Williamson County Democratic Party chair Greg Windham holds a peculiar view of voters’ perception of the party he was elected to lead.
Windham said Moving Wilco Forward and Annie’s (List) play into anti-Democratic stereotypes, making Williamson County residents and other Texans “afraid of Democrats.”
“They [voters] think we are here to kiss their men, kill their babies and take their guns,” Windham said.
In an interview with Round Rock Leader editor Brad Stutzman, Windham echoed derisive stereotypes that Republicans frequently use to bash Democrats. During his brief tenure as the head of the local party, these sentiments have sparked conflict with a number of precinct chairs on the party’s executive committee.
Stutzman provides a balanced summary of the disagreement between Windham and the executive committee members who voted to spend about half their cash to fund a voter registration drive conducted by a coordinated campaign representing all local Democratic candidates. However, Windham’s comments quoted in the story reveal that he is fixated on opposing the treasurer of Moving Wilco Forward, the political action committee managing the coordinated campaign.
Robert Jones is a Democratic political consultant with a remarkable track record of success, serving as the political director for Annie’s List, a statewide “organization dedicated to electing progressive women to office.” Jones formed Moving Wilco Forward in December 2008 with the express purpose of electing all the Democratic candidates in Williamson county.
In voting to move $5,000 over to Moving Wilco Forward, the majority of executive committee members expressed greater confidence in the organization’s ability to execute the voter registration program than Windham.
Windham said he believes volunteers should use “elbow grease,” going door-to-door to register voters.
Hard work is part of the plan, and the coordinated campaign will do a significant amount of door-to-door canvassing; however, the coordinated campaign will also be using mail pieces and targeting new residents of Williamson county, many of whom may have neglected to move their voter registration. Take the average street in your average neighborhood, for example. Perhaps 1 in 20 homes on that street will have moved in the past year. “Elbow grease” is wasted knocking on the other 19 doors.
Windham may not have been aware of this, which may explain why he was in a very small minority voting against the proposal. After all, Windham has only run one political campaign, a failed bid for County Commissioner in 2008.
After the executive committee voted to write the check to Moving Wilco Forward, Windham fired off an antagonistic email to a large number of local Democrats.
It would be responsible for wasteful spenders to be eradicated in order to combat the stereotypes that prevent us from winning elections. We are living in an age of consequences and it would be refreshing for some people to wake up and realize it.
One is led to wonder how to “eradicate” members of the executive committee who disagree with him. The executive committee believes the best chance for success in November is with an organization that has the experience and tools to register more voters. They believe that a Moving Wilco Forward-led coordinated campaign will make a much better case than Windham that the Democratic Party better represents the interests of Williamson County’s working families.
The top concerns of voters this election, contrary to what Windham says, are Texas’ highest-in-the-nation electric and home insurance rates, the difficulty in finding a job or getting enough hours to make ends meet, the expense of sending a child to college, the fear of being one illness away from bankruptcy and the strain of toll roads and fuel prices on the family budget.
In ways that directly impact the lives of families in Williamson county, the Democratic Party represents positive change, greater transparency and accountability. All the better ideas for government are Democratic. The Republican party deals in fear, distrust, delay, stagnation and corruption. The Republican party is sorry that BP was asked to pay for the damage caused by their negligence. The Republican party wants to eliminate Social Security and terminate unemployment benefits. The Republican Party wants to give $3 million to each of the richest 120,000 taxpayers.
Local Democratic activists feel a sense of urgency to act now to take back government and use it to defend working families instead of giant corporations like ExxonMobil or BP. Every election that passes without voters hearing our message, more children fail, more homes are foreclosed, more workers become jobless, more jobless become homeless and summers keep getting hotter.
Greg Windham needs to heed his own advice: “We are living in an age of consequences and it would be refreshing for some people to wake up and realize it.” Wake up, Greg. Realize that you’re hurting the very cause you were elected to champion. Either that or step down and allow someone who actually believes that informed voters will side with the Democratic Party.
In a fascinating article about the re-election campaign of Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), Slate reporter David Weigel touches on the tragic irony of the typical disaffected voter that is working to return the Republican party to the majority in the United States House of Representatives.
In 2008, (voters in the Orlando-area 8th Congressional District) voted for Grayson and the Obama-Biden ticket, narrowly, because of disgust with the Bush administration’s failures. It was tough to find a job then. It’s tougher now.
