“I said, ‘There’s nothing routine about this!’” Patrick recalled.

Then he started catching up with the news. It played into exactly what he says makes him want to be part of the political debate again, but also makes him worry that politics has moved past him.

“It was interesting to me that the first reaction was not ‘Thank God no one was hurt.’ Instead, it felt like the first reaction was ‘Look how the pattern is part of something.’ It could have been a mail carrier. It could have been someone in the mail room. It went immediately into the political frame. Even that, to me, was revealing,” Patrick said. “There’s the first step here, that is about our humanity, that we are skipping over pretty quickly. We get to our political discourse and that tribal brawl as fast as possible, and I don’t think that’s all about the media. It’s like a bad habit we’re in.”

There aren’t many national figures (and no other African American ones) that the Cunningham campaign would have brought in to this district, where the slogan on yard signs is Lowcountry Over Party. Cunningham—an enthusiastic young attorney who on Saturday announced that his campaign has a poll showing him running even—brings every conversation back to banning offshore drilling. Cunningham’s opponent, Katie Arrington, meanwhile, knocked off the congressman and frequent Donald Trump critic Mark Sanford earlier this year in a primary that demonstrated the total and proudly embraced Trumpification of the GOP, and has called the race “the fight of good and evil.”

Cunningham said he didn’t know much about Patrick before Bakari Sellers, a former state legislator and current CNN personality, suggested inviting him. (Sellers joined them for their tour of the district on Saturday, repeatedly telling crowds about how Patrick’s 2006 campaign was his inspiration before Obama’s 2008 White House campaign was.)

“He represents levelheaded leadership,” Cunningham said, explaining what he’d learned about Patrick since, and why he’d wanted him to come. “He didn’t come out of nowhere.”

At the roundtable on Saturday morning and at a stop at a local brewery, where he stood on top of two collapsed cornhole boards so the crowd could see him, Patrick repeated a line that he’s been saying to explain why a former governor of Massachusetts keeps popping up in all these odd spots. He draws it back to growing up on welfare on the South Side, talking about an interconnected responsibility that’s been lost.

“It may not be my neighborhood, but it is my community,” he says, his voice rising each time. “It may not be my campaign, but it is my campaign.”

There’s an element of this, from the Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett pushing him in private and public to these tiny events where Patrick will spend way more time than makes campaign sense. With most of the people he talks to, it feels like those West Wing flashbacks, when Jed Bartlet is a former governor laying his heart out to a handful of voters in New Hampshire, and a small group of devoted aides falls in love with him and insists he’s the real deal, that he could really do it. But those flashbacks all came after viewers had already seen a few seasons of Bartlet as president, so they’d been primed to believe that a campaign like this could work, and that the people who were in love with him would turn out to not be completely crazy.