It’s been a few days since I went down to the south capitol steps to watch the Tea Party Express featuring Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Ron Paul. It’s a bit late for me to do a comprehensive write-up of the speeches there. I caught all of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz’s speech, but could only stay for about ten minutes of Ron Paul’s, because I had to get back home to write my review of the Avengers. The crowd was friendly, enthusiastic, and about 75% Ron Paul supporters, with the other 25% there either for Ted Cruz or various other candidates, including Richard Mack and the Libertarian candidate for the U.S. 25th congressional district Betsy Dewey, who was running around in one of those Firefly cunning hats and has the virtue of being quite cute.
Rather than a blow-by-blow description of what was said, or an attempt to construct a coherent Venn diagram depicting conservatives, Libertarians, Republicans, the Tea Party, and Ron Paul supporters, I’m going to just put up some pictures:
Why ObamaCare can’t work: “It is a perverse but very real fact of life that the more complex and rich the system to be regulated, the less the ‘experts’ and the goo-goos have the political power to impose their vision on the regulatory process. The more carefully crafted a law needs to be, the more it is going to be full of lobby lollipops and sweat heart deals. A legislative body trying to write a health care law for a country like ours is like a neurosurgeon operating, drunk, with one hand holding a chainsaw and the other in a boxing glove.”
Paul Ryan endorses Mitt Romney. That’s a great pickup for him, and it eases, ever so slightly, my concerns that Romney will be a “big spending Republican” in the mode of Bush43 should he get elected.
Dwight notes a Hezbollah connection to the story of a chain of Austin bars that weren’t paying their employees what they were owed.
So a Hispanic Democrat shoots someone who might or might not have been assaulting him, and suddenly Texas Democrats are ready to drag gun control back on the agenda. Thanks Rep. Garnet Coleman (Democrat, Houston)! I was a little worried that gun owners might be not be motivated to go to the polls in Texas in 2012 (what with the House, Senate, and Governor’s mansion all under Republican control), but your proposal to end the castle doctrine is just the tonic we need to get them to the voting booth!
The King Street Patriots in Houston have a Democratic Judge rule against their tax-exempt status in a lawsuit brought by the Democratic Party. I wanted to point out the frivolous nature of this lawsuit, but Big Jolly already beat me to it.
After much back and forth with his campaign trying to find a date, I was finally able to interview Texas Senate candidate Craig James on March 21 at the Rudy’s on South 360 here in Austin. This was, alas, not an ideal atmosphere for an interview (it got better when one of his staffers asked Rudy’s to turn off their piped in music for the area, which is something I should have thought of asking for), and the first part of the interview makes it hard to hear. After the first question, I stopped the camera and moved it closer to James so you can hear his answers, so the audio gets much better about 1:35 in, though I seem to have cut off the top of his head in the process. So let me apologize in advance for the less-than-sterling sound and video quality for various parts of the interview, but the vast majority of the interview is intelligible. I filmed this with my Mino Flip camera and did a light edit in iMovie, so the crappiness is 100% my fault (or that of the environment it was filmed in).
Thoughts:
James is a very confident, well-spoken and personable speaker with a lot of natural charisma. He seems to get the big picture of the conservative agenda (a constitutionally limited government, and a commitment to free markets) and obviously comes from a social conservative background.
I like that he would eliminate the Department of Education, but it’s a bit hard to square with his emphasis on vocational training in the second part of the answer. It’s not that I disagree that it’s a good idea, it’s just that after the elimination of the Department of Education, I don’t see any viable (or proper) role for such fine-grained educational policy control at the federal level.
I’m not particularly interested in the Texas Tech question that starts part 2, but since it’s the most famous controversy he’s been involved in, the interview would have felt incomplete without it.
There are a couple of interesting admissions I give him credit for: admitting that Texans for a Better Tomorrow was created as a vehicle for him to explore a role in politics, and admitting that he would root for the New England Patriots (for whom he played in the NFL) were they to meet the Cowboys in the Superbowl, a brave position that’s obviously not pandering to his constituents.
I didn’t like the vagueness of his positions beyond a few policy specifics, and the fact he tried to straddle both sides of some issues (such as PIPA/SOPA in the second half of the interview). Both Ted Cruz and Tom Leppert were occasionally vague on some points, but James is already sounding awfully vague for someone who hasn’t ever held elective office.
The low-point of the interview (about 3:15 into the second part) was finding out that James has never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act. This is not an obscure statute, it’s one of the fundamental laws governing the limitations of using federal troops. I would expect not only anyone with an interest in politics to at least have heard of the Posse Comitatus act, I would actually expect the same of anyone with a basic college education.
I’d like to thank Craig James for taking time out of his busy schedule to speak with me, and his staff for their assistance in setting up the interview.
Now I’ve interviewed all the major Republican Senate candidates but David Dewhurst. If his campaign would get in touch with me to set a convenient date in the next few weeks, I’d like to correct that oversight…
Now that all the post-redistricting filings have been finalized, I thought I would take a look at Texas U.S. congressional races to see where either the Republican or the Democratic party has failed to field a candidate. While districts are usually drawn to protect incumbents and minimize the chances of the out-of-power party, it’s usually best to contest all possible races, for a variety of reasons:
You can’t beat something with nothing.
