Quote:Texas: Red but Not Relevant
Mimi Swartz
MAY 17, 2016
Houston — HILLARY CLINTON is coming to town, but not for any public events. Instead, she plans to appear at a fund-raiser at a loyalist’s grand Houston home. The cost of attending is detailed on the Evite: $2,700 for a Champion, $1,000 for a Fighter and $500 for an Advocate (not surprisingly, first to sell out).
No doubt Mrs. Clinton could draw an adoring crowd, but it’s accepted as a waste of time for national Democratic candidates to come here to seek actual votes, as opposed to cash. Texas has become as predictably red as California and New York are blue, with the predictable result that it has become nearly irrelevant in the presidential races.
Not that things are looking so great for Republicans from my home state. Our most recent candidate for national office just crashed and burned: Despite his ostrich-skin cowboy boots, Ted Cruz was trounced by a Yankee who, truth be told, is far more stereotypically Texan in his rich-guy rubeness.
Another failed Texas candidate, Rick Perry, just endorsed Mr. Trump, proving once again that the former governor’s cravenness is truly as big as Texas. Remember when Mr. Perry was still in the race, and he branded Mr. Trump a “cancer on conservatism”? Governor “Oops” must believe his fellow Republicans are as memory-impaired as he is.
To be the punch line to a not-so-funny joke is not a happy place for Texans. Say what you will about politicians like Lyndon Johnson, Phil Gramm, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Ann Richards and Bush 41, but they believed in government and governing, and they were taken seriously by the rest of the nation. In the House, there was Sam Rayburn, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey. Maybe you didn’t like their politics, but they got things done.
That kind of gravitas has quit the scene. Texas boasts legions of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, artists and energy executives who enjoy global reputations, but back home pridefully ignorant pygmies run the political show.
One example: When our senior senator, John Cornyn, was running for re-election in 2014, the Houston Chronicle’s editorial board asked him for his view of a huge coastal storm-surge-protection project in the Houston-Galveston area known as the Ike Dike. His answer: “I don’t even know what that is.”
And he looks like a legislative wunderkind compared with our junior senator. “Now it’s time for Ted Cruz to represent the people who sent him to Washington,” the Chronicle suggested after the Indiana primary. Good luck with that.
Mary Beth Rogers, the author of the optimistic “Turning Texas Blue,” summed up our collective frustration: “The conventional wisdom is we are just a bunch of crazies down here.”
How did we get here? The reasons are varied. The national Democratic Party’s decades-long shift to the left contributed to the end of 100 years of Democratic dominance. (Even Mr. Perry was a Democrat, because, back in the day, nobody in Texas was a Republican.)
The energy boom of the late ’70s and early ’80s brought an influx of the disaffected from the Rust Belt, boosting the angry, turn-back-the-clock conservatism already here. Then, in the ’90s, Karl Rove and Mr. DeLay’s grand plan to create a perpetual Republican majority in Texas also tilted control of Republican primaries toward ever more right-wing activists.
Meanwhile, Texas Democrats’ case of learned helplessness became chronic. They hardly bother to run for dogcatcher. Wendy Davis’s ignominious defeat in her 2014 run for governor proved it was time to start over, but strategic efforts have not taken off.
“They spend a lot of time updating voter files, but nobody knows how to use those things,” one longtime Democrat told me. The difference between pragmatism and self-pity has become hard to discern. That was never the norm.
Then the cuckoos took over. It’s astounding that a state so modern in many ways has moved so far backward when it comes to taking care of its own people — for example, curtailing poor women’s access to birth control while refusing to take a cent in Medicaid expansion.
Is it cynicism or plain old ignorance that makes our legislators appear oblivious to the damage that cuts to public education and health care will do to our future work force?
Few in Texas see a quick way to restore the state to national relevance, if not respectability. That might be a comfort to the Texas haters outside our borders, but it’s not so heartening for the people who live here. Maybe the long-predicted Latino surge at the polls will save us (thanks to Donald Build-a-Wall Trump). Or maybe, as the aged white voters of the religious right pass to their rewards, they will be replaced by more open-minded millennials.
“Our best hope is to become a swing state like Florida,” Ms. Rogers proposed.
It’s a humbling thought for a Texan, but we have to start somewhere.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/opinion/tex...6&_r=0
Maryland 4 hours ago
If Texas wanted to leave the United States and become an independent nation, they would have to pay back billions of dollars that have gone into building highways, rural electrification, hundreds of dams and lakes, and maybe they'd have to buy the numerous military bases back, too. The Johnson Space Center would close, research and support money for the University of Texas and Texas A&M would dry up. In short, they would be paying the rest of us for the next 100 years and they would lose the welfare support that enables low wage employers, like McDonald's and WalMart, to hire people at near starvation wages while the national govt. picks up the slack.
It wouldn't be a happy place after a few years. In fact, it would probably wind up like a right wing version of Venezuela where people are dying hourly in hospitals due to lack of treatment and medicines.
Think of this: those hard right politicians wouldn't have Washington to kick around any more. They'd have to blame themselves for the mess they made.
JRD
Houston 3 hours ago
I've lived in Texas off and on, mostly on, since 1965. In the haze of selective memory I've watched the local mindset devolve into its current state - and the current state isn't pretty. This used to be a place that valued diverse ideas and challenged people to think creatively and optimistically about the future.
Those days are gone. Today Texas is ruled by fear. A sizable segment of the population wants to secede from the union, carry guns in the open and shut down any discussion or debate. To many in Texas, its 'my way or the highway'. The descent into ignorance and intolerance has been dramatic and seems to be gaining speed. In the end, though, nature will surely prevail. No pendulum can swing can swing forever in one direction.
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