Short Stories, Long Odds

A friend of mine writes for a newspaper in north Texas, the Wise County Messenger. She asked me for my thoughts about Kinky Friedman’s announcement that he plans to run for Governor. My response follows.

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now.

I’ve already called it for Kay Bailey Hutchison if she decides to run against Rick Perry on the GOP side, although I think it’ll be a squeaker. Perry will browbeat Hutchison with abortion and Perry isn’t well-liked to begin with, so that’ll be a total bloodbath.

Former Rep Chris Bell has decided to run (or at least, that’s what I hear), and he had a strong following before he was assassinated by redistricting and I don’t think Turner will be a challenge in the Democratic primary.

Unless Martin Frost decides to run for the Democrats, which he won’t, it’ll be Kay Bailey Hutchison, Chris Bell, and Kinky Friedman. If Kinky could get signatures at any time and use those to get on the ballot, I think he’d have a shot at wrecking the field and, if the fight between Hutchison and Perry gets nasty enough, I think he may even have a chance at winning. Certainly, voting for gimmick candidates for Governor is in vogue these days.

However, I think Kinky’s chances at actually winning will be destroyed by logistics. In order for him to get on the ballot, he has to collect signatures of people who DIDN’T vote in the primaries. If a voter votes in either the Republican or Democratic primary, their signature on the petition won’t count. He’ll need an excellent street team organization to disseminate his information and turn his run legitimate. If he doesn’t have a strong organization already, his campaign will stall early and die.

The difficulty for an independant is that the really good foot soldiers in politics – the staff, the volunteers, the street teams, phone bankers, pollsters, etc – are strong party identifiers. He will be hard pressed to find veterans to add to his staff and volunteer corps as an independant.

Party identification also often means money, and I expect the Texas governors race to cost well into the millions.

So, to sum up – if he can build a good organization full of people who are not only good at what they do in politics but are also experienced, he has a good shot. If he doesn’t already have most of his staff in line, he’s toast.

Last night, I’m watching CNN. There’s a Democratic senator talking about Bush’s budget, the spending Bush’s budget doesn’t include [like the war(s) we're fighting or the cost of Social Security reform] and this Democrat has a chart. Half of the chart is covered up. The Democrat is saying something like this:

“Bush only wants you to think about this part of his budget, the next two years, and he doesn’t want you to think about what the things he’s cutting are, and he doesn’t want you to think about what the unlisted expenditures will do to the budget, and he certainly doesn’t want you to think about what’s going to happen to the deficit and the national debt after this year here”.

(Democrat points to right where the chart is covered up.)

“So, why doesn’t he want you to think about the rest of this? This part he’s hiding from you?”

(Senator starts to uncover his chart)

(CNN CUTS BACK TO THE DESK WHERE WOLF BLITZER IS SITTING THERE AND IS ALL LIKE)

“Coming up next: psychic detectives! Are they real?”

I had thought CNN was getting a little weird, and now I know that they’re like FOX Lite or something.

If anyone else saw that, I would really love to know who the unlabelled Democrat with the chart was.

By the way, you can comment again. I turned them back on because everyone stopped talking.

Here is a copy of the letter I sent to the UNT College Democrats mailing list. It hints at some salient points about the party I thought you guys might take interest in. It features some comparisons between the College Democrats and the YCT, or Young Conservatives of Texas.

The YCT just recently staged “Capture an illegal immigrant day” on the UNT campus, and if I’m not mistaken the event was coordinated with similar ones all over Texas.

You can image how people reacted. Behold, the face of campus activism:

Follows, the letter:

From what I can tell, the YCT has many advantages over us:

1) They have a slick website. We could have a slick website too and I
could build it and even add blog capabilities – before I started
writing freelance I was a web development contractor

Its true. Don’t let this site’s design fool you, I can make things that look pretty.

2) They have a lot of interested people. We have our “contributing
elites” but obviously that isn’t winning us any battles. We have to
not only engage in committee work, but we also have to figure out a
way to reach out to more students. I was at the DFA meeting Wednesday
night and they told me that the Students for Dean group at one point
had 300 people in it and they were meeting twice a week. Dean
provided a leadership-in-absentia, and as far as I have seen, there’s
no public face for the College Democrats at UNT. If we were able to
imbue one of our contributing elites with some hot PR, we could get
more people in engaged.

With as crazy as some people in Denton get about certain issues, we should have any problem finding willing volunteers with strong hearts. We just have to sell the whole progressive package so that the Sieera Club members are just as eager to stand up for women’s rights as those of the noble guppy squid.

3) PR – Because of the traditionally careful nature of Democrats, even
when we get letters published people aren’t entirely sure what we
stand for or are opposed to. Outlining a set of defined principles
and then engaging the public in discussions or events surrounding
those issues is a must, an absolute. Edra Bogle informed me that a
committee was appointed to establish a set of principles and issues
that we’re going to inculcate the county with, and we should be
contributing to that process as well as defining our own additional
pet issues. If we want to get the student’s attention we need to find
things that they will care about, either vehemently (the immigrant
issue) or in an indirect sort of way (our trade imbalance with China
destroying the job market, etc).

