Too Good to Be True

The 1996 campaign season had just kicked off, and the editorial staff of the Independent Weekly, where I worked at the time, was meeting at our Durham office to plan our coverage. We were feeling considerable despair: None of the men running for governor represented the progressive values we espoused as an alternative newsweekly.

Democrat Jim Hunt, the three-term incumbent, was an emblem of the New South and an advocate for public schools and early childhood education. But during the eight-year hiatus following his second term, he had worked as a corporate lawyer and lobbyist, and now he was promoting leaner government, corporate tax cuts, and a more punitive approach to juvenile crime. “I guess we’re not the only ones who listen to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh,” a Republican legislative leader had snarked in 1994 after hearing Hunt outline his policy agenda.

The Republicans, meanwhile, were duking it out in a four-way primary, and would go on to nominate state Rep. Robin Hayes, an heir to the Cannon Mills textile fortune. The Independent staff agreed with Hayes on one priority: repealing the state’s regressive food tax. But Hayes was better known for his leadership on conservative social issues, including legislation to mandate the teaching of sexual abstinence in public schools. His preferred curriculum instructed students to wash their genitals with diluted Lysol after having sex.

Most of the issues the Independent championed—campaign finance reform, universal health care, prison alternatives, tougher environmental laws—were unlikely to be part of the political debate. Our editor, a 32-year-old named Bob Moser, directed his staff to come up with a creative way to cover the election. Then he walked out of the room—“rather dramatically, as a young editor will do,” he recalled—and vowed not to return until we had an idea.

By the time Moser came back, we had started to coalesce around a plan: If none of the candidates embody our values, let’s invent one who does.

On May 15, eight days after the primary election, the Independent’s cover featured a silver-haired woman posing in front of the Governor’s Mansion. Her head was cocked, and a dogwood-flower boutonniere poked out from her red blazer. This was Jolene Strickland, the mayor of Pine Hill, a town that (we claimed) straddled the border of Chatham, Lee, and Harnett counties. She was challenging Hunt and Hayes in the general election, without a party affiliation.

Her campaign slogan: “Too Good To Be True.”

Inside was a four-page profile of Strickland: educator, NASCAR fan, and daughter of a tobacco farmer who had died of lung cancer. Melinda Ruley, our most talented staff writer, penned the piece. In convincing detail, Ruley portrayed Strickland as a relatable everywoman who kept a plastic box on her kitchen table stuffed with coupons. 

“When I was a newlywed,” the candidate said, “I told my mother I hoped one day I wouldn’t have to clip coupons. She told me, she said, ‘Jo, you stop practicing thrift and the devil will move into your kitchen.’ Like he was going to come and live in the toaster oven!”

Ruley peppered her article with hints that Strickland, like her slogan, was too good to be true. Pine Hill was a “storybook town” that didn’t appear on the state’s own maps. The mayor lived on Big Bluffs Street. Other characters seemed to spring from a Southern fever dream: Strickland’s husband, who was wearing a rubber chicken on his head when the couple met; their bird dog, Mercy Me, who clenched a dead squirrel in her mouth during a campaign photoshoot; a local preacher, who appeared at her fish-fry fundraiser and prayed over the Fry Baby.

Most of us felt pretty confident that these hints would clue the reader in. “The only thing we were missing was a dead mule, preferably hanging from the rafters of a rotting mansion in the swamp,” Ruley told me recently. But when people are eager for change, they will sometimes overlook the warnings.

As any modern voter knows, perfect candidates don’t exist. This is a complete history of the time when we—an idealistic bunch of young journalists, facing a match between an establishment Democrat and a religious conservative Republican—decided to craft a perfect candidate of our own. 

Finding Jolene

Ruley wrote the story, but the Jolene ’96 campaign was the idea of staff writer Eric Bates. A fictional unaffiliated candidate, he argued, would underscore our dissatisfaction with Hunt and expose the inadequacy of the two-party system. 

“My idea was that it would be more like Lake Wobegon,” the mythical town in the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, Bates said—“that the reader would be in on the joke. And that it would be an illuminating, comforting wish fulfillment that the reader would participate in.”

Moser liked the plan. It also made him nervous. The Independent—now known as INDY Week and managed by The Assembly—had a reputation for earnestness, and our credibility as an alt weekly depended on accurate, fair reporting. “We strain for that every week,” Moser said, speaking recently about what happened in the 1990s. (He went on to become executive editor of The American Prospect and is now an editor at Inside Higher Ed.) “It’s extremely important to us that our news is taken seriously and is trustworthy.”

Moser worried, too, about how other journalists would react. The Independent invested significant time and money in investigative reporting, and we relied on daily newspapers to amplify our findings. He didn’t want to risk those relationships for a prank.

Pulling off Jolene meant finding the right balance, Moser believed—making Strickland’s story both credible and detectable as a fantasy. Hoping to nurture Ruley’s creativity, he urged her to err on the side of plausibility in her first draft. She could adjust the balance in revisions.

