Seeing ’em jump

Seeing ’em jump is Wes Jordan’s description of the pleasure that makes politics hard to relinquish. It names a visible performance of deference—people standing, fetching, pausing, or drawing near for a politician—and the private gratification Wes sees beneath the machinery of campaigns. Its force lies in the contrast between politics as public service and politics as the experience of being obeyed and attended to.

Meaning and political setting

Wes introduces the expression while explaining what a citywide campaign demands. A candidate cannot win on merits alone, he tells Roger White: money and organization are essential, especially the local knowledge needed to mobilize voters neighborhood by neighborhood. The explanation is not abstract. Wes describes a campaign check for $20,000 offered in exchange for support of a gay-rights agenda; after he returns it, a newspaper denounces him and he believes he has lost the gay vote. As campaign expenses mount, he says, rejected checks begin to look different. The lesson is that political ideals and electoral survival operate within a system of organized resources and competing constituencies.

Wes then describes get-out-the-vote payments as another part of that system. In the closing days of a race, intermediaries claim they can deliver votes from particular neighborhoods and demand cash, sometimes aggressively and without negotiation. The candidate must rely on people who know which operators can deliver and who can work through them. Money is handed over in cash under verbal agreements, with little control over what happens to it afterward. Wes says an operator may keep about half, while the rest supports the service of contacting potential voters on election day. He estimates that a candidate should set aside half a million dollars for voter payments, and says a million would increase the chances of winning by 50 percent; he identifies Andre Fleet as the candidate guaranteed a million dollars.

The Atlanta Way behind the spectacle

Wes places these campaign practices within what he calls the Atlanta Way: a political order built around negotiation among constituencies with unequal power. He explains it through the image of a baseball being unraveled. Beneath the white covering and the long winding string, he says, lies a small, hard black core. In his account, that core represents 280,000 black residents in South Atlanta, whose votes control the city; the string represents three million white residents in North Atlanta and surrounding counties. The image makes electoral organization a question of how those populations and their interests are connected.

Wes illustrates that connection with the billion-dollar airport expansion during Maynard’s mayoralty. He recalls that Maynard promised 30 percent of the project to minority contractors. White business interests initially balked, Wes says, but accepted the arrangement when they considered the remaining $700 million. Maynard later took pride in the project having created 25 black millionaires. The example presents the Atlanta Way as an exchange: political and economic opportunity is distributed through negotiation, while the larger project proceeds. Seeing ’em jump is not itself the exchange, but it is the personal reward Wes identifies within the political world those exchanges sustain.

The pleasure of deference

Late in the novel, Wes distinguishes the attraction of politics from money, governing power, and fame. He says that he loses money each year because his salary cannot cover what is expected of him. Publicity, including television appearances and newspaper coverage, becomes ordinary with repetition; even the power to change the city does not explain the hold politics has on him. The reward, he says, is seeing people jump.

He gives the phrase a literal, recurring shape. When he enters a room, people who are seated rise; someone moves to get him a chair. In stores, people stop what they are doing to help him. At the airport, he says, staff will stop the whole operation if necessary to make sure he catches a late flight. In public spaces, admirers approach for his autograph. The repeated movement turns deference into something both bodily and observable: political status is made visible in how quickly other people respond.

Wes also says that white people and African Americans behave alike in this respect. Roger notices that Wes has begun using the term African American, and Wes briefly acknowledges the change before returning to his point. The exchange sits beside Wes’s broader account of Atlanta’s racial political structure: the city’s divisions shape the organization of power, even as the spectacle of attention crosses those divisions.

Roger’s taste of influence

Wes applies the expression directly to Roger’s recent conduct. He tells him that Charlie Croker has been a major figure in Atlanta and that Roger has had Croker jumping ever since their first meeting in his office at Croker Concourse. Roger has helped his client and Wes, but Wes’s praise also recasts the work as a political experience: Roger has acquired a taste, perhaps a large one, for making another powerful person respond.

Roger does not accept the characterization comfortably. He is busy looking for irony in Wes’s remarks, resents Wes for understanding his motives so accurately, and answers that he would not call the experience fun. That resistance leaves the expression unresolved as a judgment of Roger: Wes can see his enjoyment, but Roger does not openly endorse the description. The phrase therefore links campaign mechanics to personal temptation. Political influence may be purchased and organized through money, intermediaries, and votes; its most intimate payoff, in Wes’s account, is the moment when other people move because he has entered the room.