Call it municipal disobedience: communities facing environmental threats are defying laws they deem illegitimate.

Originally published in The Nation.

Nancy Martland in Sugar Hill: “People in New Hampshire—maybe everywhere, I don’t know—we want to stand up for ourselves.” Photos by Barry Yeoman.

THE 600 RESIDENTS OF SUGAR HILL, New Hampshire, have done a laudable job of keeping the vulgarities of modern life at bay. There are no fast-food restaurants, no neon signs. Instead, the former iron-mining town has rambling country inns and a main road lined with Victorian and Arts and Crafts houses. Locals gather for breakfast, as they have since 1938, at Polly’s Pancake Parlor, which grinds its own corn and wheat and uses syrup from the sugar maples that give the town its name. With tourism driving the economy, the village’s biggest assets are its fall foliage, fields of lupines and uninterrupted views of the snow-capped White Mountains.

Each March, Sugar Hill’s voters gather at the white meetinghouse—a converted church built in 1830 with a trio of gold-leaf clocks on its steeple—for their annual town meeting. Anyone who collects enough signatures can place an item on the agenda to be voted into law. That New Englander impulse toward self-government, combined with the feistiness that led Sugar Hill to secede from a neighboring town in 1962, might explain its residents’ sweeping response when they learned in 2010 that an international electric consortium has proposed a high-voltage transmission line that would slice through the village like a giant zipper.

The Northern Pass, if built, would enter New Hampshire at the Canadian border and bisect some of the state’s most intact forestland as it connects Quebec’s hydroelectric dams with New England’s power grid. Steel towers, some exceeding thirteen stories in height, would line the 180-mile route, which snakes through ten miles of protected national forest and seven miles of Sugar Hill. Conservationists say the project is unneeded and could degrade waterways and fragment wildlife habitats.

But what New Hampshirites fear most is that the Northern Pass will disfigure the state’s visual landscape. “It could destroy our economy,” says Dolly McPhaul, a lifelong Sugar Hill resident. “If people don’t build their second homes here, where are the builders going to get their money? The plumbers? The grocery store that feeds these people?” McPhaul and her neighbors were particularly disheartened to learn that the Northern Pass required federal and state permits—but no local permits at all.

“You’re shocked to find out you have no say,” says Nancy Martland, a retired child-development researcher who moved to Sugar Hill in 2007. “Even your whole town. Even at town meeting. Even your Select Board. You have no power. People in New Hampshire—maybe everywhere, I don’t know—we want to stand up for ourselves.”

So they did. Last year, Martland and McPhaul campaigned for a local ordinance that would ban corporations from acquiring land or building structures to support any “unsustainable energy system.” The ordinance stripped those corporations of their free-speech and due-process rights under the Constitution, as well as protections afforded by the Constitution’s commerce and contract clauses. Judicial rulings that recognized corporations as legal “persons” would not be recognized in Sugar Hill. Any state or federal law that tried to interfere with the town’s authority would be invalidated. “Natural communities and ecosystems”—wetlands, streams, rivers, aquifers—would acquire “inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish,” and any resident could enforce the law on their behalf. “All power is inherent in the people,” the measure stated.

Listen to audio of Nancy Martland.

Sugar Hill’s attorney suggested this was folly; local governments can’t override state or federal law, much less the Constitution. Such an ordinance could attract a lawsuit, which the village could ill afford. McPhaul, a Republican and a charity volunteer and self-described “goody two-shoes,” also worried about litigation. “But what is your option?” she asks. “To lie down, play dead and let them destroy your town?” After a two-month public-awareness campaign, Sugar Hill’s residents took up the ordinance at their 2012 town meeting. It passed by a unanimous voice vote.

Thus, Sugar Hill became one of dozens of communities nationwide—mostly villages but also the city of Pittsburgh—that have reacted to environmental threats by directly challenging the Constitution and established case law. The leading champion of this confrontational strategy—which has its share of critics, even among progressives who share the sense of desperation that is driving it—is a bearish 43-year-old attorney named Thomas Linzey. These skirmishes, Linzey believes, are the first steps in a long campaign to wrest power from corporations and strengthen American democracy. He refers to the strategy as “collective nonviolent civil disobedience through municipal lawmaking.”

LINZEY RUNS THE COMMUNITY ENVIRONMENTAL Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that advocates for local self-government and the rights of nature. CELDF comes into threatened communities, educates residents about US legal history, and trains them to advocate for “rights-based ordinances” like Sugar Hill’s. About thirty municipalities in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and New Mexico have enacted such measures, according to Linzey, following an earlier round of over 100 more modest laws. CELDF’s organizers have helped citizens fight frackers, coal companies, factory farms, big-box stores, water bottlers and sewage-sludge dumpers. They’ve campaigned to overhaul the city charter in Spokane, Washington. And they aided the successful effort to confer rights on nature in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution. Linzey, whose baritone voice is filled with populist fire, has crafted a message whose appeal brings together liberals distrustful of big business and conservatives distrustful of big government.

Linzey’s approach has evolved dramatically since 1995, when the organization he co-founded started assisting Pennsylvania communities that were battling polluters and developers. Newly admitted to the bar, the young Alabaman initially put his faith in the regulatory system. “It seemed to us at the time that people needed lawyers,” he recalls. “The problem was not that we didn’t have good environmental laws. The problem was, the world has gone to shit because we didn’t have enough people enforcing those laws.” So Linzey applied what he’d learned in law school. Faced with a proposed incinerator or landfill, “we would take the 400-page application and try to find places where it was deficient—gaps, omissions, those types of things.” Based on these bureaucratic challenges, CELDF’s clients often won their first rounds.

“Then the community group would have a victory party,” he recalls. “Everybody would pat each other on the back and say the system works. Meanwhile, thirty, sixty days from then, the corporation would come back and submit a new and improved permit application, and the project would move forward. So we weren’t stopping anything.”

The attorney wondered what he was accomplishing by working within the system. “In many ways, the regulatory process is intended to exhaust communities, because it does not recognize—and neither does the broader structure of the law recognize—that communities have any power to make those fundamental decisions about energy or transportation or agriculture.” Citizens could delay but not stop projects; the law was “merely regulating the rate at which the environment was being destroyed.”

Behind Linzey’s epiphany is almost 200 years of jurisprudence giving both constitutional rights and legal personhood to corporations. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which used the First Amendment to permit corporations unlimited independent political spending, is just the latest in a chain of such rulings. Most famous is the 1886 case Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific, in which a railroad company argued that a particular tax law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause. “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the [clause] applies to these corporations,” Chief Justice Morrison Waite said from the bench. “We are all of opinion that it does.” Since then, courts have also used the Constitution’s Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and its commerce and contract clauses, to expand corporate rights. Linzey believes these rulings are rooted in the very structure of the Constitution, which he says “puts the rights of property and commerce over the rights of people, communities and nature.”

The Constitution also concentrates power by declaring itself, along with federal statutes, “the supreme law of the land.” And starting in 1868, a judicial doctrine known as Dillon’s Rule held local governments subservient to state legislatures, which “breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist,” Linzey adds.

With communities holding so little authority, Linzey and his colleagues decided that the only way to fight environmental threats was through open defiance. He compares this to Northern jurors who refused to convict defendants in fugitive slave cases, suffragists who risked arrest to vote and African-Americans who sat down at segregated lunch counters. “Change does not happen by silver-tongued lawyers going into courthouses,” he says. “The only way law changes is through disobedience.” There was no reason, he concluded, that disobedience couldn’t come from local governments—and he found eager allies in Pennsylvania’s Republican-leaning farm country.

LINZEY HAD STARTED RECEIVING CALLS from elected supervisors worried about the arrival of factory hog farms in their rural townships. The officials had tried to stave off the invasions by strictly regulating manure disposal, only to find their efforts pre-empted by Pennsylvania law. Now some were willing to butt heads with the state government. Linzey drafted an ordinance that would ban corporate farming altogether, drawing from similar laws passed by nine Midwestern states. About twenty townships enacted the measure, he estimates, followed by eighty that banned the importing of corporate-hauled sewage sludge for use as fertilizer on farm fields. (Despite industry assurances, some scientists consider the noxious sludge toxic. Two Pennsylvania teens had recently died after exposure to such sludge.) A few townships went further, refusing altogether to recognize the personhood of corporate sludge haulers.

Predictably, Pennsylvania’s state government invoked its supremacy. It passed a law in 2005 empowering the attorney general to sue local governments that restrict “normal agricultural operations,” then took legal action against two townships, East Brunswick and Packer. Both withdrew their sludge bans, though Packer’s supervisors voted not to recognize the attorney general’s authority to restrict their autonomy. A court voided that measure.

News of the Pennsylvania rebellion reached other places. In Barnstead, New Hampshire (population 4,600), a home-schooling mother named Gail Darrell, who lives in a Revolutionary War–era cabin with her piano-tuner husband, watched with alarm as a water bottler called USA Springs announced plans to extract 310,000 gallons a day from three bedrock wells in nearby Nottingham. A report by civil engineer Thomas Ballestero warned that the operations could deplete and contaminate the local water supply. Yet the project seemed to be moving forward.

Darrell had never been involved in local politics. But her children were getting older, leaving her with free time. So she volunteered to sit on a committee studying how Barnstead could protect its own water. There she learned about CELDF and invited Linzey to speak to the town’s selectmen. Linzey’s call to outlaw corporate privilege found a receptive audience in freedom-loving New Hampshire. (The state constitution authorizes its citizens to form a new government when the existing one starts serving private interests.) “It’s always been a bit ornery up here,” says Gordon Preston, who chaired the board of selectmen at the time. Preston had reservations about CELDF’s approach: “The biggest fear of a small town is that they get their asses hauled into court and have little or no money to defend themselves.” But he also shared Linzey’s concern about corporate power and supported the principle of local self-government.

CELDF’s Gail Darrell: “I didn’t really understand about the Constitution till I went through the school—that it wasn’t about freedom.”

Darrell worked with the selectmen to put an anti-bottling ordinance on the 2006 town meeting agenda. Shortly before the vote, Linzey and historian Richard Grossman came to Barnstead to teach CELDF’s Democracy School, an intensive seminar that traces the history of corporate and government power. It was a clarifying moment for Darrell. “I didn’t really understand about the Constitution till I went through the school—that it wasn’t about freedom,” she says. “We grow up with that IV drip in our arm that tells us that we live in the greatest democracy that ever was.” The seminar gave Darrell the momentum she needed to defend the ordinance, which passed overwhelmingly at the town meeting and was strengthened two years later. Barnstead not only banned corporate water withdrawals and stripped bottling companies of their presumed constitutional rights; it also threatened secession from any government that tries to overturn the ban or “intimidate the people of Barnstead.” The measure was among the first to confer civil rights on natural systems like aquifers and rivers. Nottingham, which had initially rebuffed CELDF, followed suit with a similar measure.