Bates thought the first draft read too much like a straightforward news story. “There’s not a single thing in it that winks to the reader that this is fictional,” he recalled telling Ruley. He supplied more clues, which Ruley folded in.

Meanwhile, we needed someone to play Strickland. We found her in Joanna Maclay, a professor who taught literature in performance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. (She was also a scholar of Southern dialects, which would prove useful.) Maclay bore a passing resemblance to former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, and she was spending her sabbatical in North Carolina. During a photo shoot at The Mecca, a Raleigh restaurant favored by politicians, she recalled, an owner asked her, “Are you somebody?”

“Well, I sure am,” Strickland replied.

Just before the issue went to press, Moser was driving to work and pulled over to cry. “I was very, very worried about this,” he said. “Worried about being the relatively newish editor of this paper I loved and making a huge mistake.” What if readers didn’t get the hints and felt deceived? What if they did understand it was fiction, but hated the idea?

The first reactions were favorable. Readers felt drawn to Strickland and her six-point platform, which mirrored our own. They ordered the T-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons that we advertised in the issue. “I remember the excitement of thinking, finally, somebody who seems to be focusing on things that are important, and coming at them from a place that seemed genuine,” said Jerry Salak, a reader who managed special events for a catering company at the time. “I remember wanting to get involved in whatever way I could to help her win.”

Some readers sent campaign contributions directly to the paper and asked us to forward them to the Strickland campaign. (We returned them.) “It became apparent that people thought it was real, and that the dissatisfaction that we were trying to highlight through the story was very real and very powerful,” said Bates, who later became editor of The New Republic and is now an editor at Business Insider. “What made the story so effective was that people were desperate for some kind of progressive alternative.”

Two weeks later, Bates wrote a follow-up article that dropped additional hints. It quoted three actual readers, including Salak, who had come to doubt Strickland’s existence. The candidate’s response, to close readers, all but confirmed the ruse. “My campaign,” she said, “is all about giving people a way to imagine just how good our government can be.”

Bates also called the Hunt and Hayes campaigns for comment. Neither suggested they knew Strickland was a fake. “The governor looks forward to debating the issues throughout the course of the campaign with all the candidates,” said Hunt press secretary Sean Walsh. Would that include Strickland? Bates asked. “It certainly would,” Walsh said.

Hayes spokesman Andrew Duke sounded more circumspect. “I don’t like to say whether someone’s not legitimate this early in the campaign,” he told Bates. “Sometimes it can come back and bite you. Who knows? If she does the right things, she might catch on.”

Duke did not respond to interview requests. Walsh died in 2018.

Bates’ article also announced Strickland’s public debut: The candidate would hold a press conference the following day, May 30, at the legislature. “You can say the press has made me what I am today,” she said.

Trial by Press

Maclay said she was informed about her legislative appearance on one day’s notice. 

“It was like, ‘Ah, I’m not ready to do a press conference, guys. I don’t have enough information,’” she recalled. “And they told me, ‘Listen, you’ll be fine.’” The Independent had asked Bob Geary, a journalist who would later join our staff, to pose as her press secretary. “Bob will deflect any problems,” she remembered being told.

Maclay was right: She did need more preparation. She made it through the opening statement, and fielded questions from the Independent’s own reporter Sue Sturgis about education policy and campaign finance reform. But then other reporters pressed for details the candidate couldn’t supply. 

She didn’t know which highways ran through Pine Hill, or when she had earned her degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill. She misstated the length of her tenure as mayor. She began to panic.

“[We] kind of threw her to the wolves,” said Ruley.

Jim Morrill, an Assembly contributor who at the time covered politics for The Charlotte Observer, asked the toughest questions. “I never like to get manipulated by anybody—by a candidate or a campaign, and certainly not by another publication,” he told me recently. “In hindsight, it’s kind of funny. But it didn’t seem that funny at the time. It seemed like the Indy was trying to pull something over on us.”

By the time reporters filed their stories, they had sniffed out the truth. There was no Pine Hill. Neither UNC-Chapel Hill nor the Department of Motor Vehicles had a record of Strickland. Her campaign phone number was the same as the Independent’s.

That day, I was driving to Washington, D.C., and I stopped at a rest area to check my voicemail from a pay phone. Morrill, who knew me from the legislative press room, had called for comment.

“Every politician is in some way fictitious,” I told him. “Jim Hunt is an invention of the corporate executives who fund his campaign. Robin Hayes is an invention of the Christian right.”

“Come on, Barry,” Morrill responded.

The initial news coverage chronicled the prank and quoted dueling journalism experts. Reporters contacted the Hunt and Hayes campaigns, which offered their shared disapproval. “There are better ways to discuss substantive issues than to mislead your readers,” Walsh, the Hunt spokesman, told Raleigh’s News & Observer.

To Bates, those articles omitted a key question. “There was almost no discussion among journalists of why would so many people fall for this,” he said. “Why were so many people primed and even desperate to believe in this? And what does that reveal about our world?”

It took two more weeks before a daily journalist suggested that the Strickland campaign might have value. 

