millennial

As a teenager before he was even allowed to vote, Charlie Comfort organized for then-Sen. Barack Obama in his hometown of Oskaloosa, Iowa.

Now he’s a Republican.

Meet Charlie. He lives in Waterloo.

He’s 23 and this will be his third presidential caucus.

Charlie’s first foray into politics was during the 2008 campaign. He met Obama at the Smokey Row Coffeehouse, one of the most popular stops for candidates in Oskaloosa, on the Fourth of July in 2007.

Obama campaign volunteers. (Handout)

It was Malia Obama’s 9th birthday, and the shop’s staff put the candidate’s daughter’s name up on the marquee inside.

After Obama spoke, Charlie ran home excited and ready to help.

He wasn’t old enough to vote but dedicated hours to organizing his neighbors, teachers and anyone else who would listen. The Obama campaign said Charlie, a high school student, made more phone calls than any other volunteer in town.

His hard work — at age 15 — earned him a prime spot next to the candidate in this group photo.

The Comfort family was the subject of a front-page story in the Washington Times the morning of the caucus.

Why?

They clearly illustrated the divided nature of the state: Martha Comfort backed Hillary Clinton, Keith Comfort preferred John Edwards and their son was traveling all over the region to put up Obama lawn signs instead of finishing his homework.

Here they are, eight years ago.

Martha Comfort, a legal assistant in town, was working as a Clinton precinct captain. Keith Comfort, a banker, was a little more passive about his support for Edwards, who would ultimately come in second in the caucuses (and later drop out of the race).

Here’s a semi-awkward clip where I tried to get them to pretend they were in a caucus.

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Eight years later, Charlie is a Republican.

Before we get to how that happened, it’s important to note the teenager used the skills he built as a political organizer to run for office himself.

At the age of 19 in October 2011, he became the youngest school board member in Oskaloosa’s history after unseating a 17-year incumbent and getting all his friends to vote.

His interest in education policy had an unintended consequence — he didn’t like that Obama, for whom he’d worked so hard to get to the White House, had not revamped the No Child Left Behind Act as promised. He found himself intrigued by the Republican candidates coming to town in the hopes of winning the Iowa caucuses and challenging Obama in 2012.

In the 2012 Iowa caucuses, he was a Newt Gingrich precinct captain.

But he changed his mind on the way in, and his first caucus vote ultimately went to ex-Sen. Rick Santorum. “I appreciate he spent so much time in Iowa,” Charlie says now.

Once Mitt Romney won the nomination, Charlie set out to help the GOP in the swing state.

That fall, he appeared in a piece by “PBS NewsHour.” (About four minutes into the piece, interviewed at the Smokey Row coffee shop, of course.)

Fast forward four years, and he’s got a tough choice to make.

Charlie has moved from Oskaloosa to Waterloo and is working in marketing. He spent his weekend “chasing the candidates around” because he was undecided as the long campaign for the caucuses comes to a close.

Like most Iowans interested in this quirky process, he’s met many of the hopefuls as they make their way across the state. He even introduced former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at an event at Smokey Row in October. But that didn’t really help him make up his mind.

“I am disappointed by all the anger, rhetoric and hatred that has been spewed by the party this year,” he says. “I am disappointed that the candidates who would support more moderate values have balked on that to try and get more of a conservative base turning out and I don’t think the Republican platform has been expressed as well as it could.”

Martha and Keith Comfort are still Democrats.

But they also are still split on their preferred candidate.

Keith Comfort gave his first-ever political donation, to Sen. Bernie Sanders. Martha Comfort isn’t working on Clinton’s behalf this time, but she’s still in her corner — probably.

“Now I’m on the fence and I may lean towards Bernie,” she says. “I like what he stands for and I look at Hillary and she really does have the experience but she does have some baggage. But I guess everybody does.”

Then again … “I’m leaning to Hillary because she’s realistic about what she’s promising. She knows what takes place in the office of the president and the process to get things through Congress.”

She says she’ll be resolute in her choice before walking into her neighborhood caucus meeting Monday night: “Nobody is going to persuade me there, even if my husband is across the room.”

As for Charlie, he’s made up his mind.

Iowa caucusgoer Charlie Comfort and presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina

Charlie Comfort and Carly Fiorina. (Courtesy of Charlie Comfort)

He didn’t even need the whole weekend.

“This is who I plan to caucus for,” Charlie said Saturday via Facebook Messenger.

It wasn’t intended to have dramatic effect, but the photo didn’t come through for several minutes.

But there he is, smiling next to former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina, considered a long shot in Iowa and nationally.

