When the Tea Party Came to Town by Robert Draper

Author:Robert Draper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Side Pockets on a Cow

“We’re celebrating a great day—the American auto industry is coming back!”

John Dingell stood outside in the middle of a makeshift car lot in suburban Detroit, surrounded by hybrid vehicles and a small bank of TV cameras. He leaned on his cane, but through his lenses the old man’s eyes glowed with unquenchable zeal.

“These are American cars,” he continued lustily. “I come down with an acute rash when I go by a foreign-made car. Our workmen, our engineers, and our union members are still the best in the world. The United States is coming back!”

A local reporter asked the congressman if American consumers would be receptive to green-technology vehicles. “You betcha!” Dingell declared. “I’m no advocate for rising oil prices. But I have to say, they’ve shifted the buying tastes of the American public and probably in the long run will be necessary to break our dependence on foreign oil, which poses such a risk to the United States.”

“Is there anything else you’d like to add?” said the reporter.

Dingell faced the cameras squarely and offered a wide grin. “Tell our American people that, by golly, we still make the best right here in southeast Michigan!” he said. “Come on by and see and buy these great cars, put Americans to work, and get the best for your money!”

With that, the eighty-four-year-old congressman climbed into the backseat of his American-made SUV and sped off to his home in Dearborn.

Earlier that morning, Congress’s foremost pitchman for the domestic auto industry was celebrated at a “Green Leaders” event in downtown Detroit for his contributions to local conservation efforts. The drive from Dearborn ferried him through the semi-evacuated rusted shell of a once-muscular city, and though Dingell was not an excessively sentimental man, he became somewhat younger as he stared out the car window and conjured up the ghosts of his childhood. He had grown up on Detroit’s West Grand Boulevard in the bottom floor of a flat where his dad brewed beer in a back bedroom. He remembered John Dzieglewicz as a brilliant philosopher of a man with an eighth-grade education whose Polish last name had already been bastardized by the time the meat salesman decided to run for the newly created 15th District in 1932. He remembered how the Polack old-timers stood agape with tears running down their ruddy cheeks during the candidate’s victory speech, when John Dingell Sr. officially became one of ninety-three Democratic freshmen to join FDR in forging a New Deal. He remembered traveling from Detroit to Washington for his father’s swearing-in, and at the age of seven standing agog on the floor of the House chamber, the biggest room he had ever seen.

He remembered Detroit as a company town where for a time the men wore their union buttons under the brims of their hats or behind their coat lapels in the manner of a secret society. During pheasant season, young John Dingell would balance his .22 rifle on the handlebars of his bicycle

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