“It’s too bad, this reign of literalism,” wrote David Dubuisson, an editor at the Greensboro News & Record. “I think it keeps us from reaching a higher level of truth. A specialized publication like the Independent is freer to experiment. And by supplying a foil for the real politicians, a fictional Jolene Strickland has the potential to clarify what the race for governor is really all about. She falls squarely in a noble tradition of literary devices. And in this day when popular fiction often seems hog-tied by a stifling literality, the capacity of fiction to convey truth is in danger of being forgotten.”

‘Jolene the Idea’

The week after the press conference, we published a mea culpa. “Maybe we made Jolene too believable,” wrote Moser. “And maybe, in the process, we eroded your trust in the basic factuality of what we report. If so, we sincerely apologize.” 

But the Strickland stories would continue, now with a disclaimer. “We don’t want you to believe in Jolene the person,” Moser wrote, “but Jolene the idea.”

Some readers rolled with, and even enjoyed, the revelation. Others felt conned. “I used the Independent’s endorsements for every election because I trusted the rigor of the research,” said Salak. He considered the newspaper a friend, as many people did. “To have that source of trusted information present something as real, when it wasn’t real, felt like a betrayal.”

After that, we published 14 more dispatches from the Strickland campaign, ending with her concession speech after Hunt’s reelection victory. For some Independent staffers, the disclaimer changed the experience. “It deflated a little bit when we had to come clean, because to me that reduced the tension,” said Ruley. “Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief was no longer part of the motivating energy. … Everybody knew.” 

But Jolene-the-idea persisted. After the election, The News & Observer reported that Wake County ballot counters “kept finding the name of an unexpected write-in candidate for governor”: Jolene Strickland. 

There was no official tally for Strickland because she wasn’t a certified contender. But the newspaper estimated she received dozens of votes in Wake alone, “if not a hundred or more.”

‘Telltale Absurdities and Impossibilities’

“Mark Twain would not have found Jolene to be inappropriate,” Bates told me during an interview this summer. The blowback from daily reporters, he argued, came from a narrow, ahistorical view of what newspapers do: “The tradition of American journalism was much more capacious than the idea that it was stenographer to objective reality.” 

Capaciousness, of course, has its pitfalls: Some readers overlooked what Twain called the “telltale absurdities and impossibilities” of his 19th-century satire, and believed it to be true.

By the 1990s, with the growing concentration of news media ownership by a handful of corporations, Bates said, content became homogenized, and humor and satire lost their place. “The whole reason a paper like the Independent existed was because there was no outlet for alternative viewpoints in the mainstream press,” he added.

The landscape has continued to shift. Americans now get news from comedic sources like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight, which do a kind of truth-telling that mainstream newspapers can’t. Even The Onion occasionally weighs in about Tar Heel politics (“North Carolina Voter In Heavily Gerrymandered District Somehow Voting For Montana Senate, Mayor Of Phoenix”). 

Which raises the question: Was Jolene Strickland ahead of her time?

It’s hard to know how the candidate would fare in this era of TikTok, deep fakes, media mistrust, and PolitiFact. Bates, for his part, believes a satire-savvy audience would embrace her. “The reaction to Jolene today, once it was exposed, would have been to stage a massive write-in campaign for her,” he said. “People would have embraced the prank and run with it, kind of gleefully, as a way of registering their dissatisfaction. … You would use the internet to mobilize all those people and you could have taken it to the nth level. You could have had big political rallies.” 

But let’s go back to 1996, and the question of whether Strickland’s campaign was valuable. 

One of the biggest initial skeptics on staff was Sturgis, the reporter forced to maintain a straight face at Strickland’s press conference. She had come from the more conventional News & Observer, and worried that a fictional candidate would harm our credibility. 

Sturgis now works for the Energy and Policy Institute, a nonprofit watchdog group. Reading the stories 28 years later, she was struck by how the Independent used them to explore serious issues. When Bates wrote about a chance encounter between Strickland and NASCAR legend Richard Petty—quoting real public statements from Petty, who was running as a Republican for secretary of state—he also discussed tobacco marketing and corporate recruitment policy. Other stories addressed water pollution, tax fairness, and highway spending.

“It was as if we looked at the silences, and we created Jolene Strickland to address the silences,” Sturgis said. “It’s so curious, because it’s an untrue story, but it did the opposite of inserting disinformation into the campaign. It actually opened a space and put information in there for the public that they wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise.”

Moser, looking back, considers the campaign one of his proudest moments. “In the publicity that it got,” he said, “it made a statement about how journalism could be different, how journalism can fire your imagination to wonder: Why is this not possible, and how could this be possible?”

As for the professor who brought Strickland to life: Maclay remembers the experience fondly, both for the acting challenge and for the ways her character forced voters to reexamine Hunt and Hayes. Now 86 and retired, she divides her time between her children’s homes in Durham and suburban Chicago. Last year Maclay switched her voter registration to North Carolina. She wanted a say, finally, in choosing our next governor.