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SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010
PHOTOS BY MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST Tom Jefferson, center, had many questions for Rep. Tom Perriello at the Democrat’s town hall meeting Thursday in Charlotte Court House, Va. A freshman congressman, Perriello is facing a tough reelection fight. Less voter outrage, but Democrat sees ‘deeper anxiety’ voters from A1
With polls consistently show- ing that dissatisfaction with Washington is at or near record levels, another word for what vot- ers are feeling right now might be “frustration,” or “despair,” or “dis- gust.” Ask Donald Burroughs which best describes his feeling about elected officials these days and he says, “All of it.” Two years ago, Burroughs cast his ballot for Perriello. It turned out to be the closest congression- al race in the country, an election in which the Democrat came from 35 points behind in his own poll to win by 727 votes. But Burroughs isn’t sure he will
support the 35-year-old freshman congressman again this Novem- ber. Burroughs stood at the back of the Charlotte County Board of Supervisors meeting room listen- ing to Perriello speak. A battered black cap in his hand identified him as a Desert Storm veteran. “Put a man in office,” he said. “Over a year later, I’m worse off than when he took office.” Burroughs, 45, has been look- ing for work for 16 months now, since the brake-shoe plant where he worked closed and moved to China. “They bail out these lending in- stitutions. They bail out those au- to manufacturers,” he said. “Where’s my bailout? Me and my children and my grandchildren are going to have to pay for these bailouts.” He is far from alone. Across the
country, with signs showing that the economic recovery may be sputtering, nearly four in 10 peo- ple now tell pollsters that they or someone in their family has lost a job in the past year. Their circumstances are not the only thing that drives their disaffection with Washington.
‘They’re being left out’
“People are really smart,” said Democratic pollster Anna Green- berg. “They know the economic collapse happened before Obama. They hold lots of people responsi- ble, and they’re realistic enough to know you can’t change things overnight. People are more angry at Washington being broken, and the wrong people being helped.” Peter Hart, another Democratic
pollster, agreed. “All they see is they’re being left out of the proc- ess,” he said. This was never going to be an easy election for Perriello or most of the other 47 Democrats run- ning for reelection in districts that John McCain carried two years ago. And it is particularly treacherous for those 18 new- comers from conservative dis- tricts who washed up on Capitol Hill in the Democratic waves of 2006 and 2008. Come January, many of them
may be gone. As one fatalistic Democratic official put it, “They are basically living in rented terri- tory.” These are the larger dynamics
that have historically come into play in midterm elections, which
Retired Army Sgt. Douglas Randolph, left, spoke with Perriello on Thursday at one of at least 20 town halls the Democrat has planned.
almost always see a first-term president’s party losing seats. “This is a classic,” GOP pollster
Bill McInturff said. “Midterm elections are about hitting the brake after you hit the gas.” Strategists in both parties know that once the campaign sea- son enters its final stretch on La- bor Day, it will be difficult to change the course of the election. So Democratic House leaders sent their members home for August with pocket cards of talking points headlined “WE CAN’T GO BACK” and a list of weekly mes- sages to push. “We want the power of all of our voices to convey these mes- sages, so we ask you to plan public events and media interactions in your district around weekly themes — if they work for you,”
the leaders wrote in a memo to their troops. Last week was “Make It in America” week, to be followed by “Protecting Social Security Week,” “Consumer Protection Week,” “Small Business Week” and “Troops & Veterans Week.” The week of Sept. 6 will bring a reprise of “Make It in America” week.
Challenge for Perriello
Perriello has no fewer than 20 town halls scheduled over the course of the recess, keeping up the pace he set last August, when he held more of them than any other lawmaker. He’s also got a lot of explaining to do in this conservative area. Of the 11 Democratic freshmen rep- resenting districts that McCain carried, Perriello stands partic-
ularly vulnerable for having voted with President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the three most controversial pieces of legis- lation that passed the House: the $862 billion economic stimulus bill, climate-change legislation and the health-care overhaul. (He did, however, vote against the fi- nancial regulations bill, which he said wasn’t tough enough on Wall Street.) Though those votes have made him something of a hero to Dem- ocrats nationally, they haven’t gone over so well at home. The latest public poll, conducted in mid-July by SurveyUSA for WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, shows Per- riello running 23 points behind his Republican challenger, state Sen. Robert Hurt. Independent Jeffrey Clark, running to the right of Hurt and hoping to tap the en- ergy of the “tea-party” movement, barely registered in the poll, with 4 percent support. There had been some specula-
tion that Hurt, who emerged from a seven-candidate primary in June with under 50 percent of the vote, might have some trouble ral- lying the district’s disparate con- servative forces, which include a number of tea party chapters. But that doesn’t look as if it will be a problem for Hurt. On Thurs- day, the last holdout among his former rivals — second-place fin- isher Jim McKelvey — endorsed him. “Since the primary, really without exception, every organi- zation that backed any candidate is now working for us,” Hurt said.
