Politicians' obsession with the middle class means neither party talks about, or to, the poor anymore. The apathy is mutual.
“I think they care about getting into office, and after that everything goes out the window,” Robert Rowan says of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney between drags of his cigarette.
Rowan is leaning against the wall of the Jacksonville Greyhound station, a tired, muscular man with thinning brown hair who looks older than 32. He offers a familiar view from the ranks of the working poor, ignored by American politicians whose pollsters have made “middle class” a mantra, and mostly ignoring American politics in turn.
“I don’t really think they really care about us,” he tells me flatly of the political class.
Rowan is heading back to Indiana, his home state, which he’d left just three months earlier.
“I came here looking for work … [doing] construction. Anywhere from the ground up” Rowan says, proud of his abilities. And he quickly found it, taking on with a roofing company.
But the pay wasn’t that great because “of all the migrant workers. It’s just the way it is, they undervalue what we do” he mused. Unlike politicians and anti-immigrant activists, there’s no edge to his voice, not really even anger. Just resignation.
He tried to set off on his own as a subcontractor — the kind of small business decision Romney, Obama and every red-blooded politician loves to talk about. But that dream proved elusive.
The jobs, when they came, paid terribly, Rowan says. He got behind on his bills and “ended up going into motels day to day living, doing day labor. I had to get food stamps,” Rowan says.
The strain quickly became too much. So he called his mom and got her to pay for a bus ticket, he says, before hopping back on his bus.
I took my first serious bus trip in high school, on a Boy Scouts trip to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. It took days, it was hot, it was uncomfortable and I loved it. Since then, I’ve taken buses in Ecuador, Argentina, China and the U.S. They’re the last really public form of transportation, cheap and often dirty, winding through the countryside, the downtowns of major cities and the avenues of small towns.
And unlike planes, or in some countries trains, the bus is where the everyman rides, often the only way the carless poor and lower middle classes can afford a long haul.
I met Rowan halfway through a two-and-half day bus ride through the gorgeous American South, from Washington to Tampa, embarked upon with little planning and in the vague hope of finding out what working class people, college kids just starting out and the truly poor think about the state of American politics on the eve of the Republican National Convention.
And, at least to hear them tell it, they don’t think much of it.
I boarded my second bus of my first day in Richmond, Virginia. I was a one of the last passengers to get on, and the Greyhound was pretty packed. I surveyed the remaining seats. One had a heavy set African man already slumped into the aisle seat. Another was next to a older white man who’s blue ink tattoos and khaki pants made clear he’d just gotten out of jail. Again.
I opted for the seat next to a young blonde, who looked like she wouldn’t spill into my side of the seat bench — a key consideration for someone of my height whenever using any sort of mass transit.
“I've got all this student debt, I don't know what I'm gonna do,” says Hara, a 23 year-old native of Savannah, Georgia I spent most of an evening talking to on the bus.
Hara graduated from nursing school in December, and while she dreams of travelling, even in a well paying profession like nursing she realizes it could take years for her to get out from underneath that amount of debt. And by then, the realities of life — a relationship, a child, a nagging sense of permanence — will probably have caught up to her.
Hara, who spent the summer working at a summer camp in Pennsylvania, said she doesn’t pay much attention to politics — in part because of the tone of political discourse.
“Every time [there’s an election] the candidates just seem to get worse,” she says as the bus rolls through North Carolina.
“I used to want to be president, but then I realized you're just a scapegoat.... There's so many problems they can't be fixed over night. Or even one four year term.”
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