Republicans are blaming the weak economy on President Obama, Grayson and Congressional Democrats.
It’s a critique that appeals even to voters like Jeff Evans, 49, who was laid off from his trucking job in December 2009. He was receiving unemployment benefits until a Republican filibuster stopped them this summer, leaving him without a revenue stream for weeks. But even though Grayson and his fellow Democrats eventually restored his benefits, Evans isn’t sure he will support Grayson. It would do him more good, he said, and allow him to keep his dignity, if they “let the small businesses create more jobs.”
Meet Jeff the Trucker, a typical unemployed American who despite the direct negative impact that Republicans have wrought — namely a protracted filibuster in the United States Senate that interrupted the meager unemployment benefits that represented his only income — is supporting a Republican Congressional candidate. How can Americans be so easily misled into voting in direct opposition to their economic best interest?
Grayson knows how popular that argument is. The solution: Argue that Republicans have no credibility to make it. He pivots off of one of Webster’s ideas,a proposal to cut the budget to what it was in 2007. Webster suggests that Floridians were perfectly well off when the government spent at that lower level. Grayson prefers to ask whether voters realize that a cut like that would mean lower Social Security payments.
“It’s a stupid idea,” says Grayson. “Nobody has a time machine, OK? The world has changed a little bit since 2007. For one thing, there’re a lot of more people out of work.” Soon he’s on a roll, explaining how $12 trillion of capital disappeared in the “Bush implosion” of 2008. That’s who voters need to blame, he says. Why aren’t they as angry as he is?
“In 18 months, two centuries of work, the collective effort of millions of people, all gone,” says Grayson of the financial crisis. “So now the Republicans want to go back to 2007? It’s a little bit late for that.”
Joe the Trucker needs to wake up to his exploitation by Webster and the Republican Party, that has used the “Tea Party” moniker to replace their discredited brand, misled and exploited its followers who are feeling real pain, some of it caused directly by Republicans themselves. What we are witnessing is the counterattack of the nation’s wealthiest citizens to prevent even the slightest correction to the disastrous course that President George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans have led this nation.
The Houston Chronicle reports: “State District Judge John Dietz ruled that restricted corporate money was used to support the signature drive and did not comply with state election law.” Also reporting this breaking story are the Texas Tribune, Charles Kuffner, Bay Area Houston and pretty much everyone else.
The aptly-named Take Initiative America, took the initiative and broke the law in spending secretive corporate cash to help the Green Party gain access to the statewide ballot in November, according to Texas Democratic Party lawyers. The Austin American-Statesman is reporting that the shadow Republican group spent more than a half-million dollars to gather signatures for the Green Party’s ballot petition.
Jason Embry is reporting that Take Initiative America misled at least one Green Party officer before the petition drive began.
In a June 10 e-mail to other Green Party officials, state party treasurer David Wager said, “I was promised by a representative of Take Initiative America that the organization was not a corporation and that he would comply with all disclosure requests. Today I was informed that the organization is in fact a corporation and they will not disclose their donors. They claim that their collection of signatures and in-kind contribution was not political. I don’t agree. In my opinion, we have no choice but to refuse the signatures.”
On his blog, Embry explains that “Democrats contend that Republicans are behind the effort because a Green candidate likely would pull votes away from Democrat Bill White, who is challenging Gov. Rick Perry. Take Initiative America has not disclosed its donors. ”
PLEASE VOTE TODAY 7am -7pm FOR DEMOCRAT VIC VILLAREAL, running for ACC TRUSTEE. It’s a non-partisan race, so just remember “VOTE FOR VIC!!” He has excellent credentials and endorsements. I’ve met him a few times and seems genuine and very nice. He won 40% of the vote in the primary, his opponent got 25%, but since Vic didn’t have a majority, it goes to a run-off. Go to:
wilco.org and click on elections. Find your precinct number to see where your polling location is. Please urge everyone you know to vote today for Vic Villareal. If they live in the Austin school district, the RR school district or the Leander school district you can Vote for Vic!! If you want more info about him, here is his website, you can also google him: http://www.vicforacc.com/
There appears to be something about the recent actions of the State Board of Education (SBOE) that have sent some in the Texas media into a bit of a tizzy, (see here, here, and here). They’re either urging Bill White to, or questioning why he hasn’t, attacked Rick Perry hard enough over the changes the right wing SBOE made to Social Studies/History curriculum for Texas public schools. It’s as if they finally realized that the state of Texas has been take over by right wing zealots.