Though polls suggest that Re- publicans are by far the more en- ergized party this year, the Demo- crats argue that — unlike the last time they lost the House, in 1994 — they aren’t being caught off- guard. As is the case with many of the most endangered Democrats this year, Perriello does have at least one thing working in his fa- vor: a $1.5 million campaign cash advantage. Like just about every other Democrat who hopes to hang on to his job, Perriello tries to ex- plain to his constituents that gov- ernment bailouts and stimulus spending pulled the economy back from the precipice. He also touts the $2.9 million of federal money that will be spent to save teacher jobs and fix up the schools in Charlotte County, and the stimulus funds that will bring access to high-speed Internet service to every one of the homes and businesses in a county that still lacks a stoplight. But it is hard to convince those who are struggling that the dis- aster they escaped would have been much worse than the one they are living through. “I just can’t see the avoidance of a depression, not from my end of things,” Burroughs told Perriel- lo. “This time next year, you might be talking to me living out of a vehicle.” Then again, by this time next
year, Burroughs might be taking his complaints to a different con- gressman.
tumultyk@washpost.com Between phone call and text message, a generational disconnect phone from A1
strips them of the control that they have over the arguably less- intimate pleasures of texting, e- mailing, Facebooking or tweeting. They even complain that phone calls are by their nature impolite, more of an interruption than the blip of an arriving text. Kevin Loker, 20, a rising junior
at George Mason University, said he and his school friends rarely just call someone, for fear of being seen as rude or intrusive. First, they text to make an appointment to talk. “They’ll write, ‘Can I call you at such-and-such time?’ ” said Loker, executive editor of Con-
nect2Mason.com, a student me- dia site. “People want to be polite. I feel like, in general, people my age are not as quick on their feet to just talk on the phone.” The bias against unexpected phone calls stems in good part from the way texting and e-mail have conditioned young people to be cautious about how they com- municate when they are not face to face, experts say. Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown Univer- sity who studies how people con- verse in everyday life, said older generations misinterpret the way younger people use their cell- phones. “One student told me that it takes her days to call her par- ents back and the parents thought she was intentionally putting them off,” she said. “But the par-
ents didn’t get it. It’s the medium. With e-mails, you’re at the com- puter, writing a paper. With phone calls, it’s a dedicated block of time.” Tannen, 65, worries that texting
may fall victim one day to the same neglect that phone calls now face. Her generation’s feelings, she said, are perfectly captured in a recent New Yorker magazine cartoon that shows two older, balding men sitting at a bar. The caption reads: “I used to call peo- ple, then I got into e-mailing, then texting, and now I just ignore everyone.”
Ethan Seidel, rabbi of Tifereth
Israel synagogue in the District, can’t get many of his congregants younger than 35 on the telephone. Seidel, 52, often invites young, new members to his family’s home for welcome dinners, but his gesture too often doesn’t even merit return calls. “One member seemed only slightly apologetic for not returning the call,” Seidel said. “I was floored by that. They say, ‘I never answer the phone anymore.’ ”
One of Seidel’s congregants, Lianna Levine Reisner, 26, a de- velopment director at a nonprofit group, said her peers have phone gripes of their own about their el- ders. “My parents call and leave voice mails. They do that a lot,” she said. “I might listen and real- ize they’re not saying anything other than just, ‘Call me.’ I am not much of a phone talker.”
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Ethan Seidel, rabbi of of Tifereth Israel in the District, said he cannot count on younger members to return his calls.
Not only are people making
fewer calls, but they are also hav- ing shorter conversations when they do call. The average length of a cellphone call has dropped from 2.38 minutes in 1993 to 1.81 min- utes in 2009, according to indus- try data. And between 2005 and 2009, as the number of minutes people spent talking on cell- phones inched up, the number of cellphone messages containing text or multimedia content bal- looned by 1,840 percent. Land lines are disappearing.
Verizon, the nation’s second-larg- est land line carrier behind AT&T,
says its hard-wired phone connec- tions have dropped from 50 mil- lion in 2005 to 31 million this year. “Here’s the issue: We don’t want to talk with each other most of the time,” said Naomi Baron, an American University linguistics professor who published a paper in June called “Control Freaks,” dissecting how Americans com- municate online and on mobile devices. “In a very profound way, our lives changed when the re- mote control was first introduced: You didn’t have to watch what you didn’t want to watch.”
The difference in communica- tions preferences has created a palpable perception gap between young adults and their parents. Beard said that when her niece, Lindsay Spencer, 20, “is in classes at the University of Maryland, I’ll never hear from her — until she comes over to do the laundry. We text multiple times a day. Other- wise, I wouldn’t have a clue [what’s going on] in her life.” Spencer, who was raised by Beard and Davis, said Beard’s per- ception is skewed. “I think I call her more than I text,” she said in a rare phone interview.
But Beard is understanding about the change in ways of con- versing. “Parents are like, ‘They’re controlling who they talk to,’ ” she said, “but so did we when we screened people with answering machines.” Not all parents are quite that open to new ways. “My mom gets offended,” said Muggaga Kintu, 32, an administrative assistant at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who prefers texting or calling on his own time, when he’s not around patients. “She thinks I don’t want to hear from her, and that’s not the case. The other day, she called me when I was at work, and I told her, ‘Instead of calling me, can you text me?’ She said, ‘What? You don’t like to hear from me? You don’t like the sound of my voice.’ ”
Reisner said her parents in- trude on her day with questions
they deem urgent but in her real- ity are not. “My dad calls asking me about the details of my travel plans, and they’re not in my head, they’re in some e-mail, so I say, ‘I will e-mail you everything,” she said. “I know my parents are of- fended. I’ve asked my mom not to call me during the workday if it’s just to chat. We came to an agree- ment. I know she felt bad. She wanted to feel connected to me.” Answering a phone call re- quires a certain amount of psy- chological energy, she said. “I put it off because there’s something confrontational about someone calling you,” she said. “You have to gear up for it.” Sometimes Reisner gets phone calls from other synagogue mem- bers asking her to take on leader- ship roles, but the calls go straight to voice mail. She wishes that she could respond by e-mail. That way, in true Washington fashion, she could calibrate a more careful response instead of being put on the spot.
At Tifereth Israel, the waning popularity of phone calls has be- come such a controversial issue that Seidel fired off an essay in the synagogue’s April bulletin, la- menting that no one calls him back anymore.
About 10 people, he said, hadn’t
returned his calls so far this year. Technology, he said in an actual phone call, was diluting his rab- binical status.
shapirai@washpost.com
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