I was far worse than that -- a dissolute, drug-abusing anarchist who reads the battle diaries of Vietnamese generals on rainy days, roots for Russia at the Olympics and once published an article titled "God Can Suck My Dick." I was, in short, the most offensive individual who could conceivably be planted in the campaign of George W. Bush. I was tempted to feel guilty about this. But in the end I figured that it was only fair. Since John Ashcroft has made it easy for FBI agents to infiltrate anti-war groups, it seemed to make sense that an anti-war journalist should infiltrate Ashcroft's party.

Orlando is the crucial city along a stretch of interstate called the I-4 corridor, a swath of central Florida running from Daytona Beach to Tampa. Home to 3.7 million of Florida's 9.3 million registered voters, it has the bulk of the state's undecided voters and is therefore the key to winning Florida's twenty-seven electoral votes. When I got there, I expected a teeming, ultramodern NORAD-style campaign headquarters, where I would have to work my way up a giant totem pole. But in fact what I found was -- nothing at all. For all intents and purposes, there was no campaign for George Bush in Orlando in early June. There was only one paid staffer, a central-Florida field director named Vienna Avelares, and a corner of a table at the local Orange County Republican Executive Committee. If the Republicans were building an electoral Death Star somewhere, it sure as hell wasn't in Florida.

The situation was completely disarming. Vienna, a gregarious Puerto Rican single mother who insisted on introducing herself as "Vienna -- like the sausage," seemed desperate. I had planned on doing a good job anyway, but after meeting her I had a genuine desire to help get things going.

After just a week of coming in every day like this, I became -- along with a young blond Sean Hannity fan named Ben Adrian, who also volunteered at that time -- one of the most important Bush people in all of central Florida. Within a few weeks, we would both be given keys to the office and offered full-time jobs.

Here I want to make a general observation about the social aspect of working for Bush. It's very different than it is working for a Democratic candidate. Corny as this sounds, it is much more egalitarian and brotherly than most Democratic campaigns. Almost every Democratic campaign I've seen has let itself be seduced by the Primary Colors paradigm -- the hip clique full of mildly sexually adventurous twentysomethings who have been working on their memoirs since high school and dream of that chance to wear Versace sport coats and crack jokes on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

If you've ever hung out with the Tricia Enrights and Joe Trippis of the world, you know that the operative vibe of the Democratic insider is wisecracking cool. It is not a reach to say that the ideological vision that mainstream Democratic politics has offered America since Clinton has been the supercool high school, the party of the popular kids. For all the talk about the Democrats being the party of inclusion, it really doesn't feel that way from the inside.

That's not true of all Democrats, of course. I thought it was very different, for instance, in the campaign of Dennis Kucinich. For the most part, these people were motivated by something other than ambition, and just being part of that campaign meant you were in a besieged minority, with the whole world out there laughing at you. Kucinich supporters stuck up for one another, because they had to.