The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America Read Online Free PDF Page B

bipartisan
     lobbying industry. And his books came out in frantic conveyor-belt fashion, seventeen
     in eight years—for America’s decay kept growing deeper, its elite liberal media more
     destructive, its secular-socialist machine more radical, the Democrat in the White
     House more alien, and the desire to save America was undimmed, and the need to be
     heard was unquenchable.
    He finally ran for president when it was much too late, but the old man in the white
     helmet with the cold clever boyish grin still found what he wanted whenever he reached
     into his pocket.

 
    JEFF CONNAUGHTON
     
    Jeff Connaughton first saw Joe Biden in 1979. Biden was thirty-six, the sixth-youngest
     person ever elected to the United States Senate. Connaughton was nineteen, a business
     major at the University of Alabama. His parents lived up in Huntsville, where his
     father worked for thirty years as a chemical engineer with the Army Missile Command,
     a job he’d landed after flying forty-seven missions over Europe, China, and Japan
     with the Army Air Corps, then attending Tuscaloosa on the GI Bill, then going from
     a dollar an hour in a Birmingham steel mill to an Arkansas furniture factory to National
     Gypsum in Mobile to the booming postwar defense industry. Working on small-rocket
     propulsion was a good middle-class job, topping out at fifty-five thousand a year,
     underwritten by the federal government and the Cold War, but Mr. and Mrs. Connaughton
     had both grown up in poverty. Jeff’s father had watched his father march through Washington,
     D.C., with the Bonus Army in 1932. Jeff’s mother was from Town Creek, Alabama, and
     as a little girl she and her sisters had helped out during the hard times by picking
     cotton on her grandmother’s farm. When she was five, she saved a nickel to buy her
     mother a birthday present. One day, the little girl fell ill with a 104-degree fever,
     and when the ice truck passed outside and her mother wanted to buy a block of ice
     to cool her fever, she refused, because her five cents was the only money in the house.
     It was a story Jeff always thought he’d tell if he ever ran for office.
    The Connaughtons split their vote. Jeff’s mother could remember the day FDR came to
     Town Creek to open the Wheeler Dam, and all the children ran down to the station and
     watched in a solemn hush as the president was lifted from the train into a car. She
     would vote Democrat all her life. The first time Jeff’s father went to vote, in Alabama
     after the war, and asked how to do it, the poll worker said, “Just vote for the names
     beneath the rooster,” which was the symbol of the Alabama Democratic Party, the only
     one that mattered back then. On the spot Mr. Connaughton became a Republican, and
     he remained one over the following decades as the rest of the white South caught up
     with him. But years later, after Jeff went to Washington to work for Biden and became
     what he would call a Professional Democrat, his dad voted for Clinton—even for Obama.
     By then, most everyone in their suburb was staunchly Republican, and someone stole
     the Obama-Biden signs right out of the Connaughtons’ front yard. Mr. Connaughton was
     voting for his son.
    Jeff Connaughton was short and sandy-haired, smart and hardworking, with the lifelong
     inferiority complex that’s bred into boys from Alabama. Growing up, he had no clear
     political views. In 1976 he was inspired when Ronald Reagan spoke at the Republican
     convention about “the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule
     in this country”; in 1979, when Jimmy Carter diagnosed a “crisis of confidence” in
     America, warning that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,”
     Connaughton defended what came to be called the “malaise” speech in an opinion piece
     for The Tuscaloosa News . He was a swing voter until he moved to Washington; he also revered the Kennedys.
     Once, in 1994, he