Quotes of the Day

On a blistering evening in Phoenix recently, a group of prominent civic leaders met to talk about America. It didn't take long for the conversation to get around to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. That's what happens when smart Americans get to talking about politics these days. Topic A is the growing sense that our best days as a nation are behind us, that our kids won't live as well as we did, that China is in the driver's seat. The group had been assembled for my benefit by Fred DuVal, vice chair of the Arizona Board of Regents. Fred's a Democrat, but most people in the room were Republicans, and the conversation was bracing from the start — though not in the knee-jerk, contentious way we're used to seeing on television. People told personal stories and made complicated arguments that didn't fit neatly into their assigned political categories. Early on, a former Arizona attorney general named Grant Woods said he'd recently visited Turkey. He described "a prevailing sense of melancholy," which, he was told, was caused by the fact that Turkey "once had been a great empire but no longer was, and probably wouldn't ever be again ... In my lifetime, growing up in America, we were raised to believe that we were the best, No. 1, and always would be — and what I see happening now is that people are afraid our day may be passing and that the current Administration is putting that process into fast-forward."

Woods is a Republican, and his was a conservative lament: Barack Obama was leading the country away from private enterprise toward a more "European" style of Big Government. This is a popular, perhaps even dominant, theme in the U.S. this season — but it doesn't begin to describe the anguish that dominated every conversation about politics I witnessed during a four-week trip across the country. With a month to go before a crucial election and campaign ads cluttering the TV, people were in a heightened state of political awareness. I've covered more than a few midterm campaigns, but this one seems particularly fraught. That was made clear by the next speaker, a Republican public-relations consultant named Kurt Davis, who agreed with much of what Woods had said about "the far left undermining American values." But, he added, "when the middle class looks to the right and sees how free trade has sold them down the river, exporting millions of jobs ... they feel whipsawed, pissed off at both sides. I can't tell my kids that they'll be able to get a good job with a good company, work there for 30 years and retire with a good pension. I'd be lying. People know that doesn't exist anymore, and they're angry about it. That was the anger that elected Obama. He was the anti-Establishment candidate — and John McCain was anti-Establishment too. And so was Bill Clinton. But none of them did anything to change the reality that's making people angry."

More Anxious than Angry
It was that kind of trip. I talked to dozens of politicians running for office and hundreds of voters. The voters were, with few exceptions, more eloquent and unpredictable — and, of course, candid — than the politicians. They tended to be extremely frustrated with the national conversation as presented by the news media. They tended to be more anxious than angry — although the infuriated, fist-shaking third of the electorate, the Tea Party cohort, seemed a far more powerful and immediate presence in people's minds than the President of the United States or his party. Republicans seemed more talkative than Democrats, and more precise about their solutions: lower taxes and less spending. "People say to me, 'I don't like the Democrats because I don't know what they stand for,'" said Lisa Urias, a Latina businesswoman in Phoenix. "I tell them, 'I hate the Republicans because I know exactly what they stand for.'"

I found the same themes dominant everywhere — a rethinking of basic assumptions, a moment of national introspection. There was a unanimous sense that Washington was broken beyond repair. But the disgraceful behavior of the financial community, and its debilitating effects on the American economy over the past 30 years, was the issue that raised the most passion, by far, in the middle of the country. More than a few people had begun to question their own values and those of their neighbors. Was it O.K. to walk away from a mortgage? (According to a recent Pew survey, about a third of Americans think so.) But would our parents have ever walked away from a mortgage? Never. And what did that say about our moral standards? Was it part of the reason the country seemed to be slouching away from greatness?

Many Americans also were confused and frustrated by the constant state of war since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But for every occasion they raised Afghanistan, they mentioned China 25 times; economics completely trumped terrorism as a matter of concern. I met two Republican congressional candidates who are members of the Army Reserve and have served recent tours overseas — Rocky Raczkowski in Michigan and Joe Heck in Nevada. Both were strong on national security, but both had grave doubts about Afghanistan. When I'd ask people about the war, the first reaction was dismay about how much it was costing.