“New Hampshire has always had an independent spirit,” Darrell says. “The soil here is crap, and you really have to work hard to farm. When people came up here to settle, they were coming into no-man’s land. You had to have enough gumption to stick it out, to stand up for yourself, and to make it through the winter. That spirit has carried out into the way we treat government. We believe that we have the inalienable right to govern ourselves. So to hear the language of the ordinance—that didn’t seem foreign to people.”

USA Springs later filed for bankruptcy, so it is hard to know whether these ordinances had any impact. But Darrell, who became CELDF’s New England organizer, claimed a more tangible victory in Shapleigh, Maine, where residents passed a rights-based ordinance in 2009. Their target, the Nestlé subsidiary Poland Spring, pulled up its test wells and left four months later. “Without the town’s permission to proceed on that project,” says Mark Dubois, the company’s natural-resource manager, “we had no project.”

Nestlé’s withdrawal felt particularly sweet because Shapleigh’s citizens had defied both the company and their own elected officials. When the board of selectmen refused to put the rights-based ordinance to a public vote, calling it unconstitutional, bottling opponents convened their own town meeting and passed it 114-66. “Nobody is covering our asses out here,” says Charles Mullins, a retired machinist who later served one term as selectman. “When the people up high don’t do their jobs, then we’ve got to get out in the streets and do it ourselves.”

Victories like Shapleigh’s have inspired other threatened communities, but they’re not really part of CELDF’s long-term game plan. For Linzey, disobedient lawmaking is an organizing tactic, not a legal one. He knows municipalities violate the law when they assert supremacy over state and federal governments. He expects “lawsuits galore” and assumes judges won’t permit these affronts to the Constitution. But he also believes that every courtroom defeat will trigger a bigger backlash against the status quo, leading to more municipal defiance. Over time, he expects to build the critical mass necessary to amend state constitutions and eventually the federal one.

CELDF considers this the only path to environmental sustainability, and its leaders freely criticize liberals who believe otherwise. “We’re seen as not able to play well with others,” says Ben Price, who leads the nonprofit’s efforts in Pennsylvania. He admits that CELDF’s uncompromising style can be off-putting, but he doesn’t care. “Frankly, I’m not willing to suggest that the traditional progressive strategy is just as good” as the one CELDF is pursuing, and “we’re just giving another tool in the toolbox—I don’t agree with that. If trying to regulate the rate of destruction was working so well, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in environmentally.”

Price says that when he chats with mainstream environmentalists, “what I constantly hear is, ‘We need to have a seat at the table. If we’re not sitting down when they’re talking about these rules and regs, we’re left out. Is that what you want?’ My answer is yes. We need to stop legitimizing what they’re doing by being invited to the table of power, and then having no power.”

The criticism, though, runs both ways. Some progressives call CELDF’s tactics pie-in-the-sky at best, dangerous at worst. “I’m concerned about how this can suck energy out of other avenues for change,” says Jon Snyder, a Spokane City Council member who believes the resources spent on a CELDF-sponsored ballot initiative cost his council the chance for its “first progressive majority.” The 2011 measure would have amended the city charter to strip rights from corporations and give them to waterways, neighborhoods and workers. It lost by 1,000 votes out of 58,700 cast. That’s a thin margin, but wider than the eighty-nine votes that would have elected a fourth progressive to the seven-member council. The liberal bloc has lost 4–3 votes on marriage equality, saving union jobs, utility rate reform, historic preservation, alternatives to incarceration and job-placement services for the poor, Snyder says.

Constitutional scholar Kent Greenfield believes CELDF’s shortcomings go beyond misplaced energy. “I totally understand people’s revulsion against corporations’ misdeeds,” says the Boston College law professor. “I think, though, that we shouldn’t be squandering this political moment on organizational tools that, if implemented, would be a disaster. The reason we have a national government is because there are certain things we ought to decide at the national level and we can’t let people opt out of.” America’s racial history, he says, is exhibit number one; if Barnstead can threaten to secede, so can a town that wants to resegregate its schools. “This is what we fought the Civil War over, for goodness’ sake. This is what the civil rights movement was about. We cannot let the George Wallaces of the world stand in the schoolhouse door and say, ‘Our community norm of segregation is going to control here in the face of the national norm of equality.’ The assertion of power to rewrite the Constitution within one’s own community is a nonstarter—and ought to be.”

Linzey has heard the racial analogy before and rejects it. He argues that CELDF’s ordinances expand rights, at least to flesh-and-blood humans. The Constitution and federal laws should be used, he says, to overturn local restrictions of rights. “Vehicles are only as good,” he says, “as the values that animate them.”

IN THE DECADE SINCE IT FIRST TOOK AIM at corporate privilege, CELDF has jumped beyond its rural roots. It crossed the Rubicon in 2010, when Pittsburgh’s City Council unanimously passed a rights-based anti-fracking ordinance. “It was a very, very assertive bill,” says sponsor Doug Shields, who has since retired from the council. “It didn’t mince words. And there was talk that if you do this, you’ll be challenged the day after your vote.” Sure enough, last year Pennsylvania’s legislature passed a bill nullifying almost all local regulation of oil and gas extraction. (The state’s Public Utility Commission says this includes the Pittsburgh ordinance.) The new law is currently in litigation.

Even before the Pittsburgh foray, CELDF started working internationally. After a handful of townships had given civil rights to “natural communities and ecosystems”—an idea floated forty years ago by legal scholar Christopher Stone in an essay titled “Should Trees Have Standing?”—CELDF was invited by an NGO to help draft a similar provision in Ecuador’s Constitution. “Ecuador has been treated by multinational corporations as a cheap hotel,” says associate director Mari Margil. “They come in, they make a giant mess, and then they leave.” The new Constitution, adopted in 2008, gives nature the right to “respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles.” Courts have used that provision to crack down on illegal mining and road construction. Yet resource extraction continues, including the opening of 8 million acres of unspoiled rainforest to oil drilling. Margil and Linzey have also talked with activists in Nepal, Italy, India and New Zealand.

The heart of CELDF’s work, though, remains in small American communities like those affected by the Northern Pass. Besides Sugar Hill, two other towns outlawed unsustainable energy projects by popular vote last year. Three others rejected or tabled the ordinance. For all of New Hampshire’s iconoclasm, not everyone wants to register dissent through a vehicle that could be overturned in court. “Unfortunately, the state trumps anything the towns do,” says Tom Mullen, developer of a resort that lies in the transmission line’s path. “I want to focus on things that will stop this project now.” For Mullen, that means working with the state government, which in 2012 led to a victory: legislators banned the use of eminent domain to obtain right-of-way for unneeded transmission projects.

A sign in Sugar Hill protests the Northern Pass.

Still, CELDF keeps minting activists who want nothing to do with government as usual. Alexis Eynon, a middle-school art teacher, started attending Democracy Schools—following them around New England—when she learned the Northern Pass would come within a mile of her home in Thornton. Eynon built her house from straw bale, framing it with salvaged timber from her five wooded acres and heating it with a geothermal pump and a wood stove. “The original concept was to disturb the land as little as possible,” she says, which makes the nearby utility corridor that much harder to bear. “It takes a spectacular treasure that to me seems so rare in our country—these untouched places—and makes it mundane. It becomes like every other place that’s been destroyed by some kind of industrial project.”

Hearing Linzey speak, and attending the Democracy Schools, convinced Eynon that “nobody’s going to help us here. We have to help ourselves.” In March, she plans to present the rights-based ordinance at Thornton’s town meeting in the hope that it will follow the lead of Sugar Hill, thirty miles away. Eynon knows that some of her neighbors are wary of a lawsuit and that others support the Northern Pass outright. She still considers such ordinances New Hampshire’s only hope.

“The whole regulatory business feels like being a hamster in a hamster wheel,” she says. “I want to put my track shoes to the pavement and just start running.”

At the Republican National Convention, Ron Paul delegates find dissent is unwelcome within the party ranks.

Originally published in IndyWeek.

Daniel Rufty, a delegate from Charlotte, called for a formal voter after 10 Ron Paul supporters from Maine were unseated. Rufty’s calls went unheeded. Photos by Barry Yeoman.

IT WAS JUST A FEW YEARS ago that Bret McGraw began his political conversion. The 30-year-old cook, who lives in Durham and works at Whole Foods Market, once considered himself a liberal. In 2008 he voted for Barack Obama, a decision he has come to regret.

“I’m almost ashamed to say it,” he told me last week, reflecting on that vote. We were meeting in Tampa, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, where McGraw was a delegate pledged to Texas congressman Ron Paul. “I’ve never seen a president so blatantly say one thing and then do the complete opposite.”

Our lingering presence in Afghanistan; the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay; the signing of a bill authorizing indefinite military detention without trial—this was not how McGraw imagined an Obama presidency.

Even before 2008, McGraw’s younger brother had told him about Paul, the 77-year-old physician whose swashbuckling libertarianism has galvanized a large and devoted following. McGraw began reading articles and watching YouTube videos, learning about what Paul calls the dangers of central banking and a 14-figure national debt. “It was like someone throwing ice water on me,” McGraw says. “He seemed to be telling me things that were almost like a forbidden fruit in the garden of knowledge.”

Among Paul’s messages was that his supporters should become part of the electoral process. If they showed up at Republican precinct and county meetings—the sparsely populated bottom floors of the U.S. electoral system—they could climb their way up until they became RNC delegates. It’s the same strategy the religious right successfully used in the 1980s and ’90s.

McGraw hadn’t known such a system existed. “I thought it was some sort of mysterious Babylonian secret,” he said. He began attending county, then district and state meetings until he landed a spot representing North Carolina’s 6th Congressional District at the RNC.

That’s how a political newbie—who plays in two metal bands and once sold a painting called “Muppet Road Kill”—found himself a Paul delegate in Tampa last week.

He wasn’t alone. Of North Carolina’s 107 RNC delegates and alternates, roughly one-fourth were loyal to Paul—a far greater proportion than the 11 percent of the vote Paul received during the state’s Republican primary, thanks to deft grassroots organizing. Even though some of those delegates were pledged to other candidates, they nonetheless hoped to carry Paul’s libertarian message to Tampa.

“I like talking to people who disagree with me,” McGraw told me that Sunday. “I try to take the opportunity to have insightful discussion.” He knew his week would be tightly programmed—and not with the chewy conversations he craved. “I was disappointed to learn that the majority of time here for me is going to be parties and Kid Rock performances and Lynyrd Skynyrd performances,” he said.

For McGraw—and for all of North Carolina’s delegates loyal to Paul—the next four days would provide an up-close view of how American presidents are nominated. They would see how crisply the Romney-Ryan campaign tried to stage-manage the message voters received during the RNC. And they would learn what happens when dissenting voices like their own try to get heard.

EACH MORNING, NORTH CAROLINA’S DELEGATES held a pep-rally breakfast at their hotel in St. Petersburg, sponsored by a different corporate donor. (The Democrats do the same.) They listened to a parade of GOP celebrities: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, evangelical activist Ralph Reed, Mitt Romney’s son Josh, former tea party candidate Herman Cain. This was often accompanied by inspirational words from state party chairman Robin Hayes, a former congressman from a prominent textile-manufacturing family in Concord.

