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.
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