As I drove the long stretches of gorgeous American countryside between meetings, especially out West toward the end of my trip, I began to wonder about my own reflexive support for policies ranging from free trade to the free hand given financial speculators to the presence of U.S. troops in Germany and Okinawa. Road trips are nourishment for the mind and the soul, if not the body (given the quality of roadside food); from Huckleberry Finn to The Hangover, they have been a classic American pastime. The trip exploded my personal Beltway Bubble, which turns out to be more a state of mind and a set of habits than an actual place. Driving 6,782 miles in four weeks, I was forcibly weaned from my usual engorgement of newspapers, magazines, blogs and books. I watched no more than 15 minutes of cable news per day but listened to music obsessively. I was cleansed and transformed, a news junkie freed from junk news, and able to experience Americans as they are, rowdy and proud, ignorant and wise.

The Nanny State Makes Us Nuts
In this maelstrom of passionate public opinion, barack Obama occupies an ephemeral place right now, floating beyond the fray. He is respected but not quite admired. He is sufficiently popular that Republican candidates barely mention him; they are obsessed, instead, with Nancy Pelosi, whose name is canted like a congressional voodoo curse. There is, of course, a segment of the population that believes the President is either a socialist or a secret Muslim intent on undermining the country. Their views are represented to the point of distortion by noisy demagogues on TV, but the actual Obama haters were usually too polite, or embarrassed, to say the words — the real words — to me (even though I could usually tell what they were thinking).

The dominant feeling about Obama, even among some of his Republican opponents, is disappointment: he has worked hard, but without meaningful results. His health care and financial reforms are incomprehensible to most people. The Bush-Obama Wall Street bailout is anathema. The bailout of GM and Chrysler is less unpopular, especially in places like Lordstown, Ohio, where the introduction of the Chevy Cruze has opened a new product line and provided 1,200 new jobs. But even in Michigan, where the auto industry is sputtering back to life, a deputy fire chief named Kevin Gentry told me, "Everyone I know is buying Fords." The $787 billion stimulus package seems slightly less abstract and porky now because of the constant, if annoying, presence of road crews on highways all over the country.

But the American default position on government spending is skepticism: people are highly susceptible to Republican arguments about waste and stupidity, which are plentiful in this season of mammoth, slovenly Democratic legislation. Joe Heck, the Army reservist who is also a doctor, could rattle off a skein of ridiculous, irrelevant provisions of the health care bill — including the requirement that small businesses set aside a specific area for nursing mothers to use their breast pumps. That sort of nanny-state officiousness drives people nuts, especially when they feel the big issues aren't being addressed.

Even among his most passionate supporters, Obama is something of a political mystery. He doesn't challenge the Republicans; he doesn't fight back; he doesn't even tout his accomplishments. "My mom got a $250 direct deposit into her checking account a few weeks ago," a health-clinic worker named Anthony Smoot told me at a meeting in Yuba City, Calif. "She didn't know where it came from, but I looked it up. It was her check from the government for prescription drugs — you know, the money to fill the 'doughnut hole' that was passed in the health care reform. Why didn't the President make a greater effort to let her know where the money came from?" In Detroit, a Democrat named Terri Polidori who is the financial officer of a small construction company said, "The week that the tax cut in the stimulus package came through, I handed every employee his check and told them, 'You see the extra money in the envelope this week? That's from President Obama.'"

From New Products to New Deals
he Obama mystery is compounded by the president's lack of visibility, and passion, on the No. 1 issue, by far, throughout the country: jobs. The great Washington stimulus-vs.-deficit-reduction debate is not so great in America. People hate wasteful spending, but when asked to choose between deficit reduction and New Deal — style public-works programs, they choose the latter overwhelmingly. The Republican position on jobs is clear: stimulate the private sector with lower taxes and fewer regulations. The Democratic position on jobs is inexplicable. And the deeper economic issue, the loss of America's manufacturing sector, seems totally ignored by Washington — a failure that infuriates a broad swatch of Americans, liberals and conservatives alike.

This is not a new story — I've been covering factory closings since the 1970s — but it has picked up momentum over time, and a compelling narrative is beginning to emerge about the human carnage caused by arrogant financiers. The same bankers who did the leveraged buyouts of the 1980s and '90s, which sold local factories to national conglomerates, which in turn closed those factories and sent the jobs overseas — those same bankers turned to housing in the 1990s and 2000s, creating ridiculous mortgage products that encouraged people without the proper financial resources to buy homes they later defaulted on, causing the value of most middle-class housing to plummet. Everyone seems to "know" that now. The more sophisticated understand that homeownership was a program promoted by both Democrats — through government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — and Republicans. The most sophisticated understand that the financial community enriched itself obscenely by playing casino games with obscure, unregulated products like credit-default swaps, in which fortunes were made on tiny fluctuations in the value of those mortgages.