“President Obama is doing everything he can to turn the American Dream into the European nightmare,” Hayes told delegates Monday, the day before the convention opened.

As Monday’s breakfast was winding down, delegate Daniel Rufty raised his hand. It was only Day 1, but he already had something urgent on his mind.

A 26-year-old Army veteran from Charlotte, Rufty had begun questioning his own youthful view of war—which he described, with some embarrassment, as “bomb everybody”—while undergoing rehabilitation for a knee injury at the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Jackson, S.C. There, he met soldiers dealing with emotional scars from the battlefield. “These soldiers are put in moral predicaments that no one should go through,” Rufty realized. “The people we are bombing have friends, children, grandchildren.” He found himself drawn to Paul’s belief that “unconstitutional, undeclared wars” were bankrupting America and fostering global resentment.

Still, Rufty believed that Rick Santorum had the best chance to stop Romney, whom he considers “just like Obama.” At his district convention, Rufty won a spot as a Santorum delegate. Now, with Pennsylvania’s former U.S. senator out of the race, he planned to vote for Paul.

Today, though, he was upset by two recent developments at the RNC. One was a series of proposed changes in the party’s rules that seemed designed to keep insurgent candidates like Paul from gaining traction. The other was the GOP’s decision to unseat 10 Paul delegates from Maine because of what the national party called “serious credentialing, ballot and floor security issues” at the state convention.

Rufty stood up at the breakfast meeting. “I have a friend in Maine,” he told the delegates. “It’s his first time getting involved in the party. And he was uncredentialed two days ago. He paid for his hotel. He paid for his flight.”

Rufty’s friend was being replaced by a Romney delegate. “I find it really disgusting. I think it’s a kind of a stomp on our democratic process.”

“That’s not exactly the correct story,” said Ada Fisher, a delegate from Salisbury and a national committeewoman. “They had a hearing and they made a decision. You can talk about it, but you are not going to change it.” Fisher didn’t explain why the delegates were unseated. “But it was discussed and I thought it was fair.”

“Keep your eye on the prize,” said Hayes, the state GOP chairman. A unified party, he explained, was necessary to win the election. He didn’t want to see a rebellion within his own ranks.

“There is fruitful gain in this,” Rufty countered. “We can vote down the credentials report and open it up for the discussion at the convention.”

“I would not do that,” said Hayes. “I reject that idea. It’s not really productive.”

“We’re the delegates,” Rufty said, half under his breath.

Hayes was not happy to have a fractured delegation. But he agreed to hold another meeting that afternoon to discuss the proposed rules changes.

That’s when any semblance of unity dissolved.

HAYES OPENED THE AFTERNOON MEETING with another appeal for solidarity. “This late in the game, if you don’t remember anything else, remember: Support your leadership,” he said. “If you think I’m being heavy-handed, I am.”

Nor did Hayes want this meeting made public; it was a “family discussion,” he said. A Paul supporter videotaped it anyway, and I negotiated to stay when Hayes ordered me to leave.

The surprise guest at the meeting—to Hayes’ chagrin—was Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan White House staffer from Virginia who now sits on the Republican National Committee. Blackwell opposed the rules changes. He said they were designed to concentrate power in the hands of establishment candidates like Romney and make it “much more difficult for anything to rise from the bottom to the top.”

Blackwell told the North Carolinians that one “horrifying” new rule would allow presidential candidates to “disavow and remove” delegates chosen by their own state parties. According to a Romney attorney, the purpose was to prevent activists from packing state conventions and picking up delegate seats to which they were not entitled. But that’s not how Blackwell viewed it. He believed the new rule would allow the nominee to snatch delegate seats away from local volunteers—and turn them over to wealthy campaign donors. In effect, the nominating process would be turned over to the highest bidders.

“Our grassroots activists, who were newly active because they wanted to participate in the party, are going to be infuriated,” he said.

Another proposal, which Blackwell called “a disaster,” would allow national committee members to change the party rules between conventions with a 75 percent vote. Currently, only delegates can change the rules every four years at the national convention. GOP officials say they wanted more flexibility: “Four years is a long time,” party spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told CNN.

But Blackwell saw the new proposal as yet another attempt to concentrate power in the hands of the Republican establishment—stripping grassroots volunteers of any real say in how their party is run. “It is a power grab which opens the door to many future power grabs,” he said. Because he has “the power of the purse,” Blackwell said, “the national chairman can get a three-quarters vote for anything that he wants. On a whim, he can get it.”

After Blackwell finished, Hayes asked him to leave—then scolded whoever had invited the Virginian without asking permission. Hayes again urged the delegates to support the rules changes. “The discussion was fair,” he said. “All sides were heard. Compromises were made. So back to the issue at hand: defeating Barack Obama.”

Hayes was preaching now, his voice reaching fire-and-brimstone volumes. “Folks, you elect a leadership to lead,” he continued. “I have gotten to know, over a period of years, [Republican National Committee chairman] Reince Priebus. He brought this party back from the grave. With hard work. With perspiration. With incredible dedication.” Challenging the rules, Hayes warned, would “undo what he has done.”

Jeffrey Palmer, a soft-spoken Paul alternate from Durham, raised his hand. “I really respect you,” he told Hayes. But giving veto power to national politicians could be devastating. “It’s the lifeblood of this party that we bring new people in,” Palmer said. “This is grassroots versus people at the top. And for someone to work that hard, go through the process, and then to have a presidential candidate come in say, ‘Uh, no, we’d rather have my crony over there, my fundraiser over here, my lawyer over here, to fill those slots, so they can ram through my position,’ that’s just wrong.”

As Palmer spoke, Hayes walked over and put an arm around his shoulder. But the chairman didn’t concede his point. Nor did the delegation’s pro-Romney majority, which—after an hour of conversation—voted to side with the leadership.

91-year-old Rebecca Christenbury: “You were raised to be a socialist. I was raised to be free.”

WHEN YOU SPEND A WEEK TALKING with Ron Paul supporters, as I did in Tampa, conventional notions of left and right start to evaporate. The congressman’s fundamental message is that government does more harm than good: It warps the economy, restricts civil liberties and imposes our national will in ways that invite “blowback” from around the world.

Paul’s economic philosophy says a free market transmits signals, in the form of interest-rate fluctuations, which allow people to make rational decisions. When a central bank intervenes in that market, he argues, the signals get jammed and the economy goes haywire. That’s why Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve System, which his website says “fuels our economy’s boom-bust cycle and has helped devalue our dollar by over 95 percent.”

Paul takes aim at many—but not all—restrictions on individual freedoms: airport searches, the PATRIOT Act and laws governing what we put into our bodies. “Personal liberty, when it returns, once again you’ll be able to drink raw milk,” he said at a pre-RNC rally I attended at the University of South Florida’s Sun Dome. “You’ll be able to make rope out of hemp … You will be allowed, without a government permit, to buy nutritional products, when you please and what you please. No longer will government assume they have the responsibility of protecting you against yourself.”

Paul opposes abortion rights, saying the unborn also deserve liberty. He calls the right to own firearms “God-given.” And he wants to eliminate chunks of the federal government, including the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education. He told CNN in January that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “destroyed the principle of private property and private choices.”

His leeriness of war attracts young adults like McGraw and Rufty. But Paul attracts older voters too, including Rebecca Christenbury, a 91-year-old alternate delegate from Charlotte.

“I can remember living in a free country,” Christenbury told me when we met last week. “You were raised to be a socialist. I was raised to be free. We had no sales tax. We had no gasoline tax.” She paused. “We were free.”

As an adolescent, Christenbury’s mother told her that President Roosevelt would fix the country with his New Deal. “Mother, that’s not right,” she recalled saying, “to take money away from one person and give it to another person.”

Christenbury’s distrust of government eventually led her to the virulently anti-communist John Birch Society, which was founded in 1958. (Among the targets it called “Com-symps” were President Eisenhower and civil rights leaders.) Reading the society’s newsletter, Christenbury learned about Paul. She has been a fan ever since.

Like the rest of North Carolina’s pro-Paul delegates, Christenbury is personable and sympathetic, even though I don’t share many of her views. But Paul also draws supporters from the social fringes. These include white supremacists who read race-baiting articles in Paul’s newsletter during the 1980s and 1990s, which he claims not to have written and has since disavowed. He doesn’t welcome these supremacists, but he has embraced people whose brand of libertarianism runs toward the insurrectionist.

The Saturday before the RNC, I attended an unsanctioned festival of Paul enthusiasts just outside Tampa. There I met Larry Pratt, founder of Gun Owners of America, a group that considers the National Rifle Association too wishy-washy. (Paul touts the group’s support.)

“The Second Amendment says the gun should be pointed at the government,” Pratt told me, with the county sheriff serving as the “wall of interposition.” He talked about an Indiana sheriff, Brad Rogers, who threatened to arrest Food and Drug Administration agents for inspecting a farm that sold raw milk possibly linked to a bacteria outbreak. If a sheriff is willing to deputize his armed constituents, Pratt said, “the feds can be put back in their box.”

When I told several North Carolina Paul loyalists about that conversation, they distanced themselves from what they called the extremist edge of Paul’s big tent. “The Paul people are peaceful people,” said Rufty. “They’d rather fight the intellectual revolution.”

Bret McGraw (in bow tie): “It’s disappointment in America. It’s a bit of betrayal.”

BY TUESDAY’S OPENING SESSION of the RNC, the proposed rule changes had been scaled back. Presidential candidates would not be allowed to handpick their own delegates after all. But the national committee could still amend its rules without the delegates’ approval—and that, to some Paul (and tea party) supporters, made the compromise unpalatable.

The convention would vote on these new rules. But first it had to approve or reject the decision to unseat the original Maine delegates. “All those in favor will signify by saying ‘aye,’” said national committee chairman Priebus.

The hall erupted with ayes.

Priebus smiled. “Those opposed, ‘no,’” he said.

This time it erupted with shouts of “no.” Standing on the floor, I couldn’t tell which side sounded louder.

“In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it,” Priebus announced, officially unseating the original Maine delegates.

Under the RNC’s rules, any delegate can call for a formal vote, in which each side stands up to be counted. Rufty, the Army veteran, jumped up, cupped his mouth and shouted, “Division!”—the official word for this procedure. He was joined by delegates from around the country. When Priebus ignored their calls, much of the Texas delegation stood and started chanting, “Point of order! Point of order!” The majority drowned them out with a counter-chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Rufty shouted again. Hayes, the state party chairman, turned to him.

“It’s over,” Hayes said. “Don’t embarrass us.”

“I’m calling for division,” Rufty said.

“We don’t need division,” Hayes replied.

“It’s not debatable,” Rufty said. He was correct. But the convention rolled along.

An identical sequence happened with the rule changes: a too-close-to-call voice vote, shouts of “Division,” drowning chants of “U.S.A.,” and a chairman (this time House Speaker John Boehner) who didn’t acknowledge the dissent.

As the commotion raged on, Bret McGraw fell silent. The Durham cook had assumed this was how conventions worked. Still, he was disappointed. “It isn’t just disappointment in the Republican Party,” McGraw told me. “It’s disappointment in America. It’s a bit of betrayal, even with the expectation.” He wondered why the GOP, which needs a broad coalition to win this election, was so aggressively alienating one of its constituencies.

