Nor are Democratic candidates who run as Half Republican. Nor are those who cave into Republican ideas such as open carry and the faux evils of big government. Republican voters in the state are not going to vote for Democrats who are Half Republican. We've been down this loser road before.
Many Republican voters in Texas vote straight Party tickets no matter who is on the ballot. This should be 100% crystal clear given our current Attorney General is an indicated felon (indicted before the 2014 election, thank you) and our Agricultural Commissioner is a Palinesque kook who charges the state for his “Jesus shots.” The list of nut job and crooked Republicans in elected offices here is long. Remember how George P. Bush and others continued to pay employees after firing them? P. and others did so in order to prevent disgruntled employees from suing the agencies they run. The fact that this trick is against state law didn’t stop P. and his colleagues. But Republican voters don’t seem to care. P.’s office is run by his daddy’s and uncle’s malpractices of crony capitalism and pay to play politics. But I will bet my life savings on the prediction that Republicans will vote for P. again in 2018.
For straight Republican voters are not really woo-able unless an elected Republican were to do something truly ghastly to them. Like run off with one’s spouse and life’s savings after burning down one’s home. But even then I am not so sure. The Texas GOP has done one heck of a job of demonizing we “libtards.”
In my view it would be far more productive for Democrats to energize and and motivate our base to vote during each and every election. Texas is a woefully low voting state.
When it comes down to Democratic voters, most of us are not excited by Democrats who run as Half Republican. I have never seen the wind go out the sails of fired up voters/volunteers as hastily as in 2014 when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis announced her support for open carry.
Davis/Battleground Texas volunteers and I had been in the middle of a phone banking session at my home in Houston when we learned the bad news. One woman, sitting at my dining room table, banged her forehead on the table. Why? I suggested we take a 15 minute break from our calling assignments so we could vent, brainstorm and try to decide how to explain Wendy’s decision. Then we returned to work — our call lists. We are Democrats and we wanted our candidate to win no matter what. We prepared ourselves to answer for Wendy Davis’s blunder by focusing on her far more positive and worthy ideas, i.e. education and women’s reproductive rights.
Mind you, none of us are polished spin doctors. But we cared and we had Davis’s back.
Ms. Davis later explained why she supported open carry at the time. We forgave her, of course, but we also caution other Democratic candidates from making the same kind of misjudgment. Don’t be afraid to stand by our Party’s values.
I am a lifelong Democrat. I proudly boast an “F” rating from the NRA. And, yet during my 2014 gubernatorial campaign in Texas, I supported the open carry of handguns in my state.
It is a position that haunts me.
The past is the past. It is the present that matters. Long story short, Wendy Davis won the Texas women’s reproductive rights battle when the SCOTUS recently tore a hole into the scam called the Texas Republican HB2.
So, as Democrats let’s get a few things straight as we hurtle closer toward November.
It might not be a good idea to bash big government. After all, FDR and LBJ
enacted laws that empowered the government to protect groups from abuse and neglect. In FDR’s case the New Deal policies saved many Americans from literal starvation during the Great Depression. My late father and his family in North Carolina were among them. Social security enabled the elderly to live a decent life instead of an impoverished one.
LBJ ended institutional apartheid in the South through the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The government had to enforce these measures when those against the rule of law attempted to block them.
President Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Though it is far from perfect Obamacare has extended healthcare coverage to millions of Americans who previously could not afford it. Or the ruthless insurance companies refused to cover individuals because of pre-existing conditions. Government can deliver good and nice things to we the people. It all depends upon who is in charge.
Of course, the Republican Party portrays big government as a corrupted source of waste, fraud, overreach and a force of pure evil. All of which perfectly describes today’s Republican Party. This is especially true of the hopelessly depraved Texas Republican Party.
And so I was a bit taken aback when I read Matt Angle’s recent article entitled
Big-government Republicans big-foot in Fort Worth
Every politico, big or small, in Texas knows of Matt Angle. He’s a big D dog in the state. A very big dog indeed. Angle is the founder and director of the Lone Star Project, a Texas Democratic Pac. He’s been a prominent player in Texas Democratic politics for years. He was influential in Wendy Davis’s gubernatorial campaign in 2014.
Although I absolutely agree with everything Angle writes about Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton and others in his article, I disagree with his use of the government as a bullying force in local citizens’ lives.
Angle rightfully takes issue with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton and their appalling interference with a Ft. Worth ordinance to protect its transgender students.
Instead of tending to their knitting in Austin and leaving local matters to local officials, their big egos storm into cities, counties and schools to big-foot local officials.
