Encountering Anguish and Anxiety Across America

On a road trip across the U.S., Joe Klein encounters frustrated voters and a unanimous sense that Washington is broken beyond repair

  • Peter van Agtmael for TIME / Magnum

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    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.

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