“It’s so confusing to me,” he said.

Later, Rufty would show me a video someone had taken of the teleprompter during the rules vote. It said, in part, “In the opinion of the chair, the ‘ayes’ have it.” Speaker Boehner was just reading a preordained outcome.

THE ROLL-CALL VOTE NOMINATING the presidential candidate is the raison d’être for any national political-party convention. It’s also one of the emotional high points. Each state gets its turn in front of the cameras. A spokesperson offers a poetic tribute to his or her home state. Then that delegation’s votes are officially recorded.

The roll call came a few hours after Tuesday’s fractious rules vote. At least now, the Paul supporters figured, their votes would count.

“Madame Chairman, the great state of North Carolina, where the weak grow strong and the strong grow weak, was Tar Heel blue in 2008,” said state party vice chairman Wayne King. He passed the microphone to Justin Burr, a young state legislator from Albemarle.

“But Madame Secretary, this year North Carolina will be Wolfpack red in 2012,” Burr said. “And we cast seven votes for Paul, and we proudly cast 48—”

“Forty-eight!” the delegates echoed.

“—for the next president of the United States, Governor Mitt Romney.”

Daniel Rufty grimaced when he heard the vote total. Of North Carolina’s 55 voting delegates, only seven were formally pledged to Paul. But there were also four Paul supporters among the delegates pledged to Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Rufty was one of them. No one had polled those delegates to learn how they wanted to vote, now that their candidates had dropped out of the race. Party leaders automatically transferred all the non-Paul votes to Romney.

By Rufty’s calculation, he had spent thousands of dollars, eating Ramen noodles and raising money through a crowd-sourcing site—just to have his vote cast, without his consent, for the candidate he opposed. “I didn’t vote,” he said. “That’s what I was here to do.”

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Disgusted, stomped on, cheated. Those are the words that come to mind. We played by the rules. They bent their rules.”

The Paul supporters I interviewed generally felt that this was not a deliberate attempt by North Carolina’s Republican leaders to quash votes. They attributed it instead to inattention. But given how marginalized they already felt, the undercount hit a raw nerve.

When I asked Hayes, the state chairman, about those four votes, my question seemed to hit another nerve. “I’m always here. My phone is always on. If they wanted to talk to me, and they didn’t, whose fault is that?” he asked. “It’s not like I’m hiding.”

THE NORTH CAROLINA BREAKFASTS CONTINUED. At Wednesday’s, sponsored by Food Lion, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida accused President Obama of fomenting class resentments. “He tries to convince Americans that the reason they’re worse off is because other people are too well off,” Rubio said. “He tries to convince people that the way people in this country become rich is by making other people poor.”

The thunderous reception that Rubio received—followed by a race to the door to pose with him for pictures—gave the impression of a delegation united to defeat Obama. Still, the fault lines were evident.

“They’ve stacked the decks so high that the grassroots will be shut out,” said Mattie Rose Crowder, an alternate delegate (and Paul supporter) from Orange County. “It’s destroying the stability and integrity of this party.”

The Romney supporters, for their part, felt angry that Paul’s allies were tilting the convention off-script. Even being seen with a Paul delegate became grounds for suspicion. On the convention floor, two North Carolina Romney delegates confronted me. They had noticed me talking with the other camp, and this proved to them that I was not really a reporter. Rather, I was a pro-Paul infiltrator who had fraudulently scored press credentials. “You’re trying to disrupt the convention,” said Asheville delegate Bill Lack. “You don’t understand how conventions work.” (In his hometown paper, the Citizen-Times, Lack had likened the RNC to a Broadway show performed for the nation.)

Later, when I was trying to interview another Romney delegate, Lack blocked my access. The convention floor was packed, and I physically could not pass him without his consent. “He’s not really a journalist,” the Asheville delegate announced. When others tried to intervene on my behalf, Lack scowled silently. But he still wouldn’t let me through.

Asheville’s Bill Lack accused me of being a pro-Ron Paul infiltrator who was “trying to disrupt the convention.”

ON THE LAST NIGHT OF THE CONVENTION, the delegation’s floor seats were filled almost exclusively with Romney supporters. This was the nominee’s big moment, and many of the Paul supporters had given their floor passes to backers of the former Massachusetts governor—a “goodwill gesture,” said Durham’s Jeffrey Palmer.

With the exception of Clint Eastwood’s vulgar conversation with an imaginary President Obama, it was an evening of momentum: a stage full of Olympic athletes. Rubio’s tribute to his immigrant father. And then Romney, who left delegates snickering by saying, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.” The laughter transformed into cheers and whistles with the nominee’s follow-up line: “My promise is to help you and your family.”

Then 120,000 balloons, some the size of beach balls, wafted down from the rafters. For a few moments, the delegates became little kids. Even my accuser, Bill Lack, who had worn a sourpuss face all week, cracked a smile (though not at me).

Afterward, the North Carolinians held a poolside celebration at their St. Petersburg hotel. Around 2 a.m., I caught up with Daniel Rufty standing alone near the bar. He wasn’t exactly feeling the spirit.

“We criticize other countries for manipulating the vote, and then do it openly,” the Charlotte veteran told me. “All this stuff I thought—you vote, and your vote is counted—it’s a façade. It doesn’t happen.” But Rufty added that his RNC experience has inspired him to become more politically active. “It gives me the fuel I need to be the change in the world,” he said. “I need to be the change I want to see in North Carolina.”

Daniel Rufty calling for a point of order at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Video by Barry Yeoman.

More from the 2012 Republican National Convention

Day 1: Red meat at the tea party

Day 2: “All the laws we have today came from Judeo-Christian views”

Day 3: Preparing for armed revolution

Day 4: In his speech, Paul Ryan doesn’t let facts get in the way

Day 5: Tossed from the Art Pope-David Koch cocktail party

Originally published in Indyweek.

Sunlight Foundation reporter Keenan Steiner outside the Americans for Prosperity party. Photos by Barry Yeoman.

WHEN I LEARNED THAT Americans for Prosperity was hosting a cocktail party honoring Art Pope and David Koch during the Republican National Convention, it seemed like a natural event for me to cover. I used to write about Pope for IndyWeek, back when he was a state legislator from Raleigh and often the smartest (and nerdiest) Republican in the room.

Since then, Pope has made a national name for himself by working committedly to move the American political landscape to the right. Along with his family and its organizations, Pope has spent tens of millions of dollars on conservative causes, including efforts to weaken unions, relax environmental standards, and fight limits on campaign spending.

Pope has been credited with engineering the GOP takeover of the North Carolina General Assembly in 2010. As IndyWeek and the Durham-based Institute for Southern Studies have documented, this was accomplished in large part by attack-ad blitzes in a handful of key districts.

Republicans now control both chambers of the legislature for the first time since 1870. This new majority is responsible for the anti-gay Amendment 1, attacks on sea-level science, deep cuts to public education, and a green light for fracking.

But Pope’s national visibility comes primarily from his chairmanship of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a nonprofit that advocates for deregulation, low taxes and cuts in government spending. Co-founded by David Koch, an oil billionaire, APF is often cited as the behemoth behind the tea party movement. Pope and Koch are friends, and this week they were both delegates at the Republican convention in Tampa.

Yesterday’s reception was free and open to the public. Advance registration was required. Before the convention, I registered online. I heard nothing back. Figuring my name was probably on someone’s list, I decided to show up.

I wasn’t, in fact, on anyone’s list.

Nor was I alone. Arriving at the same time was Keenan Steiner, a staff writer with the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in government information. Steiner was hoping that attending the event would offer a rare glimpse of Koch in action.

“He’s the most important individual behind the Republican outside-money machine,” Steiner told me. “He and his friends are pledging to raise $400 million to help elect Republicans. He’s very secretive with the media. The public knows very little about him.”

Knowing who has access to Koch during the convention is important, the writer said: “Journalists should be interested in following him wherever he’s going.”

Art Pope on the floor of the Republican National Convention.

Steiner had successfully registered for the reception as a member of the public. The invitation was rescinded after he wrote an Aug. 17 blog post about AFP’s plans to spend $25 million on a media campaign criticizing President Obama. Steiner reported that AFP had spent $6.4 million in a single week’s advertising, including $741,030 in North Carolina. He based this on a document AFP filed with the Federal Election Commission, then amended five days later with the state-by-state details deleted. Steiner wrote that AFP had “accidentally” filed an initial document that was more specific than the law required.

After he posted his article, Steiner received a message from AFP’s director of public affairs, Levi Russell, rescinding his invitation. “Based on recent experience,“ Russell wrote, “you’re willing to write articles that are filled with inaccuracies, and not interested in making corrections.” Contrary to the blog post, Russell insisted, the initial filing was not a mistake.

Russell told Steiner to reapply as a reporter. His application was not approved.

Now Steiner was going to appeal in person. Walking into the building, he approached Matt Seaholm, AFP’s national field director and keeper of the guest list. “Right now we’re full, full, full,” Seaholm said, summarily turning the reporter away, as he did me. “There are 700 seats and we have 300 RSVPs.”

After some polite pleading by Steiner, Seaholm summoned Russell, the public affairs director, who stood his ground.

“Why are you recording this?” Russell asked, looking at the audio device in Steiner’s hand.

“Because I’m a reporter,” Steiner said.

“This isn’t a reportable event,” Russell shot back. “You’re not a credentialed reporter at this event.”

Told to leave the building, Steiner and I found ourselves in good company. Also excluded from the Koch-and-Pope mixer were journalists from Al Jazeera and Mother Jones. I imagined that, to those on the other side of the glass door, we looked like the very embodiment of the liberal media. We decided to stick around, on public property, watching to see who might show up.

That’s when an event worker told us we were unwelcome on the sidewalk outside the Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation, where the party was being held. If we persisted, she said, she would call the police. We persisted. She called the police.

The officer who showed up was soft-spoken and apologetic. “We all know the law,” he told us. We were welcome to stay, he explained, as long as we didn’t block the entrance to the Center. He didn’t want us to give the event worker an excuse to call him again. “She probably wanted to convince me to put you in the bag and run you off,” the officer said.

Inside, according to a blog post by The New York Times’ Nicholas Confessore, Koch spoke briefly with reporters and defended his political spending. “It’s a free society,” he said. “People can invest what they want.”

According to CNN, he also warned that the United States will experience “runaway inflation” if the national debt keeps growing. “And this country will see a terrible collapse. And I don’t want to see this country collapse like Greece is doing or become like Zimbabwe with runaway inflation.”

We didn’t get to hear him or Pope. But we did receive cold bottles of water from a sympathetic Center employee. “We all have differences of opinion,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be kind.”

More from the 2012 Republican National Convention

Day 1: Red meat at the tea party

Day 2: “All the laws we have today came from Judeo-Christian views”

Day 3: Preparing for armed revolution

Day 4: In his speech, Paul Ryan doesn’t let facts get in the way

Long Division: Ron Paul delegates find dissent is unwelcome within the party ranks

Originally published in Indyweek.

