When Katie started, Matt told her they’d get another desk in the den for her as soon as possible. “In the meantime,” he said, “you can set up in the dining room or use one of our desks if we aren’t here.”
“That works for me,” she said. I saw Ash wince as Katie set up her laptop on the dining room table, banging it down on the wood. Ash rushed over with a place mat to put underneath it. “Here,” she said, “this will make you more comfortable.”
The next day, a tiny desk and a folding chair arrived at the house and were shoved in the corner of the den. “That was fast,” I said to Ash, and she rolled her eyes. “I’m willing to sacrifice quite a lot of things for this campaign,” she said. “But I don’t see why my dining room table has to be one of them.”
I have to say, Jimmy’s Instagram got a lot better once Katie joined the campaign—she was always in front of him with her iPhone, capturing the moment that he shook someone’s hand or smiled during a speech. One night, when we were all sitting around after dinner, staring at our phones, I mentioned how good her pictures were. Matt agreed. “She’s got a talent for communications,” he said. “She’s always got the right image to go along with our message.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Plus she’s great at picking the filters that make me look my best.”
—
Matt and Jimmy spent most weekdays at events around Houston—or at least within a couple of hours of the city—meeting with local groups, stopping by union lunches or DAR teas. On the weekends, they’d travel farther and Ash and I would usually go with them, the four of us (plus Viv) piling into a car and driving to rural areas in East Texas, hitting as many cities as we could in one trip, places I’d never heard of before: Longview, Lufkin, Tyler, and Henderson.
If we were coming back that night, or if it was an incredibly busy trip, Katie would sometimes come along, but mostly if we were staying overnight, she hung back so we didn’t have to pay for an extra room. (I’d never seen Matt so thrifty in his life, but he was constantly making sure we were doing things the cheapest way possible, stretching all of the campaign money as far as it would go.)
When Katie wasn’t there, I was in charge of the social media, taking as many pictures of Jimmy as I could, sending out tweets, posting on Instagram. The first time I’d done this, Katie had approached me when we returned and not so subtly suggested that I could do a little more. “Make sure to tag all of the places where he is,” she said. “We want to get as many eyes on these posts as possible. You can never take too many pictures.”
She spoke to me in a tone you’d use to explain hashtags to your grandmother—patiently and with just a touch of condescension and amusement, as if she couldn’t believe how little I knew.
Since that day, I’d taken my role as traveling social media person very seriously, once almost tripping Jimmy as I took pictures of him walking into a radio station in Waco.
—
Ash once told me that Mrs. Dillon loved to talk about when Jimmy was in preschool, how she knew even then there was something special about him. She said every day when she dropped him off, the kids would come running over to greet him. Once, he got there late and all the kids were already sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and as Jimmy went over to join them, they all reached their arms up to him, to touch him as he walked by. “Like Jesus,” I said, and Ash nodded. “Exactly.”
I had a friend who had worked in the Clinton White House who told me that when Bill Clinton walked into the room, the whole place was electric. “He gave people goose bumps just by arriving,” she said. “Take my word for it—it’s almost like he’s magic.”
And I’d seen it with Obama—the charm that doesn’t feel sleazy, the smiles that seem genuine, the eye contact that makes you believe he’s paying attention, that maybe he even remembers you from the last time you met. Each year at the Christmas party, Obama gave a speech and made sure to thank the family members of his staff, telling the spouses that he knew the sacrifices we were making. Now, don’t get me wrong—I know he made this same speech at least a dozen times, repeating the lines at all of the Christmas parties they hosted. But still, it felt like he was speaking directly to me, and I cried every time—and it wasn’t (just) because of the strong eggnog they served there.
Where do people get the ability to do this? What is it that makes some politicians so attractive? Why did people like Hillary so much more when she cried? Why is it that Obama sings and it’s amazing, but Mitt Romney sings and looks like a nightmare you’d have about a wax figure come to life? And why, in God’s green earth, could Sarah Palin wink and talk about pigs and somehow make everyone around her forget that she’d basically admitted she didn’t read?