In a deserted park on Capitol Hill, a gaunt man with a head of gray wisps has a cellphone pressed to his ear.
Somewhere in Decatur, Ill., a phone is ringing.
“Ah, yes, Mrs. Stark? Uh-huh. Mrs. Stark, my name is Tim Johnson. Timothy Johnson. I’m the United States congressman for Decatur,” the man says. You learn a few things after making half a million phone calls. One is to get the word “congressman” out as fast as possible, so people don’t decide you’re a salesman and hang up.
“I really didn’t have any particular reason for calling, Mrs. Stark,” Rep. Timothy V. Johnson (R-Ill.) goes on. This one hasn’t hung up yet. “I just wanted to call and say hello.”
In the bellowing jungle that is the U.S. Congress, Johnson is a quiet man with an incredible story. His goal is to call all 300,000 households in his district. Personally.
Johnson calls from the airport. He calls from the treadmill. Over 10 years, this habit has cost him a vast chunk of his life and left him with little legacy of landmark legislation. But, if nothing else, it has meant he really knows the people in his district.
Or, at least, he used to.
This year, the Illinois legislature has drawn a new district for Johnson, leaving out a vast number of the people he’s been calling. If he gets reelected and wants to keep up the practice, he’ll have to start again with hundreds of thousands of strangers.
“That is agony, I’ll tell you,” Johnson said. “I thought: All these relationships! All these friendships! All this service! You know, what is it all about?”
This is a man haunted by democracy: The idea of representation, when practiced by Congress’s ultimate purist, looks a lot like a compulsive disorder.
Johnson is 64, three times divorced and the father of nine children. He has been calling all of his constituents since he was in the legislature. He continued the practice when he was elected to Congress in 2000. In that time, aides estimate, he has called most households twice.
“This person I’m going to call right now likely views government as completely detached from their lives,” he said, repeating the mantra that he uses to psych himself up for calls. “This is going to be the one chance that I’m going to have to convince them [that] that isn’t the case.”
He is a man comfortable with endurance. Johnson exercises religiously and fasts for 48 hours every week as a ritual of self-denial. In a Congress full of smooth-faced senior citizens, he stands out for looking unimproved: weathered, rumpled, wrinkled around the eyes.
The phone calls are Johnson’s way of applying that personality to the fundamental quandary of representative democracy. How can one person speak for 653,647 other complicated souls?
Well, Johnson figures, he can start by calling them all at home.
“Mr. Steenblock? Oh hi, Mr. Steenblock. My name is Tim Johnson,” Johnson said. It was after 7 p.m.: The rest of Congress was closing up for the evening, headed to receptions or happy hours. He was still working through the S’s of Decatur. “Congressman Tim Johnson.”
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