Chapter 1: The Faction Chapter 1 THE FACTION The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. --ALEXANDER HAMILTON, FEDERALIST NO. 68, 1788 PART I There is a front row to American democracy, and it can only seat four. In the U.S. House of Representatives, two nondescript desks positioned at the back wall offer the most revealing view of the magisterial chamber. Most Americans will never see these hidden perches. One is tucked away on the right corner, the Republican side of the chamber; the other on the left, the Democratic side.

Young staffers assigned to these wooden tables mark opposite ends of a chaotic thoroughfare away from the cameras, where members of Congress mingle, laugh, argue, and cut deals to keep the country running. At fifteen years old, I was plucked from farmland obscurity in La Porte, Indiana, and dropped into one of these four seats. That is where I first learned about politics. "Welcome to your new office." I was lured to public service both as an escape and as a calling. As a boy, my obsession with superheroes imbued me with a simple good-against-evil worldview. I wanted to be one of the good guys. With a distant gaze at adulthood, government seemed thrilling compared to the drudgery of small-town life, especially after my parents divorced and home became a place of low-level turbulence.

Washington was where actual superheroes lived, men and women elected with the noble purpose of rectifying the world''s wrongs and confronting the real bad guys--criminals, polluters, dictators. Sitting in the nurse''s office one day at school, I listened through the curtain as a fellow student recounted his parents'' struggle to afford food, while he and his siblings survived on trick-or-treat candy they had collected on Halloween. Trick-or-treat candy. That seemingly little moment changed my perspective. Suddenly, my own situation at home didn''t look so bad, and I felt the faintest inklings of a calling. I devoured books about extreme poverty. An idealistic middle-schooler, I checked out tomes on history, economics, and the Millennium Development Goals. Then terrorists struck.

I was in the Twin Towers weeks before September 11, 2001, on a trip to New York City with my mom and aunt. At fourteen years old, I gaped down from the highest floor of the North Tower with a wide-eyed view of Lower Manhattan. The short passage of time between that moment and the implosion of the buildings made me feel a cosmic connection to the tragedy. Alone in my room, I sobbed looking at still photos of Americans leaping from the buildings'' upper floors to escape flames ignited by men who had turned airplanes into missiles. "Never again," Americans vowed. I meant it, desperate to lend a hand in protecting the country against foreign enemies, while I compartmented clinical anxiety, which I couldn''t name or understand until much later. But what does a kid from a two-star town have to offer four-star military generals who are hunting down the bad guys? That was my dilemma. My family didn''t have a lot of money or major political connections.

Without those, I couldn''t see a fast path into government for a high-school student and part-time restaurant dishwasher with scalded hands and a restless mind. When I heard about a minimum-wage job as a cub reporter at the local radio station, I submitted an application. I got the gig. Luckily, listeners couldn''t tell I was a teenager unless my voice cracked on air, something I carefully avoided by practicing a deep octave. "And a pleasant good morning," I bellowed into the foam-covered microphone hanging from the studio ceiling. "This is Miles Taylor here at the broadcast center, with a look at your neewwwws at this hour." I elbowed past colleagues to land assignments covering visits from political leaders. "A word to the wise," the salty news director warned.

"Don''t meet your heroes. They''ll let you down." As I brushed shoulders with Bush administration officials who were visiting the Midwest and national media figures like MSNBC''s Chris Matthews, I was pretty sure my boss was wrong. These were the giants of public policy, and I wanted to join their ranks. My interview subjects weren''t fooled, though. No matter how grown-up I tried to act, I was still a kid wearing big-people clothes. Literally. Dad''s oversize Navy blue blazer gave me away with sleeves that were only centimeters away from my fingers, and without a driver''s license, I was forced to rely on my mom to drop me off and pick me up from news events.

But what felt like intolerable indignities ended up leading to an opening. "Son, how old are you?" U.S. senator Evan Bayh asked skeptically one night on the sidelines of a town hall he was hosting in our community. "Fifteen," I admitted reluctantly. He abruptly ended the interview and asked me to kill my handheld tape recorder. I was discouraged. But then he whispered to an aide and told me about something called the Congressional Page Program.

"You want to see politics in action?" Bayh asked. His aide handed me a fancy business card. I rubbed my thumb reverently over the gold-embossed eagle and probably emailed the staffer that same night. Several months later, I found myself on the ten-hour drive from Northwest Indiana to Washington, D.C., to join several dozen students for a job in the United States Capitol. For two hundred years, young people have assisted with administrative proceedings in the nation''s legislative body as congressional pages, or as we were sometimes called, "democracy''s messengers." The errands ranged from mundane to momentous.

We spent early mornings running packages around the Capitol complex and late nights putting bills and resolutions in the hands of hundreds of representatives, each of whom had a flurry of comments, edits, amendments, and rewrites to make to the people''s paperwork. You rarely see congressional pages. We were trained to operate in the background, quietly supporting the country''s leaders, except for every four years when pages are photographed delivering the Electoral College ballot boxes to the House to certify the results of the presidential election. On my first day, I met a personal hero. U.S. senator John McCain greeted us in passing as he made his way to the other side of the Capitol. His handshake felt like a professional christening, and I watched the vaunted combat veteran and "maverick" presidential candidate disappear down a stately hallway.

We were ushered onto the floor of the House of Representatives. The cavernous chamber was ornamented with Americana--busts, quotes, and frescoes of the country''s Founders--and it struck me with the veneration that you''d reserve for a holy site. "Welcome to your new office," Peggy Sampson, the businesslike page boss, told us as she pointed out the two desks in the back corners that would become our rotating perches. The class was split between Republican and Democratic pages, a reminder of Washington''s built-in divide. I was fortunate to be a Republican page. The GOP was in the majority, and soon I was selected to serve as the Speaker''s page--the personal messenger for the most powerful figure in Congress: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Washington was enveloped in a sober urgency in those post-9/11 years, which became clear by the weighty atmosphere. Access to the Speaker''s office was strictly controlled, and distractions weren''t tolerated in his quiet sanctum.

One day an aide found me using the office phone for a personal call to a girlfriend back in Indiana, and as punishment, I was sent back to the page desk on the House floor to run errands for junior members of Congress. (To me, getting sent back into the middle of the action wasn''t exactly punishment.) We trained as apprentices to wartime legislators who were grappling with an existential threat. You can''t overstate the palpable fear vibrating through Washington at the time, from worries about biological weapons to whispers of nuclear dirty bombs. A gas mask was hidden under every seat in the U.S. House. But fear gave way to cooperation, as members of Congress crossed the aisle to compromise on sweeping legislation.

The master class in bipartisanship culminated, for me, in President George W. Bush''s 2005 State of the Union Address. Despite having just come off of a contentious presidential campaign, he entered the chamber''s arched doorway to applause and handshakes from Republicans and Democrats. "We have known times of sorrow and hours of uncertainty and days of victory," he declared, as I stood by the page desk in the back. "In all this history, even when we have disagreed, we have seen threads of purpose that unite us." The room applauded in agreement. I had found my tribe. Roaming the musty marble passageways of Congress, I grew surer of my views as a Republican.

I was a "compassionate conservative," the kind George W. Bush spoke about when he called for a government that used the free market to eliminate poverty, that openly welcomed immigrants who sought to join our country, and that championed freedom and human dignity around the globe. Joining the GOP tribe also seemed like the best way to defend the country; Republicans, after all, portrayed themselves as the party that was ready to stand up against enemies to our democracy. What was meant to be a year turned into a whirlwind decade. I could hardly stay in school, although I was obsessed with go.