OVER SUBSEQUENT WEEKS more paperwork followed, including the intense vetting for the background check that goes with a top-secret clearance. Screen by screen on a website belonging to the Office of Personnel Management, I carefully accounted for every foreign connection and trip: every commute to Canada for McKinsey, every Maltese cousin I kept in touch with, every penny of the fifty bucks or so that I still had in a British bank account from Oxford. I ran down contact information for foreigners I had known, and told old high school and college friends not to be alarmed if someone approached them saying they were from the FBI and wanting to know how many times they had seen me smoke pot (not many, but more than zero). With a remarkably straight face, an investigator appeared in South Bend to meet with me, confirm some address information, and ask if I had ever attempted to overthrow the government.
At last, an email arrived in September 2009 affirming that everything was ready and it was time to take the oath. Even this process bore out the military mantra of hurry-up-and-wait, or in this case wait-and-hurry-up: after an excruciatingly slow process, the recruiting lieutenant insisted on getting the final signatures in by the end of the month. With my work travel schedule and her need to have me do the oath somewhere near her Detroit-area base, it wasn’t easy to find a time and place. I had built up a certain mental image in mind for my commissioning—if not a stirring scene like the emotional swearing-in of Richard Gere’s character at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman, then at least a photogenic moment with my right hand raised and maybe a few flags in the background, something worthy of a photo that I would frame and one day and show my kids. I had assumed we would do the honors on the parade ground at Naval Station Great Lakes, the major Navy facility near Chicago. Instead, the lieutenant proposed we split the difference between South Bend and Detroit and meet at a Big Boy diner in Coldwater, Michigan. But the Big Boy was closed, so we wound up at a nearby coffee shop, where we went over the paperwork together one more time, and she showed me where to sign. Not big on ceremony, she added: “If you really want to raise your right hand, we can do that.”
One minute later, I was a member of the military. A commissioned officer. Ensign, United States Navy Reserve.
1 I think of him as Farmer Daughton, having gotten the impression he is a farmer, but I do not know his actual first name.
5
“Meet Pete”
No one sits on his mother’s knee and says he hopes one day to become a state treasurer. The truth is that I made it through my schooling and early adulthood without ever noticing the office existed, or giving any thought to what it meant. As a student, learning about the exploits of senators and governors and wondering if I might someday hold office myself, it never crossed my mind that “getting into politics” would mean running for an office that most people have never heard of. Yet by the time my twenty-eighth birthday approached in early 2010, I had decided to quit my job and spend the better part of the year, and my savings, seeking an obscure office that paid less than half of what I’d already been making.
It all happened because of a chance to stand up for the then-unpopular rescue of the American auto industry—and because I actually knew what an empty car factory looks like. It takes great imagination to look at the broken windows and falling bricks of a decaying Studebaker factory in South Bend, and picture the days when it was heaving with life and employing tens of thousands of people. It takes far less imagination to glance at today’s enormous, well-kept Chrysler plants on the outskirts of Kokomo, Indiana, and picture what would happen if they were to fall silent. After about a year without maintenance, the walls would show disuse. Windows on the office side would be distressed or broken within a couple years, and by the end of the decade five-foot weeds would be pushing through the cracked asphalt of the massive parking lot.
ANYONE FROM SOUTH BEND KNOWS exactly what it looks like when an industry collapses. No one wants to see it happen to anyone else—which was why I followed the news closely when the 2008 economic crisis left Chrysler on life support. I was still at McKinsey, working out of borrowed office space and hotel rooms in San Francisco, Dubai, Seattle, or Stamford, depending on the day. On paper I was part of the Chicago office, but in practice I worked wherever the study took me. Traveling at least four days a week, by this point I’d realized that it didn’t much matter to my employer where I actually lived, so I had moved home to South Bend. This cut my rent in half and gave me more time with my parents, who hadn’t lived in the same state as me in almost a decade. And in those rare days at home, or when I needed a break from my spreadsheets, or on a plane from somewhere to somewhere, I would pull up news articles and follow the unfolding drama of the near-death and rescue of the American auto industry.
I hadn’t spent much time in Kokomo, but like most people from South Bend who had occasion to visit Indianapolis, I’d been through it at least a dozen times. About half the size of South Bend, the city of Kokomo was the midpoint of the three-hour drive between home and the state capital. Every state band competition, soccer tournament, or family trip to Indy involved at least passing through the edge of town on Old U.S. 31. Coming southward, you know you’re getting near the city limits when you see the Indiana Transmission Plant 2, or ITP2, on the left-hand side. From the highway, you wouldn’t notice much about this white and blue building, other than its sheer mass. Decades newer than the Studebaker Main Assembly building I knew so well in South Bend, it was made of steel rather than brick, and was one story across sixty-one acres rather than six floors, but the overall proportions are similar, with over half a million square feet of space. ITP2 accounts for about two thousand jobs, and it’s not even the biggest Chrysler facility in town. About three miles farther down the road, near the heart of the small city, you come to a stoplight and see two huge factories, one on either side. On the right is another transmission plant, with another thirty-five hundred jobs. Across from it is a plant that now belongs to GM Components Holdings with about a thousand more employees. The historic heart of Kokomo, with its quaint town square and the county courthouse, is about a mile west of the highway. Directly or indirectly, nearly everything in Howard County was fueled by the auto industry. In total, the town of fifty-six thousand had four Chrysler plants and one Delphi factory, and about one in five workers was in manufacturing.
So Kokomo had a lot to lose when the Great Recession struck our country and our state, with the auto companies hit hardest. As cable news told the story in stock market charts, workers at Chrysler and Delphi saw it in layoff notices. Thousands were suddenly out of a job, and with unemployment in Kokomo in double digits, there were not a lot of other options. At least layoffs meant the possibility of coming back; families hoped and waited for news of a callback before their savings ran out. The alternative, a total collapse of the companies, was unthinkable—it would take the whole city down, not just the factories. The area could see 40 percent unemployment. No business—from Applebee’s to the Cone Palace, my favorite family-owned ice-cream shop—would stand much of a chance.
Nor would the disaster be confined to Kokomo. Even at rock bottom during the crisis, the auto industry employed sixty-nine thousand people in Indiana. South Bend’s days of making Studebakers were long gone, but thousands of families in our city depended on good jobs at companies that made parts and supplies for the industry. At least we had our colleges and universities, and proximity to Chicago. If the auto industry went belly-up altogether, a city like South Bend would be wounded; a town like Kokomo would be devastated.