Skip to main content

Lone Star Blues

By



Seems the Republicans are losing their grip on the Lone Star state.  This once Democratic bastion (albeit conservatively Democratic) has been "red" for the past 20 years ever since Boy George knocked the Grand Dame of Texas off her throne in one of the biggest upsets of the 1994 midterm elections.  After 6 years of Bush and 14 years of Rick Perry, Texans seem to be a little GOP weary.  So, Rand Paul rode into Texas on his Libertarian white horse to try to urge state Republicans to be more friendly, seeming to evoke Dubya's "compassionate conservatism" from a generation before so that the Hispanic vote won't make the Lone Star State Blue.

Like so many states, the demographics seem to be turning against the Republicans.  An estimated 40 per cent of the Texas electorate is now Hispanic, and most of them tend to vote Democratic.  They might vote for one of their homeboys like Ted Cruz but run a guy like Greg Abbott and all bets are off.

Texas Republicans haven't been very kind to women either.  The recent draconian abortion bill they railroaded through the state legislature left many women feeling there is no longer any room in the Republican Party for them.  The general tone of the GOP seems to be women should stay at home, raise kids and have a hot meal on the table when the husband comes home.  You don't hear at all from Kay Bailey Hutchison these days, who for years was the most prominent Republican woman in Texas.  She was replaced by Ted Cruz.


Now, there's Wendy Davis making waves.  It remains to be seen whether she can generate the Democratic groundswell to unseat the Republicans in Austin, but her candidacy is a refreshing change.  There are also the Castro brothers in San Antonio.  You might remember Julian from the Democratic National Convention in 2012.  Both are young dynamic leaders in step with the changing demographics of the state.

You would think the GOP could have found a more charismatic front man than Greg Abbott to run for governor, which seems to imply a certain laziness in the Texas Republican Party.  It's kind of the like the waning days of the Soviet Union when you had moribund leaders like Brezhnev and Andropov at the helm.  Whatever "revolution" that was inspired back in 1994 seems to have been long forgotten, replaced by a decaying oligarchy.

Texas has been central to recent Republican presidential bids, which explains why Rand Paul was stumping in his boyhood state.  He says he is all for immigration reform and wants to reframe the GOP's position on key health issues that affect women voters.  The Tea Party darling now wants to put a little distance between himself and the Rabid Right, hoping to expand the GOP tent a little.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more