Delegate Bob Palisin: “Various fact-check groups themselves should be fact-checked.” Photo by Barry Yeoman.

IN 2009, I WAS RESEARCHING an article for AARP The Magazine about the impact of factory closings on older employers. Traveling around the country, I talked with unemployed workers who had skimped on food, lost health insurance, even suffered strokes because of the stress. During that time I kept a thick file of newspaper clippings, including stories about the 2008 closure of a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., that threw 4,000 people (including those who worked for suppliers) out of work. The New York Times interviewed one 24-year employee, Andy Richardson, who planned to move away to find a job, leaving his wife and daughters behind in Janesville. “I’ll miss my family,” he said, crying.

Manufacturing jobs were already hemorrhaging at the end of the Bush administration, when the Janesville plant was a poignant symbol. That’s why I took a doubletake when I heard GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan place the blame for the Wisconsin closure on President Obama.

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant,” Ryan said in his acceptance speech at last night’s session of the Republican National Convention. “Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another 100 years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

I watched Ryan’s speech from the seats where North Carolina’s alternate delegates were sitting. They were cheering and waving signs, more energized than I had seen them this week. “Electric,” said Vinnie DeBenedetto, a real-estate broker and former town council member from the Wake County suburb of Holly Springs. “It was just captivating. He hit the heart and soul of the delegates and guests. I think he’s the future of the Republican Party.”

“Paul Ryan’s speech was awesome. Paul Ryan is awesome,” said Zan Bunn, a computer consultant from Cary.

By the time I got back to my hotel, the Internet was buzzing about the speech. The nonpartisan fact-checking site PolitiFact, run by the Tampa Bay Times, had caught the inaccuracy about the Janesville plant—but there was more. I reviewed both PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. I also read analyses by major news organizations such as the Associated Press and Washington Post. It turns out Ryan’s speech was studded with errors. Even Fox News called it “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a political speech.”

Among them:

• Ryan said that Obama’s health-care reform law “funneled” $716 billion from Medicare services: “The biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.” In fact, notes the National Journal, none of the cuts come from benefits. What’s more, the Affordable Care Act makes it easier for seniors to afford preventive health services and prescription drugs. FactCheck.org quotes Medicare’s chief actuary as saying the reform law “substantially improves” the system’s finances. Besides, Ryan supported those cuts too.

• Ryan blamed Obama for last year’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. In reality, the rating agency Standard & Poor’s faulted both major parties for creating a political environment that was “contentious and fitful.” At the time, congressional Republicans were refusing to raise the country’s debt ceiling unless Democrats slashed social programs and investments. Ryan told CNBC then that he believed “lots of bond traders [and] economists” would accept a default of “a day or two or three or four.”

• Ryan said household incomes increased in Massachusetts when Mitt Romney was governor. In real dollars,they went down, according to PolitiFact.

• The candidate chastised Obama for failing to follow up on the “urgent report” of a bipartisan debt-reduction commission. That’s true. But Ryan neglected to mention that he had sat on that commission and voted against the recommendations. So did all the panel’s Republicans.

• Like many convention speakers, Ryan referred disparagingly to Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment. “At the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores—these didn’t come out of nowhere,” Ryan said. “A lot of heart goes into each one … After all that work, and in a bad economy, it sure doesn’t help to hear from their president that government gets the credit. What they deserve to hear is the truth. Yes, you did build that.”

Obama’s quote has been the bull’s-eye of this convention—the president has been characterized repeatedly as trying to snatch credit from small business people. But PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s The Fact Check all agree: When Obama said “that,” he was referring to infrastructure like roads and bridges that help support businesses. The president was advocating for more taxes on the wealthy to pay for these public investments. “We succeed because of our individual initiative,” Obama said in that July speech in Roanoke, Va., “but also because we do things together.” The biggest problem with Obama’s statement was its mangled grammar.
“Facts matter,” wrote National Journal’s editor-in-chief, Ron Fournier, last night. When it comes to budget matters, “Ryan ignored them and thus loses moral authority on his signature issue.”

When I arrived at the North Carolina delegation’s breakfast this morning, there was still considerable buzz around Ryan’s speech. I sat down next to Bob Palisin, a retired Presbyterian minister and former congressional candidate from Concord, near Charlotte. He was wearing his trademark green-and-red plaid jacket and a button with a Republican elephant and a Democratic donkey. “This is your brain,” it said next to the elephant. Alongside the donkey it said, “This is your brain on drugs.” Around his hat was a yellow paper band that said, “Ponzibamus Destruerus,” faux Latin for “Obamacare must be destroyed.”

He was excited about the speech. “It shows a bringing-back into the party, a youthful transition,” he said.

I told him about the factual errors. He was skeptical. “I know different fact-check groups have their own biases,” he said. “Various fact-check groups themselves should be fact-checked. I do not believe all fact-check groups are equal.”

I explained that the sites I had consulted were nonpartisan.

“I’m a history major, so I look into facts myself, rather than what you get from fact-check reports.”

I moved on. Helen Eckman is a former Pentagon employee who retired with her husband to the Eastern North Carolina town of Chocowinity. She had not heard about the factual discrepancies. “I’ll check myself,” she said. “I can’t imagine him getting up there, talking about that plant, and Obama was there and said da-da-da-all-this and then it closed. I just can’t imagine getting up in front of the whole world and saying that, and that wasn’t true. I’ll have to see precisely what he said and how he said it. But it doesn’t worry me. He’s a genius when it comes to finance and money matters, and I just think he’s what this country needs.”

What the country doesn’t need, Eckman said, is four more years of Obama, whose “you didn’t build that” comment both galls and delights her. (Those who believe the president was referring to infrastructure, she said, are “nitpicking.”) “It’s so wonderful,” she said. “Obama really gave us a gift. It’s been fabulous. It’s just so not correct that we didn’t build our own businesses, for heaven’s sakes. Sure, we need all roads and this, that, and the other thing that everyone provided. But, yeah, I just think it’s wonderful how they’ve used it. And I don’t think it’s out of context at all.”

Zan Bunn, the Cary consultant, had not had a chance to read any commentary about the speech. “I will give Paul Ryan the benefit of the doubt on his big night,” she said. “The conversation that America will have about the direction we take in November—there will be plenty of time to clear up any errors.”

“If it turns out that he was making false accusations against the president, would that be of concern for you?” I asked.

“It really wouldn’t be of concern,” she said.

“Because?”

“It really wouldn’t be of concern.”

I raised Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment. She told me she has “listened and relistened” to that comment, and disagrees with the fact-check groups. “He would have used different grammar if he was referring to the bridges,” she said. “He was clearly insulting business owners. They will not forget that.”

“I’ve gotten the sense, from reading the commentary this morning, that Republicans are more willing to forgive Mr. Ryan on the factual errors than Mr. Obama on his grammar,” I remarked.

“I think that’s accurate,” she said.

“Why do you think that’s true?”

“The president’s had four years and a campaign to get things right, to pass a budget, to create more jobs, to get his factual information correct. He has not performed. So on the night of Paul Ryan’s speech—yes, I think Republicans are likely to be forgiving of him.”

More from the 2012 Republican National Convention

Day 1: Red meat at the tea party

Day 2: “All the laws we have today came from Judeo-Christian views”

Day 3: Preparing for armed revolution

Day 5: Tossed from the Art Pope-David Koch cocktail party

Long Division: Ron Paul delegates find dissent is unwelcome within the party ranks

Originally published in Indyweek.

Delegate Richard Littiken: “If the government decides to take away your rights, you can decide to take them back.” Photo by Barry Yeoman.

I’VE COVERED NATIONAL POLICTICAL PARTY conventions since 1980. I know how amped-up the rhetoric can get on both sides. But I have never heard so much fear of an incumbent as I’ve witnessed during this week’s Republican National Convention.

“Every election we hear that this is the most important election in our lifetime,” Sharon Day, who co-chairs the Republican National Committee, told delegates last night. “This election is more than that. It is the most important election in our nation’s lifetime.”

She compared GOP activists to the United States’ Founding Fathers: “What they started, what they believed in, we must defend.”

At breakfast this morning, David Rouzer, a state senator and congressional candidate from Johnston County, warned the North Carolina delegation, “The United States is turning toward socialism. We’re not going to let that happen.”

In one-on-one conversations, party activists describe the prospect of President Obama’s reelection in apocalyptic terms, predicting something approaching doom.

Trying to understand the roots of that fear, I’ve been asking North Carolina Republicans how they imagine a second Obama term would play out. Nobody put it more starkly than Richard Littiken, a delegate from Sanford, 35 miles south of Chapel Hill, and the vice president of a family-run heating and air-conditioning company. I had been following the 43-year-old Littiken on Twitter (@Pyr8Pyr8), reading about his recent support for Pussy Riot, school vouchers and Todd Akin. (The latter is striking because Littiken is pro-choice. “But I definitely believe that the media people jumped on him in an effort to put forth their preferred candidate,” he said.)

So what does Littiken fear from four more years of an Obama presidency?

In short: He believes he will die prematurely if the president wins. And he fears he’ll be stripped of the weapons he might need to help wage an armed revolution.

Littiken has a type of cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma. He describes it as “terminal.” Doctors have told him there are limited medical treatments. “So the idea of Obamacare, a fairly controlled medical bureaucracy, is absolutely frightening,” he told me.

It’s worth noting that the Affordable Care Act—which places tougher rules on insurance companies and provides for small-business tax credits, rebates for seniors to buy prescription drugs, and permission for states to expand Medicaid if they choose—does not create a government-run health-care system. (There’s also considerable academic contention about whether national systems fare worse than our own when it comes to cancer care.) But Littiken nonetheless worries about stories he has heard. “I met a lady in D.C. who had breast cancer,” he said. “She’s from Canada. She had to come to America to get treatment because she would have had to wait so long that she would have been dead by the time she received treatment in Canada.”

According to a 2011 study by the non-profit Canada Institute for Health Information, 98 percent of residents who need radiation for cancer receive it within a clinically appropriate time frame.

Still, this is not about statistics for Littiken; it’s about his greater sense—a sense that many Republicans have expressed—that Obama doesn’t care about his welfare. Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” a distortion of the president’s vision for more deliberative end-of-life care, nonetheless maintains a hold on many conservatives.

Littiken told me that Obama once told a voter that perhaps her 105-year-old mother should be euthanized with a pill rather receiving a pacemaker. That comment, Littiken worries, portends what would happen to him. “He would kill me off,” the delegate says of Obama. “I wouldn’t be treated, so he’d basically kill me off sooner. That got me pretty fired up.”

The story, if true, would have been horrifying, so I decided to fact-check it. The woman is real; he name is Jane Sturm. During an ABC News broadcast, she asked Obama whether priority could be given to patients like her mother who displayed “a certain joy of living.”

“I don’t think we can make judgments based on people’s spirit,” the president responded. “That would be a pretty subjective decision.” He stressed that end-of-life decisions are difficult. “I don’t want bureaucracies making those decisions,” he said, and stressed that the current system sometimes does that by default. “We often make these decisions by just letting people run out of money or making the deductibles so high or the out-of-pocket expenses so onerous that they just can’t afford the care.”

