The Interview

In the spring of this year, a man came to my door wanting to interview me for an article he was writing about politics in rural America. He wrote for Der Spiegel, a German magazine which enjoys a good reputation among the reading public. I live in the small town of Washington, Oklahoma, and the Washington Post had done an article on our town as representative of a very small red community in a very red state. This reporter had decided to come to Washington to see for himself. The writer was German born, writing for a German publication. He was assigned to the United States bureau and you could tell the experience of our small town was something he had never seen. He visited with several of the people in town (at the local coffee shop and the local domino parlor) and had a feel for their Republican loyalties. When he asked them if there was a Democrat living here, they told him that I apparently was as I had an “Obama” bumper sticker on my car from 2008. With that, he appeared at my door. We visited about three hours. It was an enjoyable visit and, for the most part, he represented me well in what I told him. He was having difficulties understanding how the people of the community could relate with one another when they were members of differing political parties. He had nothing in his background to help him relate with rural Oklahoma. He never told me what direction he was going to take the article. The article he wrote appeared in Der Spiegel on June 14, 2012, entitled The President of Disappointments: How Obama has Failed to Deliver. Had I known this was the direction he was taking the article, I would have expected some questions on whether he has actually failed in his presidency. Personally, I don’t feel he has at all. I do feel Congress has failed the American people. It’s always nice to say, when condemning conduct of one political group, that both sides are guilty of improper conduct. But, in this partisan gridlock in our Congress, I just don’t see sharing the blame with those so-called “small government” Republicans. I have never heard a Democrat say, “Compromise should be those guys coming to our way of thinking.” The article was not such a bad piece. It is lengthy and I will include only that section that deals with my interview. (Not only did he fly down to Oklahoma to research the story, a month or so later he sent a photographer from New York to Oklahoma to get pictures of Washington, Oklahoma, and of me. He didn’t use any of those pictures.) With that, this is the part of the article based on my interview: Democrat in the Diaspora The Republicans are not at home in the cities, the metropolises along the coasts, where the leftist Occupy movement has also vented its displeasure over Obama's performance. Instead, they derive their support from America's forests and mountains and plains, its rural areas. It's worth paying a visit to such places to examine the limits of Obama's chances of succeeding in the vast stretch of country between the coasts -- to a place like Washington, Oklahoma, for example, where retiree Hershel Franklin is already seen as a misfit because he drives around with an "Obama '08" bumper sticker on his car. Franklin is a Democrat in the diaspora. In Oklahoma, a state wedged between Texas and Kansas, that's enough to be considered an outsider. The town of Washington is a place where people say business transactions are still sealed with a handshake, and a man's word is worth more than a contract. In this Washington, with its 520 residents, where everyone knows everyone else, people don't lock their doors and they leave their car keys in the ignition when they go into the post office. It's a place that attracts people who want to get away from the cities, and from their licentiousness and liberal lack of morals. Franklin came to Washington because of his children. He is 70, white-haired, slightly overweight and a football fan. He worked as a criminal lawyer for 30 years. His wife is the marketing director at a local bank, and their two children, 14 and 16, a boy and a girl, are both adopted. Washington, Oklahoma reminds him of his childhood and of the idyllic image of the American small town, says Franklin. It's the America of high-school proms and the America where entire small towns turn out to watch the local high-school football game on a Friday night. In the Domino Building, the retirees still smoke as if there were no smoking bans, and they make crude jokes about Obama, saying that they would drive him out of town if he ever had the audacity to show up there. Washington, Oklahoma, is fighting against change. Change is suspect, almost a crime against the past. Oklahoma is deeply in red-state territory. In the last presidential election, all 77 counties voted for the Republican candidate John McCain, giving Oklahoma the distinction of being the only state in which McCain won every county. "Ironically," says Hershel Franklin, "the people here really ought to be voting for the Democrats." Touch of the Irrational In rural towns like Washington, the people are even more dependent on the government and on government assistance than elsewhere. There is little infrastructure and a lot of poverty. Until recently, Franklin lived on a farm, where he received his electricity through the Rural Electric Cooperative, which installs power lines to remote areas. Today, like almost all retirees in Washington, he benefits from Medicare, the government healthcare program for retirees. These are both programs that were introduced by Democrats, because Democrats, unlike Republicans, believe in the government's capacity to benefit citizens. But it hasn't done them any good in Oklahoma. The Republicans, says Franklin, have managed to convince people that completely different issues are more important: the right to bear arms, a ban on all forms of abortion and the rejection of gay marriage. The Republicans, says Franklin, have claimed that the Democrats want to ban prayer in schools and desecrate classrooms. "God. Guns. Gays," says Franklin. "They behaved as if Jesus himself was a Republican! And eventually the people here actually believed this nonsense." This touch of the irrational always pervades the political debate in America, partly as a result of an unwillingness to confront the excessive complexity of the tasks at hand. The biggest project of Obama's term in office, healthcare reform, has been talked to pieces to such an extent by now that even the experts are clueless about its details. There are sharply contradictory calculations that predict either financial salvation or ruin for the United States as a result of the program, known derisively as "Obamacare." Even Obama himself hasn't managed to come up with clear enough brushstrokes to paint a convincing picture of his reforms. There is a chance that the Supreme Court will overturn the entire body of laws at the end of June, a court whose judges have openly said during hearings that no one can expect a court to actually read a bill consisting of thousands of pages. The same applies to the similarly voluminous bills on the regulation of the banking system and insurance companies and, on the other side of the aisle, to the Republicans' budget proposals. Confusion is being produced where clarity ought to prevail. And when legislation becomes so complex as to confuse even lawmakers and the courts, the lobbyists, the true regents in Washington, come into play.