We all know this is true. Sometimes it seems like Democrats and progressives outside the Senate are afraid to call bullshit on anyone. That has to stop.

4) Leadership and organization – whatever they’ve got, its smoking.
What we have, organizationally, is not. We must stop being an
ancillary limb of the party and become a cooperative but independant
force, and we must demand more of ourselves and our members. This is a
never-ending zero sum game, and a political party’s primary (and some
would say sole) function is to win elections. In order to win
elections we need, in all seriousness, to build a dedicated army of
zealots, true believers. That’s how Dean was able to raise and spend
$70 million by New Hampshire, and if he’d had better, smarter
financial management he would have done a lot more damage than he did.

See my above comment about the Sierra Club members. THe time to start is now – if we wait until the election to start recruiting it’ll be too late.

We need to figure out the aims of the party at local and state-wide
levels for 2006, and we must identify if the goals handed down by the
state and local organizations of the party are actually in the party’s
best interest. Then we need to figure out what we can do to best serve
the party, and then we have to do it, or we are fucking condemned to
relive the past.

I’m tired of Democrats deferring to the state and national parties on every little thing, and I’m tired of it because obviously it isn’t working. The Democrats have been a party of” targeters” – mainly concentrating only on races they think they can win – and that strategy is a recipe for the long term destruction of the Democratic party. The current leadership of the Texas Democratic Party engage in a targeting strategy, and they need a little of that good ol’ “Come To Jesus” talking-to.

I have written here about Alberto Gonzales and the process of his confirmation in the Senate, but I have not written about what has been said during that process. I have had the opportunity to review the things said on both sides, and I feel as if there were some alarming elements contained therein.

The opposition raised the spectre of Abu Ghraib and the role Gonzales played as White House Counsel in his judgement concerning the legality of torture and how the American military should view the Geneva Conventions within the context of our current operations in the War on Terror.

Those for Gonzales, roundly comprised of Senate Republicans, spoke about Gonzales’ humble beginnings, his distinguished career as a legal professional, and his sober judgement of the legality of using torture against enemies of the United States.

I watched Senator John Cornyn, representing my beloved state of Texas, deliver the following defense of Alberto Gonzales’ counsel to the White House:

According to Article 4 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, though, only lawful combatants are eligible for POW protections. The Red Cross’s own guidelines state that to earn POW status, combatants must satisfy all four conditions of lawful combat: being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates, having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, carrying arms openly, and conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Accordingly, Mr. Bush determined that the United States shall treat all detainees humanely, but that as a legal matter, neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban militia are legally entitled to the convention’s protections. The former is not even a state, let alone a party to the Geneva Convention, while the latter does not comply with all four required conditions of lawful combat.

What should disturb us about this defense, regularly championed in the media on op-ed pages around our country and often espoused by Republican elected officials, is what it says about their shared perception of America’s role in the world. It says that while we speak clearly of our commitment to freedom and regularly defend the individual human rights of people around the world, we are content to merely adhere to the letter of the law when exerting our considerable force.

If we, the United States of America, are to safeguard freedom and liberty around the world, we would do well to do better than we have to. We would do well to do more than what is strictly required. What message does this send to the rest of the world?

What our leaders and thinkers are saying when they invoke the strict legality of the Geneva Conventions is that they endorse torture to meet our needs if we can get away with it. They are saying that if an enemy does not meet a certain set of codified requirements, the enemy does not deserve the protection of their basic human rights the Geneva Conventions afford. They are saying that theenemy is not worthy of our mercy, only of our retribution.

It is not the accceptance and utilization of extreme measures in the face of imminent danger to American lives that should disturb us as citizens of this world, but rather the a policy of extreme measures writ large for application on the greater field of battle in the War in Iraq. The abject humliation and fear the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were exposed to had nothing to do with protecting American lives or national security – it was instead the total failure of human decency by those charged with not only protecting America but also defending the liberty of a people unable to claim it for themselves, and likewise charged with delivering the message and cause of freedom to the wider world. Charged, in fact, with deliverance itself.

This instance of action against what we as Americans believe in is what Senator Cornyn and his colleagues were defending. To say that Gonzales was charged not with deciding the morality of a policy but only the legality of that policy is indicative of a larger problem in a larger set of choices and administration. Alberto Gonzales answered to his client, and now George Bush wishes to make him the employee of the American people.

We can do better. We can engage in the selection of a slate of representative officials that take into consideration the larger consequences of the decisions they make. Alberto Gonzales has already enabled the United States government to come up short of our ideals and what we defend, and instead to meet only our explicit legal obligations, as opposed to our greater humanitarian responsibilities to the world at large. He should not be allowed to do so again.

If we are to be stewards of liberty and messengers of freedom, if we are to end tyranny in the world at large, and if we are to be the shining beacon of humanity and democracy that we so emphatically seek to be, we not only can do better, we must do better.