Obama told Sturm that patients, families, and physicians need to make more informed choices: “At least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

Google “Obama” and “take a pill,” and you’ll find many conservative bloggers interpreting the president’s comment as Littiken did. When U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren, a California Republican, claimed on the House floor that the president would deny a pacemaker to a healthy 100-year-old, the Tampa Bay Times’ nonpartisan PolitiFact declared the statement false.

Just as important to Littiken is his belief that Obama “attacks the Second Amendment rights” of citizens. When I asked him how, he said, “I’m not specifically positive now,” but cited Attorney General Eric Holder’s statements of support for gun control. Littiken himself owns a Sig Sauer P220 pistol.

Again, I went to PolitiFact, the fact-checking site that in 2009 won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. “Gun talk has been almost anathema at the White House,” it said. “Obama signed a bill in 2009 that allows people to carry loaded guns into most national parks; in 2011, he largely avoided a discussion—to the anger of many activists—about strengthening gun laws following the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Obama received a failing grade from the nation’s preeminent gun control group, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.”

I asked Littiken why gun ownership was important to him. “If free people don’t have the right to possess firearms, then their government can do to them whatever they wish,” he said.

“How does a free people possessing firearms help keep the government in check?” I asked.

“Well, if the government decides to take away your rights, you can decide to take them back.”

“What does that mean?”

“In practice, it would have to be a revolution,” he said. “I’m not saying we’re that close.”

“What would bring us closer?”

“Well, if Obama”—he caught himself here—“or any administration keeps encroaching our liberties, you have the choice to be a mouse and take it, or you can stand up for your rights.” He cited the 2005 case Kelo vs. New London, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a city can use eminent domain to buy up a neighborhood for private redevelopment. He also mentioned the bailout and bankruptcy plan for General Motors, which was brokered by the Obama administration.

Preparing for armed insurrection is a serious matter, so later I asked Littiken if I had understood him correctly. “If you look at some of the stuff that the Founding Fathers wrote,” he said, “they talk about [how] we need armed citizens to make sure that our government doesn’t get too far out of control. If you go to the DMV, that’s enough reason to not let the government have too much control.” Before anyone takes up arms, “things gotta get way worse than they are now. But when the government keeps taking your rights away, your civil liberties away, and then when the economy keeps deteriorating, when people can’t put food on their table for their families and the government’s coming in and taking their home from them because they’re having to foreclose on them, it’s just around the corner.”

The next day, I told Littiken about my follow-up research. When I reported Obama’s actual words to Jane Sturm, he responded, “I’m just telling you what my interpretation is.” As for PolitiFact’s report on Obama’s gun-control record: “Stuff hasn’t happened yet,” he conceded. “Yet what happens when it does?”

More from the 2012 Republican National Convention

Day 1: Red meat at the tea party

Day 2: “All the laws we have today came from Judeo-Christian views”

Day 4: In his speech, Paul Ryan doesn’t let facts get in the way

Day 5: Tossed from the Art Pope-David Koch cocktail party

Long Division: Ron Paul delegates find dissent is unwelcome within the party ranks

Originally published in Indyweek.

Miriam Aikens with her husband Norris: “Woman was built to carry children.” Photo by Barry Yeoman.

FORTY YEARS AGO, WHEN SHE WAS A TEENAGER, Miriam Aikens had an abortion. Then she had another. “I was young,” she says. “I was uninformed.”

She was raised a devout Christian, and still “in the church” when she terminated the two unwanted pregnancies. Describing the aftermath, she mostly avoids the first-person pronoun. But the pain in her voice, even as she talks to a new acquaintance, is palpable.

“Woman was built to carry children, and to bear children,” says Aikens, a 55-year-old minister from Reidsville, N.C., about 60 miles northwest of Durham.

We are sitting in the lobby of the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront, where the North Carolina delegation to the Republican National Convention is headquartered. A rowdy bar is behind us, but Aikens’ mind is decades away. “Once life is conceived, it’s a spiritual connection. And once that connection is disrupted, there’s an emptiness there. And that’s felt, whether it’s covered up by excuses or by someone else saying, ‘Well, it’s OK, it’s all right.’ That emptiness is there because there’s a part of you that just died. I would always cover it with other things—we won’t get into those things. But during that period of time, I could still hear God calling me.”

It would be another decade—she remembers the date: Dec. 27, 1982—before Aikens’ born-again experience. With that came a sense of redemption. “God has forgiven me,” she says. “But I know the haunting that can be there when a woman recognizes after the fact what she has done. And I know the pain that can be there—personally know the pain.” Abortion, she has come to believe, is no different from murder.

I had been interviewing North Carolina’s delegates all evening. Most of those pledged to Mitt Romney (as Aikens is) had listed economic issues—industry bailouts, health-care reform, the stimulus package—as their key concerns. But millions of citizens also share Aikens’ priorities, and not all of them vote. Some GOP leaders believe an ambitious registration and get-out-the-vote effort among religious conservatives could help swing this election in Romney’s favor.

At a rally Sunday afternoon sponsored by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, founder Ralph Reed ticked off a list of complaints against President Obama, from his support of gay marriage to the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that insurance companies cover no-cost contraception.

“How in the world did we get to this point?” he asked. “Speaking candidly, we can’t point our finger at anyone else, because the church had allowed this to happen. Did you know that, in 2008, there were 17 million evangelical Christians who didn’t even bother to go to the polls?” (Nine million of those, he said, were registered but stayed home.) “I vowed after the 2008 elections that, as long as I have breath in my body, that was never going to happen in America again.”

Later, Reed told me that evangelicals can’t shift the electoral map alone; rather, they need to be part of an electoral strategy that includes moving more Hispanic, female and independent voters into the Romney camp. He said North Carolina is one of eight states his organization is targeting in a massive campaign to register conservative Christians.

Aikens needs no moving. She and her husband Norris are the pastors at Living By the Word Ministries, a nondenominational evangelical church in Reidsville. They have nine children, 27 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. “We have a love for them all that is unspeakable and full of joy, “ she says. “I cannot imagine any one of those children not being born into this world.”

I ask Aikens what matters to her besides abortion. No. 1, she says, is same-sex marriage. “It is my heart,” she explains. “God knew what he was doing when he ordained marriage, and it is the foundation of our society. If those that choose the lifestyle of homosexuality, if they choose to unite, I don’t see that it can validly be called marriage. They can call it what they want to. I’m not restricting them.”

I wonder aloud if the word “marriage” is really the sticking point, as she seems to imply. “If there was a mechanism by which same-sex couples could get all the same rights as married couples, but not call it marriage, would you support that?” I ask.

“No,” she quickly says.

“Because?”

“Although marriage may be a civil union, that civil union erupted from the spiritual union that is defined in the word of God. All the laws that we enjoy today, even the setup of our government, came from Judeo-Christian views that our founders established. And those views have lasted and they have endured, and they are the lifeblood of the prosperity of this nation.”

“Do you think that same-sex marriage would disrupt the prosperity of this nation?”

“I won’t speak to that.”

Aikens goes on to talk about how America’s leaders should look to the Bible to guide their policy in the Middle East. “The Word of God tells us that we should always bless Israel,” she says. “I believe that America has enjoyed the blessing of the Lord upon us because of our past relationship with Israel.”

“My [knowledge of] eschatology is not as good as it used to be,” I admit. (Eschatology is belief about the end times.) “But do I remember correctly that Israel looms large in the conditions that need to be set for the Second Coming?”

She smiles. “It does,” she says. “Eyes will always be set upon Israel for the Second Coming of Jesus. We should not be convincing Israel to divide the land that God has promised to them.”

Aikens won’t say who she supported originally for president. But she is fully on board with Romney today. She has no doubt that he and running mate Paul Ryan are Christians who share her social values. When I ask what might happen to the country if Obama wins reelection, she waves off the question. Romney and Ryan will win, she says, and “take this nation into a place of recovery, a place of prosperity. I’m not afraid at all.”

More from the 2012 Republican National Convention

Day 1: Red meat at the tea party

Day 3: Preparing for armed revolution

Day 4: In his speech, Paul Ryan doesn’t let facts get in the way

Day 5: Tossed from the Art Pope-David Koch cocktail party

Long Division: Ron Paul delegates find dissent is unwelcome within the party ranks

Originally published in Indyweek.

Unity rally, Tampa. Photo by Barry Yeoman.

VOLUNTEERS WEARING PLASTIC RAIN PONCHOS steered drivers into the sprawling parking lot of River Ministries International, a campus on the outskirts of Tampa that includes an evangelical church, a worship school, and a “Holy Ghost training center.” There were food trucks and merchandise tables, including one man selling “Anybody but Obama” sticky notes. (He gave me a sample, telling me to slap it onto the windshield of any car sporting an Obama bumper sticker. “Hey Voter!” it said. “I’ll pay for your contraceptives if you pay for my ammo.”)

A mortgage and real estate broker named Marshawn Hogans was selling anti-Obama T-shirts. He told me that the president and congressional Democrats posed a double threat to Christian businessmen like himself: First, they cut into his income with the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which gave federal bank regulatory agencies more regulatory authority over financial institutions. Then they sanctioned “perversion” with their support for gay marriage.

People arrived in groups, tickets in hand, backpacks open for inspection. They carried posters decrying “Obamacare.” Some wore colonial garb. (One carried a musket.) The approaching rains weren’t going to keep them away from last night’s Unity Rally, a showcase for Tea Party favorites like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, who were denied speaking slots at this week’s Republican National Convention.

Once Tropical Storm Isaac blows through Tampa, the week will belong to Mitt Romney. But the weekend definitely belonged to the Republican Party’s more spirited voices: the Tea Party, the evangelical right and libertarian supporters of Ron Paul. As the Romney camp tries to evoke a unified GOP during the convention, the more party’s more ideological wings want to make sure their voices don’t get lost in the kumbaya.

“We are not an unwanted second-class political party,” said Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman who dropped out of the presidential race after finishing sixth in the Iowa caucuses. “We are the conscience of the United States Constitution. We don’t apologize for that.” She ticked off a list of complaints about President Obama, including a stimulus package that amounted to “one boondoggle project after another” and a health-care reform law that she called “failed socialized medicine.” Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act, she said, “there’s only one option left for America to remain free, and that’s at the ballot box this November. We’re not going to stand by and see socialism implemented in our country.”

Obamacare made for good applause lines over and over. But the real cheering and stomping came when the language grew more visceral. It’s hard to imagine President Obama as anything close to a socialist—this is the man who appointed Timothy Geitner as his treasury secretary—but that message was sounded over and over through the night. “Friends, we are not going to go quietly into that dark night of socialist tyranny,” declared Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation. “We are not going to let the lamp of liberty be extinguished by those who believe in government of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.” (Ironically, Phillips has spoken in favor of restricting voting rights to landowners.)

“We have one simple message for the Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis of fiscal evil: You shall take my freedom, you shall take my liberty when you pry it from”—and here the crowd joined in—“my cold, dead hands.”