They not only tell them what to do but how to do it.
Recently, we’ve seen full-blown big-government Republicanism run rampant in Tarrant County.
Fort Worth ISD leaders were working effectively and without controversy to implement already agreed-upon policies for transgender students. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick decided to show up and blow up the entire process.
The two right wing zealots did blow up the entire process but the individuals lit the explosives, not the Texas government. One can argue that the Lt. Gov. and Attorney General abused their powers by bullying Ft. Worth’s local officials while shamelessly fear mongering and dividing its citizenry.
Dan Patrick, whom the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board has blasted as a con artist as well as a manipulator of right wing hoaxes, did exactly what Angle writes below.
He pitted family against family. He raised irrational fears, created confusion and generally caused problems while solving none.
Ethically challenged Attorney General Ken Paxton arrived right on Patrick’s heels to grab more headlines by issuing a “legal opinion” on the transgender issue. Of course, Paxton downplayed the hard fact that his “opinion” has absolutely no force of law.
Again, the two right wing hucksters are the culprits. The carnival barkers over-reached which is precisely what Texas Republicans do. The US Supreme Court recently and precisely busted the Texas GOP for its over-reaching schemes in the state’s unconstitutional anti-abortion law.
Angle is understandably upset by the area’s state senator.
In the past, both Democrats and Republicans would see defending local voters and officials as not only their duty but as smart politics.
Current Sen. Konni Burton, R-Colleyville, is just not wired that way.
Burton is as much a big-government Republican as Patrick, Paxton or Gov. Greg Abbott. She would impose an ideological point of view anchored in Austin upon even her own constituents in Tarrant County.
Burton, Patrick and Paxton are narrow, ideological authoritarian leaders. That is the real problem. All use their positions in order to shove their religious and political dogmas down everyones’ throats. No one may disagree with them.
They gained their power and will work to hold it by imposing narrow ideology and displaying authority.
They are skilled in concocting emotional and divisive solutions and applying them to nonexistent problems.
And as long as they’re allowed to get away with it, their favored targets will be local officials and voters.
All of the above is 100% true. But the castigating office holders are the problem.
Right wing tyrants did the same to Denton when its citizens voted to ban Fracking. The Governor and Republican state legislators sided with
big oil over the desires of Denton’s local leaders and its residents. All factions, tea party, moderates, Democrats, Libertarians had joined forces to pass the ban.
Abbott’s commitment to giving citizens a real say in their property uses and taking on legislative influence-peddling couldn’t have come at a better time for the people of Denton, Texas. In November of 2014, the Dentonians voted overwhelmingly to protect their property, their children and their communities from the many adverse impacts of fracking, an irresponsible and largely unregulated method of gas extraction. Abbott’s promises presumably meant that under his watch, government would never be allowed to strip away the democratic rights of Denton’s local citizens at the behest of industry.
But then in May Abbott signed into law HB40, a bill reportedly scripted by the oil and gas industry, thereby stripping away the property and local voting rights of the citizens of the city of Denton and every other town and city in Texas. Industry’s lawyers wasted no time running into court to bully Denton’s City Council into dropping its ban under the threat of attorney’s fees.
The same happened in Houston when City Council passed the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). Thanks to right wing conservative and religious fundamentalist activism, the state’s
Supreme Court ruled that Houston must repeal or put the ordinance on the ballot. Houston put HERO on the ballot. With more than a little help from the dictatorial fear mongers-in-chiefs, Dan Patrick, and Governor Greg Abbott, HERO went down in flames. The right wing zealots did to Houston what Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton did to Ft. Worth and Denton.
The government is not the problem here. The predicament rests with the totalitarians that have managed to get elected and get away with misusing the powers of their offices. Radical right wing extremists have taken over our state’s government and they have infringed upon too many of our rights.
IMHO Democrats would serve better serve our goals, our base and our Party by staying on message about unforgiving dogmatic politicians who seem to enjoy punishing those with whom they disagree on religious and political grounds.
Push has come to being bulldozed. Radical right wing extremists run the state. They exploit the government in order to ram their right wing, intolerant fundamentalist religious beliefs, authoritarianism, pro-corporate, neoliberal agendas down our throats.
Sometimes it’s impossible to imagine how the state that gave us LBJ also produced
W., Rick Perry, Tom Delay and the three spineless bigots mentioned above. Let’s go back to the LBJ model. He could be one mean SOB but at least LBJ did right by the people. I wish LBJ were still around so we could enjoy his blistering commentary on today’s hateful Texas Republicans whose spirits are
rotten to the core.