The Hopefuls(64)
“See?” Jimmy said, handing one of the push cards to me. “They’re small enough so people can put them in their pockets. And you can only imagine how many people are dying to carry a picture of me around with them.”
Matt shook his head behind Jimmy, but he looked amused. There wasn’t all that much to see in the office, so after a few minutes I told them I’d let them get to work.
“Wait,” Jimmy said. He gave me a large pile of the push cards and winked. “So you can campaign for me.”
I took the cards from him. “Of course,” I said. “I’ll start knocking on doors now.” But the thing was, from then on I always had a bunch of his push cards with me. During the campaign we all carried them to hand out at events and lunches and sometimes to random people we met. Once, I gave one to a lady in the grocery store as we chatted in the checkout line. It became such a habit over those ten months that after the election was over, I sometimes found myself reaching for them when I met someone new.
Jimmy’s father had footed the bill for a photographer and a messaging and design consultant, which resulted in a two-day photo shoot where Jimmy was captured in ten different outfits and five different locations. Matt was there for the whole thing, and afterward he said to me, “I’m starting to think Jimmy secretly wants to be a model.”
The picture that they chose to use on all the promotional materials was a shot of Jimmy standing outside, somewhere in Texas, nothing but open land behind him. He was wearing dress pants and a button-down shirt that was rolled up to his elbows, and his hands were on his hips as he looked straight at the camera, smiling but looking confident. Underneath him was his campaign motto, “Let’s Get to Work,” which I thought sounded cheesy at first, but grew to like. During those months, I saw this image of Jimmy about four hundred times a day—there were posters and push cards littered all over the house—and after a while when I looked at him in real life, I could almost see the slogan underneath him, beckoning me to get to work.
It also became something Jimmy said often, mostly when Matt was trying to get him to focus. That day, when it became clear that Matt was getting impatient and wanted Jimmy to stop talking to me and start being productive, he stood up straight and said loudly, “Okay, let’s get to work!” saluting me as I walked out of the office.
—
As soon as Matt agreed to run Jimmy’s campaign, he thought of little else. He did research on past commissioners, read as much as he could about the oil and gas industry in Texas, like he was cramming for a final. Matt had told me once how much he loved school, how he missed it all the time. “How very Harvard of you,” I’d said, rolling my eyes just a little. Because he wasn’t talking about the parties or hanging out in the dining hall—no, he missed studying for tests, the satisfaction that came from gathering information and making it his own. And as I watched him run the campaign, this was clear.
Each night, he took stacks of paper to bed with him, highlighting and making notes in the margins. “I feel like there’s so much I need to catch up on,” he said. Often, I woke up in the morning to find Matt sleeping with papers on top of him, a highlighter still clenched in his hand. Our sheets were soon streaked with neon yellow marks, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Matt’s approach was to have Jimmy focus on fracking and the environment. (A few months earlier, I’d never even heard Matt say the word fracking, and now he probably used it a hundred times a day, like it had always been a part of his vocabulary, like he was an expert on the whole situation.)
“This is our way in,” he told me when he first started researching fracking. He sounded excited, almost manic. “The Republicans don’t want to touch this. They won’t do anything to ruffle the feathers of the oil and gas companies.”
If I was being completely honest, I wasn’t even exactly sure what fracking was before Matt started talking about it, and I’m not sure Jimmy knew much about it either. I was there when Matt first proposed this strategy to Jimmy, standing in front of him and making his case. “The week that you filed to run was the same week the earthquake hit around Fort Worth,” he told him. “These earthquakes aren’t right; they aren’t normal. The people in these towns are suffering and in danger. They need an advocate, and that can be you.”
Jimmy nodded slowly. “I think you’re right,” he said. And that was all it took to convince him—even I’d asked more questions about it. But Jimmy was content to let Matt run with this, and from that point on he let Matt decide almost every aspect of his campaign. There were times Matt wouldn’t even bother to consult Jimmy—he once wrote and sent an e-mail to all of Jimmy’s supporters (from Jimmy) emphasizing the need to investigate the harmful effects of wastewater injection wells. It was only after everyone received it that Matt realized he’d forgotten to show it to Jimmy first.
“It just slipped my mind,” Matt said. “I’m sorry. We talked about it and I got so caught up in all of it.”
“No worries,” Jimmy said. “I trust you. This is why I wanted you on the team.” I watched Jimmy closely, trying to see if he was upset, but he honestly didn’t seem to mind.
I walked by the den one day and heard Matt talking to Jimmy, but it sounded more like a lecture than a conversation. “I think we need to be bold, to propose an end to all fracking in the next ten years,” Matt said. “This will reach the people outside of Houston, it will speak right to them. We can get them on our side. Then once we win the primary, we’ll push even harder.”