If Obama’s alleged embrace of socialism weren’t enough, Phillips also questioned the president’s patriotism: “For the first time, we have a leader in America who is committed to diminishing the United States of America,” he said. “We’ve got a leader up there who thinks that America is not the greatest nation in the world.” The sanctuary erupted into boos.

In the world view of last night’s speakers, the United States is divided: those who want to keep their hard-earned money and those who believe in what President Obama has called “shared prosperity.”

“You drive to work in the dark,” said radio host Neal Boortz. “You work yourself to the bone. You drive home in the dark. You make good decisions. You work 80 hours a week. You become prosperous. Obama takes your money and gives it to somebody else who is more likely to vote for him than you are. And that is shared prosperity.”

Boos from the audience. “I won’t share my wealth!” a woman behind me shouted.

“The Democrats—the looters, the moochers, the parasites—they’re going for access to your pocket. You’re going to vote to put a zipper on your pocket, to the extent that you can … Our republic is on the edge, and we have a president who’s dedicated to what he calls a fundamental transformation and what I call destruction.”

The star of the night, hands down, was former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who warned of a deep recession, maybe even a depression, if Obama is reelected. “Stupid people are ruining America,” he said to a sustained applause. “I’ve had some people say, ‘Listen, don’t you think that’s being insensitive?’ If they’re stupid, they’re just stupid. That’s not being insensitive. Somebody needs to tell them. They need to know the facts.”

More from the 2012 Republican National Convention

Day 2: “All the laws we have today came from Judeo-Christian views”

Day 3: Preparing for armed revolution

Day 4: In his speech, Paul Ryan doesn’t let facts get in the way

Day 5: Tossed from the Art Pope-David Koch cocktail party

Long Division: Ron Paul delegates find dissent is unwelcome within the party ranks

The average public school in this country is more than 40 years old—and showing its age. Roofs leak, walls are ridden with termites and lead paint, and rooms are chronically overcrowded. Parade looks at two communities that rebuilt their schools—and the lessons they can teach all of us.

Originally published in Parade.

Carter Ford shows off the new library at Kentucky’s Richardsville Elementary, the nation’s first public school that produces more energy than it consumes. Photos by Barry Yeoman.

JUST A FEW YEARS AGO, CALIFORNIA’S Santa Ana High School looked like it had long outlived its Art Deco grandeur. The 1935 building was dilapidated, overcrowded, and scarred with graffiti. Roofs leaked. Sewage backed up in pipes. Some buildings had no mechanical ventilation. The wiring was in “various levels of dysfunction,” says assistant superintendent Joe Dixon. “Computers would go down. Lighting would go down. In the few places where we had air-conditioning, that would go down.” In one building, makeshift classroom partitions forced teachers to shout over one another’s lessons. Between the noise and the heat, “it was hard to focus on my work,” says Elvis Carranza, 16, an incoming senior at Santa Ana. “It made me not want to go to school at all.” What’s more, 34 portable buildings (i.e., trailers) had turned parts of the campus into a labyrinth—surrounded by chain-link fencing that, in Dixon’s words, “made it look like if you could get in, you were never going to get out.”

The sad truth is, Santa Ana High was like thousands of other schools across the United States. Talk of fixing American education tends to focus on teacher retention, test scores, and graduation rates—but we often overlook an equally serious problem: crumbling, antiquated facilities that are hostile to learning and depressing to the children and teachers who spend many of their waking hours there.

An estimated 40 percent of the nation’s 100,000 public schools are in “bad to poor condition,” according to Glen Earthman, Ed.D., a professor emeritus of educational administration at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. Today, the average U.S. public school is over 40 years old. The 21st Century School Fund, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for healthy and safe learning environments, calculates that it would take $271 billion to bring all of those buildings up to a decent standard. But some communities have taken matters into their own hands to fund the improvements their kids need. Here are two such success stories.

FOR PEOPLE IN SANTA ANA, a city of more than 300,000 located 30 miles south of Los Angeles, the second-rate school facilities were unacceptable. Many residents are immigrants; they often work multiple jobs and share bedrooms in overcrowded apartments. Twenty-eight percent of the city’s children live in poverty. Yet Santa Ana’s parents have ambitious dreams for their kids.

“They want us to do better,” says Carranza, one of five children of a Mexican-born seamstress. His mother, who as a child often walked past the schoolhouse in her village near Santa María del Oro, Jalisco, but never set foot inside, vowed that her own children would have more opportunity. “My mama always told me that the reason she came here,” he says, “was so we could make something of ourselves.”

Raising taxes would not be easy in a city that in 2004 was ranked No. 1 for “urban hardship” by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. But in 2008, Santa Ana residents voted two to one for a $200 million bond issue that would improve the city’s 56 public schools. The resulting property-tax increase—less than $100 per year for a modest house—meant collective belt tightening. “We saw parents picking up recyclables just to make ends meet,” says Maria Cante, the high school’s community and family outreach liaison. But relatively few complained, she says—they knew that better schools would give their children a surer shot at higher education.

Lunch time in the rose garden at Santa Ana High School. The environment conveys respect for students.

More than $40 million went to overhauling Santa Ana High, one of the district’s neediest schools, an effort that was completed over the past three years. Among many improvements, the auditorium was renovated seat by seat, with high-tech lighting and sound added. (Community groups now use the auditorium and other school facilities year-round.) Workers tore down fences and laid an elegant promenade to help make the ­entrance more inviting. Assistant superintendent Dixon secured an additional $41 million from the state, including an overcrowding-relief grant to help replace the trailers with a two-story classroom building. With more than an acre reclaimed, Santa Ana High once again resembled a true campus.

Visit that campus today and you’ll see young dancers rehearsing in a sun-drenched studio. You’ll watch as history teacher Jason Hollingshead uses interactive games on his electronic “smart board” to bring the civil rights movement to life. You’ll see 11th graders in a chemistry lab huddled around ­unscratched ­countertops with gleaming chrome fixtures. You’ll spy seniors eating lunch in a rose garden, under a canopy of magnolias.

Since the modernization, vandalism has virtually ceased and attendance has inched up. Eighty-nine percent of seniors had passed the California High School Exit Exam by this past March, compared with 82 percent in 2011. Teachers say students have grown more ­engaged. “If you feel valued, it inspires you to pay more attention and work harder,” Carranza says.

THE PROBLEMS FACING AMERICA’S SCHOOL BUILDINGS are not always visible ones. Poor ventilation causes asthma, headaches, fatigue, and nausea, making it harder to concentrate and boosting absenteeism. Hot and cold classrooms, external noise, and insufficient light all undermine teaching. “We know that when the heat gets up to 78, 80 degrees, the learning curve drops precipitously,” says Earthman. “When a student can’t see the writing surface, when a student can’t hear the teacher, there is a measurable effect.”

Earthman, who has studied the link between infrastructure and student performance since 1993, has found that children attending schools in subpar condition score up to 10 percentile points lower on standardized tests, even after controlling for poverty. Outmoded facilities not only inhibit learning but also drive away good teachers, who would rather work in schools where the thermostats function and the air doesn’t sicken them.

Of course, there are beautifully designed schools that boast every amenity a student could desire, notes Mary Filardo, director of the 21st Century School Fund. But, not surprisingly, they tend to be located in the most affluent ­communities. Elsewhere—in cities, older suburbs, and rural areas—many schools remain “unhealthy, unsafe, depressing places,” she says.

Take a look across the United States and it becomes obvious that when it comes to infrastructure, equality in education remains an unrealized ideal. When it rains in Reading, Pa., “we have classrooms in which there is actually a waterfall coming over the lights,” says Bryan ­Sanguinito, president of the Reading Education Association. At Youth’s Benefit Elementary School in Fallston, Md., some water fountains are off-limits because of lead in the plumbing. In Beloit, Wis., “we’ve shut down certain wings of buildings [because] of air-quality issues,” says superintendent Steve McNeal. Geronimo Road Elementary School, on Oklahoma’s Fort Sill military base, has termite-ridden walls and ceiling tiles that dangle “by threads of glue,” according to the Center for Public Integrity. The Arizona Republic recently revealed that the school fire alarm at ­Arizona’s ­Fredonia High can’t be heard in certain classrooms. And the faulty air­conditioning at J.D. Smith Middle School in North Las Vegas sometimes forces administrators to cool off students by distributing ice pops, reports The Las Vegas Sun. 

Much of the disparity between school districts is a function of how educational facilities are funded. It’s typically a local responsibility, and communities have wildly varying tax bases; those with the highest household incomes spend almost three times as much on school construction as the poorest ones.

Struggling districts know they need better buildings. But their leaders say they can’t fix what they can’t afford to, particularly in a stalled economy. According to state and local authorities, the aging schools in New Bedford, Mass.—some more than a century old—have suffered mold infestation and registered alarming carbon dioxide levels. Many have “no facilities for computer labs, for music, for special needs,” says school committee member John Fletcher. But with state funding slashed, the district has laid off most of its custodial staff and put building improvements on hold to avoid massive teacher cuts. “Keeping class size small is the first priority,” Fletcher says.

Until state and federal governments fill the gap, inequalities will persist. Filardo, who thinks about these issues full time in her post at the 21st Century School Fund, knows the obstacles are huge. “But the American people, in their communities, have been willing to tackle major initiatives,” Filardo says. She is encouraged by districts like Santa Ana that have found creative solutions despite their modest means.

Of course, not every old school can be renovated like Santa Ana High. Some need to be rebuilt from scratch. But even new construction can be made more affordable. One way is to go green.

 “RIGHT HERE WE CAN SHOW OFF THE SOLAR TUBES,” says Carter Ford as he leads two guests through Richardsville Elementary School in Kentucky’s Warren County. He’s demonstrating a technology that dramatically cuts lighting costs at this rural school. “They’re aluminum cylinders, and on the top there’s a little dome. It collects the sunlight and reflects it a bunch of times. Then, with the glass, it’s able to magnify it and spread it out through the room.” Ford looks up at his visitors and beams with pride. He is lanky, mop-topped—and just 12 years old.

Richardsville Elementary sits across from a cattle pasture nine miles north of Bowling Green. More than three-quarters of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Until 2010, classes were held in a beloved but obsolete 60-year-old building with dismal l­ighting and no handicapped access. “We had mice in the walls ­eating the wiring,” recalls one teacher, who requested anonymity. “We had mold problems, habitual bronchitis, allergies, sinus infections—teachers and kids.”

Clearly, the old school needed to be replaced. By district policy, that meant building green, which typically doesn’t cost more up front but can yield big returns. Since 2003, Warren County’s school system has focused on conserving energy in construction and operations and calculates that it has saved $7 million and avoided teacher layoffs as a result. That has helped secure bipartisan political support. “When you build high-performance facilities, you save money,” says State Rep. Jim DeCesare, a local Republican (and construction firm executive) who cochairs the Kentucky Green Schools Caucus.

For the new Richardson Elementary, school officials asked Louisville architect Kenny Stanfield to design the nation’s first public school to produce more energy than it consumes. “We had to rethink everything,” says Stanfield—from the placement of classrooms to how bathroom sinks turned on.