There is a visceral sense that the financial community's fundamental purpose has been perverted. It has made a killing off the death of American manufacturing; it has drained our best young minds away from industry and into the creation of new financial products that, as Paul Volcker has said, haven't added anything to our GDP. Indeed, a story Volcker told me haunted the entire road trip. It happened back in the 1980s, at the beginning of the mergers-and-acquisitions frenzy. A recent Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering from Princeton approached Volcker and asked him which Wall Street firm he should go to work for. "Why don't you go to work for Boeing?" Volcker asked. The young man replied that he could start at $50,000 per year at Boeing, on a career track that might reach $90,000. "I can make that overnight on Wall Street," he said. A generation of such decisions has diverted America's smartest young people from making new products to making new deals. Most Americans do not believe their political leaders are willing to discuss real remedies for these excesses; indeed, they are convinced the financiers have purchased the silence and acquiescence of both parties.

The disgust with Wall Street is accompanied by a growing skepticism about the free-trade argument that every President since Reagan has made. Bill Clinton argued persuasively that globalization was inevitable and part of a natural process. The more-advanced economies had to produce more-advanced products, which required a better-educated workforce. But that argument has fallen apart as countries like China and India have leaped past the U.S. in some high-tech sectors and the American education system has proved entirely incapable of taking students to a higher skill level. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 86% of the American people believe the outsourcing of jobs contributed to the recession. A majority expressed strong doubts about free trade. "How is a young person who isn't a genius nuclear physicist going to get a job?" asked John McGraw, an unemployed corporate executive in the Chicago suburbs (who, happily, found new work a few days after I interviewed him). "We need manufacturing jobs for the nongeniuses. I can't believe we've let this happen."

Clinton used to say that the manufacturing jobs that went away weren't coming back, and he was undoubtedly right about that. But Obama would be cheered by most Americans if he showed a little spine with China — if, for example, he backed the recent House legislation giving him the right to slap tariffs on the Chinese for currency manipulation. "The great fear is about American supremacy," said Anne Mariucci, chair of the Arizona Board of Regents. "We all believed that if you followed the basic compact, worked hard and played by the rules, that we'd have the highest standard of living in the world. And we were always on the front edge of the next new technology — but we're not anymore. We seem to be mired in mediocrity while China is steaming ahead."

A Mirage in a Tense Time
A reader named Bill Chavez invited me to dinner with his neighbors in Yuba City. It was a warm evening in the Central Valley. Bill and his wife Pattie set out tables on the front lawn of their home in the bankrupt Dunmore subdivision. The neighbors proved to be remarkable. On one side lived Hindus from Indian Punjab; on the other side lived Muslims from Pakistani Punjab. A Zimbabwean immigrant studying to be a medical technician wandered over; Jeannie Klever, the chair of the local Democratic Party, and her husband Dale dropped by. The Mexican Americans from across the street, a business manager and a bilingual schoolteacher, came after they'd finished feeding their kids. Bill — who is half Filipino, half Panamanian — told me that Yuba City had the largest Sikh population outside India (approximately 16,000). But the talk mostly turned on ordinary things: organizing a block party, the tyranny of constant soccer practices.

It was a perfectly American scene — perhaps not Sarah Palin's America, but a demonstration of the nation's greatest principle and its greatest strength: that no matter where we come from, the things we have in common as human beings are more important than the things that divide us. Bill later took me to a community meeting that was filled with all the same complaints — about the incivility of public discourse, about the loss of jobs to China. But my mind kept wandering back to the scene on Bill and Pattie's front lawn, which seemed as much a hope, and a dream, as a sunset reality — the neighbors eating chicken and vegetarian spaghetti, a raft of kids playing in the street. I asked Boniface, the Zimbabwean immigrant, if this was how he'd imagined America, and he said, "Yes, this is how I imagined it. Exactly."

It was always how I imagined America, at its best, too. But it now seems almost a mirage in a terrible, tense time.

• Joe Klein