“She seems genuine, authentic. She has a business background and has experience with policymakers, whether it be domestically or foreign. Ultimately, I think she is in it for the right reasons — to help fix America,” he said.

“I am very impressed with her secretary-to-CEO story. Only in America.”

For more, go to www.latimes.com/politics

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Freelance writer and editor Lucy Schiller bumped up against the issues of aging, eldercare and loneliness through her grandmothers. When the family pulled her maternal grandmother, Mary Ann, from assisted living during the pandemic, Schiller became her primary caregiver. Her paternal grandmother, Anita, was less fortunate; she contracted COVID-19 from a home healthcare aide and died in a hospital.

As she relates in “Aging Out,” the shock of Anita’s death was a factor in Schiller’s abrupt relocation from a central New York college town to Pittsburgh, where she knew no one. Schiller calls the move “a half-desperate plan to simply change the background scenery of my life for the millionth time.”

While grieving, scrambling to make a living, taking long walks with her dog and wrestling with her chosen solitude, Schiller embarks on a quest to understand the institutions and attitudes that shape old age in America. “What was the relationship between personal fear of oldness and the ways in which oldness was structured in society?” she asks.

The resulting book, a deliberately meandering account of her Steel City sojourn, weds memoir, travelogue, philosophical rumination and journalistic investigation. Schiller, an MFA graduate of the University of Iowa and now an assistant professor of nonfiction at Texas Tech University, is a fluid writer. But most of what she covers is well-trod ground.

It’s worth asking whom she envisions as her audience. Most older readers know this territory; younger ones have other, more pressing concerns, including how to afford life in the here-and-now.

Perhaps Schiller, a millennial in her 30s, hopes they will identify with her personal struggles. But her loneliness seems largely self-imposed, perhaps compounded by what she describes as “a severe strain” of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “It turns out, laughably, that an interest in privacy, and staying quiet about internal feelings, are hallmarks of this condition,” she writes, offering a partial explanation for her wariness of company.

Pondering the American way of aging, Schiller initially adopts a posture of ignorance and naivete so extreme that it seems like a pose. She puzzles out the distinctions among nursing homes, assisted living facilities and continuing care retirement communities, as well as home healthcare. And she underlines the fact that, when it comes to long-term care in the United States, only the relatively well-off have good choices. This isn’t exactly news.

Another Schiller inquiry involves the familiar complexities of Medicare. She notes that, as a public program for seniors, it is so inadequate that it requires private options, such as Medigap and Medicare Advantage, to paper over coverage gaps. Picking the best plan for one’s needs can be a daunting option, requiring trained help or careful study. Schiller attends an informational seminar by a broker for Medicare Advantage plans and decides, unhelpfully, that they are neither “a solution or a problem.”

Schiller’s reporting methods rely, to some extent, on serendipity. “I tended toward … a kind of diffuse sallying through the world, staying open to the coincidence, digression, and movement,” she writes. She calls the method “antinarrative.”

All that sallying takes her down some unexpected byways. She returns to a western Pennsylvania town called Harmony, where she once had “a horrible, endless date over crepes,” to investigate a strike over pay and working conditions at a troubled nursing home. That leads to a long discussion of the use of restraints on the elderly.

At one point, Schiller finds a company called Papa that employs younger “Pals” to assist older adults. With the backing of health insurance companies, the Pals provide companionship, transportation, housecleaning services and more. Schiller tries something similar as a volunteer for a health insurance company, reaching out to an elderly Black woman by phone. They stumble over time into an unlikely friendship.

One problem with all these efforts to mitigate old-age loneliness, Schiller notes, is that the loneliest generation is actually Gen Z. And the loneliness surveys themselves, she suggests, may be suspect.

Schiller delves, inevitably, into the history of AARP, an organization that even in its earliest days was entangled with the health insurance industry. And consumer advocate Ralph Nader, for whom she does some editing work, tips her to the story of activist Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers.

Kuhn, Schiller writes, understood “the tension between the social so-called nothingness of old age and its vibrant realities.” Which brings Schiller to the intersection of aging and disability, and to Programs for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), which provide community-based care as an alternative to nursing homes.

In the end, Schiller has a go at parsing her own motivations. “I had descended into the strange subterranean structures of aging, almost as a way to avoid the contemporary world … ,” she writes. “Age … was a helpful distancing tool: older people’s vulnerabilities, including those of my own grandparents, helped to distract me from my own present and future. … I still did not know how to seal over the gaping wound of the pandemic, how to move forward.”

For all her verbiage, she can find no easy fix, nor even a complicated one. “It was not possible for me to imagine a solution to the level of fragmentation, pain, and dysfunction I saw,” she writes, leaving readers without much justification for having followed her rambling, idiosyncratic quest.

Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.