Lemme tell ya ’bout ol’ Jimmy Talarico, folks. He’s a simple man, a country boy whose pappy was a preacher, and he loves just four things in this world: He loves his woman. He loves drivin’ them back roads in his ol’ pick-’em-up truck. He loves cuttin’ taxes. And he loves securin’ the border.
If you haven’t been following Talarico’s media campaign, spend a few minutes to take a look. The great thing about being a politician with no real internal self is that it becomes comically easy to turn into some new person, pivoting from Beto-light soy opera on themes like the non-binary God and loving trans kids to…whatever it is that he’s doing now.
Apply the following comparison as widely as possible. This is James Talarico:
And this is James Talarico:
He’s the proudly meat-free candidate who loves to sit down to a big ol’ plate of beef ribs (that he’s scared to touch directly with his hand, but please do not allow yourself to notice this). Whatever you think, voter, he agrees with you. Please state your preference so the candidate may concur.
Like the transition between seasons of your favorite show, now, we’re meetin’ New Model Texas Jimmy. Suddenly the letter G disappears from the end of his words, and he talks constantly about how hard he worked up there in the legislature to force Republicans to cut taxes in Texas, ’cause they didn’t wanna until Ol’ Jimmy told ’em to. (He’s lying, but you already knew that.)
We should be about three weeks away from the day Talarico hauls out his favorite shootin’ irons and heads out for a day at the range, and it’s kind of surprising that his campaign hasn’t rented him an old hunting dog yet. The shootin’ range will turn out to be the place where he does his best thinkin’, or something like that. If they don’t keep an eye on him, he may start to reminisce about the year he went to state with the Dillon Panthers.
If you watch carefully, or even not carefully, you’ll quickly see two themes develop in Talarico’s messaging: One, he’s going to aggressively cut everybody’s taxes.
And two, he’s going to give everybody a lot more free stuff from the government.
How does he reconcile those two themes, government having less revenue plus government spending a lot more money? Short answer: LOL. He’s not trying to. He’s for X, and he’s for Not-X. He’s for all of it. If you’re lookin’ to get paid, Jimmy’s your man. Details TK, mumble mumble.
If you want to watch a very nearly miraculous piece of sociopathic pandering, grab a cup of coffee and settle in:
Ol’ Jimmy’s sick and tired — sorry, sick and tahrd — of watchin’ black folk get taken advantage of by a society that lives on all their hard work and don’t give ’em nothin’ in return. When Jimmy goes up to that Senate, folks, why, he’s gonna make it rain. The free stuff from the government is gonna roll like a mighty river runnin’ on down to a black sea.
The town hall questions all boil down to shouldn’t we get more free stuff, and Ol’ Jimmy agrees 110 percent. He has a special plan for black voters, see. It’s more or less…segregated. I mean, in a good way!
But even if you’ve failed to be black and don’t qualify for Ol’ Jimmy’s special plan, your taxes are going to be much lower, and at the same time the government is going to take care of your children for free and give you a free doctor. Jimmy’s just an ol’ country boy, folks, but he ain’t gonna stand for nothin’ less.
It’s too early for polls to matter much, but the early signs aren’t great. As the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton was impeached with 60 Republican votes in the Texas House (before being acquitted in the state Senate), and more than a third of Texas Republican voters chose John Cornyn in the primary. Paxton needs to pull his party back together.
Talarico has a more united party, with only some anger among black voters over the defeat of Jasmine Crockett, and he seems to be dragging over some Republican squishes. He just needs to lie and pretend to love tax cuts for a few months.
And he’s good enough at pretending. If you doubt that, watch.