The building that resulted uses a quarter of the energy of an average school. Geothermal pumps, which rely on the earth’s steady underground temperatures, supply the heating and cooling. Solar tubes reduce the need for artificial lights. Sensors detect when a room is occupied (and by how many people) and adjust lighting and ventilation accordingly. The kitchen uses steam convection ovens rather than deep-fat fryers, which saves electricity and results in healthier food. And 2,700 rooftop solar panels produce enough power to allow the district to sell excess energy back to the grid.

But what really makes Richardsville Elementary stand out—beyond the sunlit corridors and cutting-edge technology—is how conservation is woven into the fabric of everyday learning. Geothermal temperature gauges are exposed for children to monitor. So is a pipe that collects rainwater for nourishing a garden. There are hallway displays about solar power and recycling, and even first graders can explain how renewable energy works. Warren County is doing more than saving money and keeping kids healthy—it’s producing students who are literate about environmental issues before reaching puberty. That’s a lesson many communities can learn: Building first-class schools is a massive undertaking, but there are creative ways to do it affordably. Once a district makes the commitment, it might discover that better buildings not only help students learn—they help them dream. Last school year, in the evenings, Carter Ford would build Lego cities in his bedroom, with restaurants and airports and curving glass windows. He turned to his own school for ideas—creating a skylight, for example, modeled after the solar tubes in the classrooms. He’d walk through the halls of Richardsville Elementary, gleaning ways to make his own cities more energy-efficient. Then Ford would go home and fine-tune his creation. “It’s amazing,” he says, “how much this building can inspire you.”

SIDEBAR: What you can do to help

LEARN MORE about the issue in your area. Many websites contain good information about school buildings; the most comprehensive is the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities. You can also contact the state agency that oversees school facilities; find your state’s by going to the American Clearinghouse on Educational Facilities and clicking on “Policies.”

CONTACT your lawmakers. A broad coalition of organizations has crafted a message for Congress calling for more federal funding for school repairs and renovations. Send your own letter through Fix America’s Schools Today.

TAKE ACTION in your community. The 21st Century School Fund has a detailed guidebook for parents called “For Generations to Come.” If you’re worried that your child’s school might contain mold or toxic chemicals, go to Healthy Schools Network, where you’ll find a checklist of steps to take.

Read Caitlin Johnston’s analysis of this article on the Poynter Institute web site.

Publicado originalmente en inglés en Coastal Living.

La chirigota Sosasión de Dirertores actuando en Cádiz. Fotos por Barry Yeoman.

ERAN LAS 4 DE LA MAÑANA CUANDO LLEGAMOS a Campo del Sur, la carretera que sigue la línea de costa en el Casco Antiguo de Cádiz, España. Después de ocho visitas, todavía me alegra llegar a esta esquina. Las calles estrechas de la Ciudad Vieja explotan en una vista panorámica: una fila de casas de colores pasteles, torres de formas y alturas diferentes, la cúpula de ladrillo amarillo de la Catedral gigante. Al otro lado de la calle, las olas del Atlántico chocan contra un muro de piedra bajo. La escena se parece al Malecón de La Habana. Un poco más adelante, dos castillos del siglo XVIII marcan las fronteras de La Caleta, playa en forma de medialuna preferida por los gaditanos.

Estaba pasando la semana con una docena de músicos que cantaban durante el Carnaval en plazas y bares por toda la ciudad. Mis amigos, que crecieron juntos en el Barrio de La Viña, tenían citas cada noche desde las 9 horas hasta el amanecer. El último concierto de la noche fue en una cena en un club privado cerca del océano.

Mientras esperábamos en el amplio vestíbulo del club, uno de los componentes dijo: “Barry, esta vez vas a cantar con nosotros”. Cuando le advertí que no sabía las letras, mi amigo Silva dijo que él me enseñaría las primeras líneas de un pasodoble. Durante el resto de la actuación—explicó—yo podría gesticular en la última fila de músicos. Silva y yo fuimos al otro lado del vestíbulo, y nos acurrucamos juntos hasta que yo había aprendido de memoria las letras españolas.

A las 5, fuimos al comedor. Formamos tres filas que se parecían en tamaño y forma a las de un sello de correos. La canturía comenzó, e inmediatamente me di cuenta que es difícil gesticular de manera convincente. Entonces, ¡zas!, llegó el aplauso y se acabó.

Me acordé de mi primera visita a Cádiz 12 años antes. Pensé: Es un milagro que yo haya crecido tan cerca de estos hombres, y siempre haya estado tan encantado con su ciudad, y es por eso que seguiría volviendo una y otra vez.

La chirigota caminando por el Casco Antiguo.

EN 1998, ESTABA CAMINANDO por el muelle de piedra en el borde de La Caleta, que termina en un arco que divide la playa del Casco Antiguo. Cerca de allí, en unos bancos de piedra caliza, se sentaron una docena de hombres de 20 años de edad, a cantar, mientras sus brazos reposaban cómodamente en los hombros y rodillas de uno y otro. Su canto me confundió con el de una llamada en coro. Cuando me acerqué a ellos para hablar, mi tartamudez severa me paralizó. Y así, sintiendo la tensión de una lengua extranjera, mis palabras se prolongaron más allá de diez segundos. Cuando hablé, se rieron burlonamente—pensé. Me fui, pero luego regresé a ellos. Y les dije: “Tengo un problema al hablar. Lo he tenido toda mi vida”.

Yo no sabía cómo ellos reaccionarían. Para mi sorpresa, admiraron mi coraje y me invitaron a su mundo. Luego me ofrecieron bebidas y las tripas anaranjadas de un erizo de mar. Durante las próximas dos semanas, me traían al meollo del Carnaval. Durante la tarde, nos sentamos en la playa y tratamos de reconfortar a los demás. Yo era educado pero sin raíces, consumado profesionalmente pero musicalmente inepto. Ellos tenían raíces profundos en La Viña; muchos no tenían empleo pero todos eran brillantes, musicalmente hablando. Por las noches me llevaban a las plazas donde sólo los gaditanos iban, aquellos sitios en donde residían bares al aire libre que vendían botellas frías de San Miguel, y en donde amigos cantaban espontáneamente.

Me sentía tan bienvenido que regresé al año siguiente. Y al otro, y luego otra vez. Durante mis visitas más recientes, he conocido a las familias de mis amigos y he observado como ellos han llegado a ser mejores como cantantes. Los he seguido a través de la ciudad en noches innumerables; bebiendo vino de Jerez y escuchando a la gente gritar con alegría y cantar. Más importante: he mirado como ellos han crecido, casado, y comenzado a criar a sus propios diminutos músicos carnavalescos.

Todo esto me lleva a comprender el valor de regresar a un sitio. Yo venía a Cádiz originalmente para sus 3.000 años de historia, su Carnaval increíble, y el sentimiento de la niebla salina en mi camisa mientras caminaba por el Campo del Sur. Ahora vuelvo por mis amigos, y por un momento de risa incómoda convertido en 14 años de hospitalidad y gracia.

Gracias a Michel Barbachán y Miguel Lara Hidalgo por ayuda con la traducción.

Chirigota Sosasión de dirertores actuando en Plaza San Francisco, Cádiz, febrero 2010.

How one moment during Carnaval in Spain turned into a lifetime of friendship.

Originally published in Coastal Living. Click here for Spanish translation

The chirigota (Carnaval group) Sosasión de Dirertores performing in Cádiz. Photos by Barry Yeoman.

IT WAS 4 IN THE MORNING WHEN WE REACHED Campo del Sur, the road hugging the coastline in the ancient center of Cádiz, Spain. Even after eight visits, I still swoon when I turn this corner. The alley-like streets of the Old City explode into a panoramic vista: a row of pastel houses; turrets of various shapes and heights; the yellow-brick dome of the massive Cathedral. Across the street, Atlantic waves crash hard against a low-stone wall—an old-world counterpart to Havana’s Malecón. Just ahead, two 18th-century sea fortresses mark the endpoints of La Caleta, the small, crescent-shaped beach preferred by Cádiz’s locals.

I was spending the week with a dozen part-time musicians who perform during the Carnaval season in plazas and bars throughout the city. My friends, who grew up together in the old fishermen’s quarter of La Viña, were booked singing from 9 p.m. until dawn. The last gig of the night was a lucrative one: singing their satirical tunes for a high-priced dinner party at an oceanside private club.

As we waited on sofas in the club’s spacious lobby, one of the performers said, “This time, Barry, you’ll sing with us.” When I protested that I didn’t know the words, my friend Silva said he would teach me the opening lines of one song. During the rest of the 20-minute performance, he explained, I would stand in the back row of musicians and gesticulate. Silva waved me across the lobby, and we huddled together until I had memorized the Spanish lyrics.

At 5 a.m., we were herded into the dining room. We formed three rows on a postage-stamp stage. The singing began, and immediately I realized just how difficult it was to gesticulate convincingly. Then—whoosh!—came the applause and it was over.

We took our bows. I thought back to my first visit to Cádiz 12 years earlier. I realized what a miracle it was that we had become friends, and that I had become so enchanted with their city that I would return again and again.

The chirigota walking through the Old City of Cádiz.

IN 1998, I WAS WALKING ALONG the stone pier at the edge of La Caleta, which ends at an archway dividing the beach from the Old City. Nearby, on some limestone benches, sat a dozen boisterous 20-year-old men, their gangly arms resting comfortably on one another’s shoulders and knees. I mistook their enthusiastic chanting for a call. But when I approached them to talk, my often-severe stutter paralyzed me. Feeling the stress of a foreign language, I took 10 seconds to choke out two words. When I did, they laughed—mockingly, I thought. I stormed off, but then turned around and went back. “I have a problem speaking,” I told them. “I’ve had it all my life.”

I didn’t know how they’d react. To my surprise, they admired my boldness and invited me into their fold. They offered me drinks and the briny guts of a fresh-caught sea urchin. And over the next two weeks, they brought me into the thick of Carnaval. During the afternoons, we sat on the beach and tried to make sense of one another: me educated but rootless, professionally accomplished and musically inept; them rooted for generations in La Viña, working class, largely unemployed, and musically brilliant. At night they took me into plazas where only locals go, where outdoor bars sold cold bottles of San Miguel and friends erupted into spontaneous song.

I felt so welcomed that I returned the following year. And the year after that, and then again. During my most recent visits, I’ve met my friends’ families and watched them become more proficient as entertainers. I’ve followed them through the city on countless nights, swilling sherry and listening to the crowd woot and sing along. More important, I’ve watched them grow up, get married, and start raising their own pint-sized Carnaval musicians.

I have learned the value of returning to a place. I came to Cádiz originally for its 3,000-year history, its raucous Carnaval, and the feeling of the salt spray on my shirt as I walked along Campo del Sur. I return because of my friends, and because a moment of uncomfortable laughter turned into 14 years of hospitality and grace.

Read Barry’s original 1998 article “Embraced in Spain.”

Chirigota Sosasión de dirertores performing in Plaza San Francisco, Cádiz, Feb. 2010.