I’ll spare you the deeper nuances to this fair-food geography; the important thing is that Franklin County is in chicken territory, and the people there had been looking for a way to make the Canoe Festival more exciting that year. So they decided to get their community into the record books by filling a canoe with the most chicken ever placed into a single container. The previous world record was held by some KFC distributor in the Persian Gulf who had put twelve hundred pounds of chicken on a giant hummus plate a few years earlier.
In the glint of the evening summer sun, we gathered near the county seat, Brookville, population 2,596. The atmosphere was somewhere between jolly and crazed. I met a Colonel Sanders impersonator who pointed out that the Colonel had actually been born in Indiana, not Kentucky. Signs saying things like MAKE CHICKEN NOT WAR and BEAT KUWAIT ringed the canoe, while people streamed in from every corner of town, bearing Styrofoam coolers full of fried chicken from restaurants and family kitchens. Eager to please, I tried to make myself useful by carrying a few coolers from a staging area to the boat, where the chicken was promptly dumped in. When the president of the Canoefest Fryers Club announced the official weight of the chicken—1,645 pounds—the applause heralded an authentically achieved moment in the life of the community. Then, of course, we ate it all.
Some of the rural counties blurred together; others you can’t forget, like Crawford County, where a faithful intern and I pulled up to what we thought was the county courthouse in a town called English and found no one there at all. Nolan, the intern, was as confused as I was; after dutifully following the GPS device, we stepped out of my tungsten-green Taurus into steamy air and overgrown grass and looked, blinking, through the midday glare at the brick-and-cinder-block courthouse. The parking lot was empty. The building was locked and, on closer inspection, definitely abandoned. We looked for signs of life nearby, and found no one. Not only was the courthouse empty, but the whole town was literally deserted.
It turns out that was the old courthouse, before a series of floods prompted the town council to relocate not just the courthouse but the entire town. Thus there was Old English and New English, and we were in the wrong English. By the time we sorted it out and got uphill to New English, we had missed our appointment with Jerry Brewer, the local Democratic chair who was supposed to meet me there.
Crawford County being pretty small, the lady in the clerk’s office who saw me looking for him told me we could just call him at home. She dialed the phone on her desk and held out the handset for me to take as it rang. When he answered, he told me he wasn’t going to be able to leave his farm that day anyway, because the harvest was coming early and they had to pull up the corn as quickly as possible. Assuming this meant our meeting was canceled, I was about to say goodbye when he explained that we could still meet—as long as I didn’t mind taking the meeting in the cab of his tractor while we did a few rows of corn. So that’s where we met.
In the middle of the field under an August sun, it felt in the air-conditioned cab like we were in some kind of vessel, gliding over the top of the corn as though sailing in an infinite sea of tasseled ears and husks. In front of us, the machinery calmly devoured six, maybe twelve rows at a time. At one point, we came to a sort of clearing in the vast cornfield and stopped to talk to the farmhand, a bearded, tattooed, burly man whose eyes looked somehow too young to belong to someone as bearded, tattooed, and burly as he was. He was fresh back from serving in Iraq, Jerry said, and was helping in the fields for the summer. We got out of the tractor while Jerry and his employee did something involving a trailer hitch that I did not fully understand, and then we were back on our way, leaving the young man doing whatever he was doing out there as we kept on a straight path along the rows toward the tree line in the distance.
YOU CAN READ THE PROGRESS of the campaign calendar in the condition of the corn. After you announce and begin campaigning in the early spring, you drive between great squares of rich black soil, freshly turned up, with innocent two-leaf sprigs ornamenting the earth geometrically with dots of green. Then the stalks grow into fair and parade season, well past “knee-high by Fourth of July” if all goes well. When you can’t see over the top of the corn, such things as corn mazes become possible, and it’s almost back to school. Harvest means it’s right around Labor Day, and by now you also have at least a rough sense of what kind of year it’s going to be for your party.
You’re in the home stretch when the harvest is over and you can again see across the fields over the tops of the chopped-off stalks. Rumbling through them in the passenger seat of Jeff’s hybrid Saturn SUV, I would think of the nineteenth century Hoosier dialect poet James Whitcomb Riley:
The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill.
If it was too early or late to call someone, I might listen to Lyle Lovett’s “Up in Indiana” and thumb through news stories on my iPhone, seeing more and more evidence that this would not be a good year for Democrats in our state or anywhere else.
Democratic members of Congress were still licking their wounds from the tongue-lashings they got in town halls across America over the summer of Tea Party rage, heaped with abuse from voters who had been led to believe that the health care bill amounted to red socialism, complete with “death panels” and all manner of evil. Conservatives were energized in ways not seen since the early Bill Clinton administration, and the makings of a wave were under way. This was not good news for me. In a state like ours, a down-ticket Democrat stood a chance of winning only under the best of circumstances, and these were clearly not going to be the best of circumstances.
In the final days, the obscurity of our race added to a sense of doom. We had gotten some good press coverage, and my fundraising events and phone calls had even yielded enough money to do a few TV ads, rare for a campaign like this. But outside of party activists, organized auto workers, and public finance wonks, most voters had still never heard of me. On November 1, the day before the election, I woke early in South Bend and headed down to Indianapolis to campaign at an early-voting site, hoping to catch the occasional voter near their County-City Building. It was humbling, a reminder that campaigning for office often resembles nothing so much as your first experience handing out flyers for something. In 2008 there would have been a line around the block as Obama drew record-breaking numbers of early voters, but this November morning in 2010 felt like the sorriest, quietest Monday that plaza had ever seen. A lone intern joined me, having driven me down from South Bend, holding a MEET PETE sign duct-taped to a stake as I looked vainly for someone to shake hands with. At one point the police stopped by to make sure the two of us did not constitute an unauthorized demonstration.
I perked up when one person came over and said he recognized me from my commercial, but then he explained that he was not able to vote because of his felony convictions. At one point there was no one at all to talk to but a man walking up and down the block in a sandwich board from Paddy’s Legal Beagle Pub advertising a $5.99 lunch “speacil.” Figuring he was a voter, I introduced myself, drawing breath and winding myself up for one more, “Hi, my name’s Pete, and I’m running for—”
But he interrupted: “I’m not big on elections, I’m a monarchist myself.”