It helps tie down time, money and effort that could otherwise be shifted to other races.
It helps down-ballot races by drawing voters to the polls.
It offers a chance for Republicans to get their message of limited government, lower taxes and greater freedom out to people who might not otherwise hear it, and possibly make some converts in the process (the parable of the sower).
Stuff happens. Sudden, unexpected twists of fate can play out at any moment. Incumbents get caught stuffing bribe money into their freezer or consorting with prostitutes. Planes crash. And there’s always the possibility of someone being caught in bed with a dead woman or a live goat.
Unexpected opportunities arise, but you can’t take advantage of them if you don’t have a candidate in place.
With that in mind, let’s see how well Republicans and Democrats have done in finding candidates for all 36 Texas congressional races:
U.S. Congressional Races Where Democrats Failed to Field a Candidate
U.S. Representative District 2: Republican Incumbent Ted Poe
U.S. Representative District 3: Republican Incumbent Sam Johnson
U.S. Representative District 4: Republican Incumbent Ralph Hall
U.S. Representative District 13: Republican Incumbent Mac Thornberry
U.S. Representative District 17: Republican Incumbent Bill Flores (in a seat that was held by Democrat Chet Edwards until 2010!)
U.S. Representative District 19: Republican Incumbent Randy Neugebauer
U.S. Representative District 25: Open seat, formerly Lloyd Dogget’s until he moved to the newly created 35th District following redistricting. No less than 12 Republicans have filed for this seat (including former Senate candidates Michael Williams, Roger Williams, and Charles Holcomb). 56% of the newly reformulated 25th District’s residents voted for McCain in 2008; that’s solidly, but not overwhelmingly, Republican. But not one Democrat bothered to run…
So that’s seven U.S. Congressional races where Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee National Chair for Recruiting and Candidate Services Allyson Schwartz, and, well, whoever the hell it is at The Texas Democratic Party in charge of recruiting candidates, were unable to find a single person out of approximately 688,488 citizens in each of those districts to run for the United States House of Representatives. Say what you want about Alvin Greene running for Senator in South Carolina, but at least he showed up, which Texas Democrats couldn’t even manage to do in almost one-fifth of U.S. Congressional races this year.
By contrast, Republicans only fell down on the job in one congressional district:
U.S. Congressional Race Where Republicans Failed to Field a Candidate
U.S. Representative District 29: Democratic incumbent Gene Green gets a pass. In a district that went 62% for Obama, any Republican was going to have an uphill race. But given that there are five districts even more heavily Democratic (the 9th, 16th, 18th, 33rd, and 35th) where Republicans fielded a candidate, this seems like a lost opportunity, especially for a Republican Hispanic candidate in a Hispanic district headed by an old white guy. (Granted, this didn’t work for Roy Morales in 2010, but I would have preferred that Morales file again and run a token campaign over no one running at all.)
All in all this is good news for Republicans. If I were a Democrat, I’d be mad at how thoroughly the state and national party fell down on the job of recruiting candidates.
A suggestion: All six Republican incumbents who haven’t drawn an opponent should each hold a fundraiser for Republican Incumbent Francisco “Quico” Canseco, who figures to have the toughest race of any incumbent this time around.
The latest blogroll addition is UrbanGrounds written by Robbie Cooper, “a conservative, a biker, a Veteran, a professional writer, and a blogging enthusiast in the heart of uber-Liberal Austin, TX.” It has a nice mix of local and national news that’s well worth checking out.
Several Austin bloggers are suggesting that people gather to “welcome” Eric Holder to Austin, where he’ll be speaking at the LBJ Library on UT campus. I won’t be able to, due to commitments with my new job, but I encourage others to do so if it fits into their schedule.
State Rep. Joaquin Castro raised $515,000 in Q3 in his effort to unseat Lloyd Doggett in the Democratic primary for the newly created 35th U.S. Congressional District. That’s serious money for a single quarter for a House race.
But don’t count the old liberal warhorse out yet; Doggett had more than $3.1 million cash on hand as of the end of Q2 (and the campaign says they won’t release final numbers until they’re official next week). But between Castro’s fundraising and the new San Antonio Hispanic majority district, Doggett probably has the toughest fight on his hands of his Congressional career.
A few tidbits of Texas senate race news for a lazy Friday:
There is a Tour of Texas Senatorial Forum in Austin tomorrow, Saturday July 30th, 2011, from 4:00 – 6:00 PM at the Texas Capitol Extension Auditorium at 1100 N Congress Ave, Room E1.004. I expect to attend, and hopefully should get a chance to interview one of the candidates before the forum, if all goes well.
I’ve actually been looking for Ricardo Sanchez news and not finding any, or rather the only news is non-news: There was a liberal “Texas Labor Rally to Protect Social Security and Medicare” he was scheduled to appear at…and he didn’t even bother to show up.
Tonight would be a good time to locate your voter registration card so you have it handy tomorrow. It would also be a good time to locate your polling place:
Daily KOS admits its polls were fabricated. Come December, when defeated Democrats in congress start packing up their belongings, they might pause a moment to contemplate how living in the “reality-based community”‘s fantasy bubble brought them to that juncture.