But it brings to mind a couple of other topics about the Governor’s race in Texas so far. Many, myself included sometimes, tend to wonder what kind of a race Bill White is running, or intends to run, against Perry. The best explanation so far is that’s he is running the kind of campaign he won with before. This from Jason Embry’s First Reading from last Thursday:
In this space yesterday, I wrote that one consequence of White’s recent television advertising is that money spent now is money that’s not available in the fall, when voters are paying more attention.
Houston Chronicle columnist Rick Casey, who has been following White much longer than I have, wrote to point out that, when he first ran for mayor, few gave White much chance for winning. And so he went up on television in February, nine months before the election, with about $2 million in his own money, and he stayed on television. By summer, polls showed he had a good shot. That early ad buy helped raise his profile and helped him raise $9.7 million. “To be a
Generations of Bill’s family have lived, worked and raised their children in Texas. His family has helped build small businesses, taught in our public schools and fought for our country. Bill now has a video featuring his old family photos.
Bill wrote on his Facebook Wall: “Please forward to friends this youtube video on my background, family and commitment to a better future for all Texans. The photos come from old family albums!”
There’s also this newspaper insert that is going around the state that looks pretty cool.
The AFL-CIO offer stems from details uncovered by Associated Press reporter Jay Root, in his story, “Gov. Perry’s temporary digs costs Texas big bucks.” The AP story — which went national on Monday, making it to the top of Yahoo! News — uncovered that at a time when the state of Texas is facing an $18 billion budget shortfall and Rick Perry is slashing vital areas of state government over $1 billion at a time, Perry is charging the taxpayers for some truly fancy — and unnecessary — items:
$18,000 for “consumables” such as household supplies and cleaning products
$1,001.46 in window drapes from Neiman Marcus
$1,000 “emergency repair” for an ice machine
$700 clothes rack
$70 for a two-year subscription to Food & Wine Magazine
$8,400 for maintenance of heated pool
Here’s Elise Hu’s report:
And this from the AFL-CIO:
Perry, the career politician, needs to be cut loose.
This week it’s the Democratic candidate for Texas Land Commissioner Hector Uribe.
Also from last week Democratic candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner Hank Gilbert.
Anyone can view the previous Meet the Statewides pages, in English and Spanish, via the links from the “Statewide Candidates” section of the candidates page.
We’ll have more on this as the day goes on, but all this talk of anti-incumbency and “throw the bums out” really oversimplifies what’s going on out there. It’s an easy instant analysis, especially for the time-strapped broadcast media. But particularly as it concerns last night’s results, it’s such an overboard analysis that it’s not just meaningless, it’s actually misleading.
In almost every respect the big losers last night were national Republicans. Even in cases where the ostensible Democrat lost or suffered a setback — Specter in Pennsylvania and Lincoln in Arkansas — the Democrats emerged with a stronger or potentially stronger candidate.
More on this later, but Democrats come out of last night in about as good a shape as they could possibly have hoped for. And Republicans have to be wondering if they are up to surfing the expected 2010 wave.
Well the traditional media will always take to the simple explanation first. While each race made it harder for Republicans, none of these races became sure things for Democrats. If Lincoln loses to Halter in the Arkansas runoff, then the Democrats will now have a chance in all three of these Senate races – Arkansas, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. Which wasn’t likely if these races went the other way on Tuesday. And, Last Night’s Big Loser: National Republicans.
In any case, that’s actually quite different from his father. I find Ron Paul’s politics awful and he’s a classic ideologue. But as a person he comes off as pretty humble and even unassuming, which I’ve always thought is the reason he manages to have a certain degree of crossover popularity despite his draconian and often ugly politics.
Now does any of that matter? Not necessarily, I guess. And when I mentioned this in the newsroom this evening a couple members of our team pointed out, rightly, that that sort of attitude is part and parcel of the Tea Party movement and really any anti-establishment movement for that matter. But even in a conservative state like Kentucky some measure of pivoting is necessary in a general election. And I wondered after seeing Paul whether he’s constitutionally capable of it.
But I am getting the impression that Paul — aside from just being very unlikeable in personal terms — may be a much more divisive figure than one might from any Tea Party candidate who snatches away a nomination from an establishment party figure. The PA Senate race was really hard fought. And Sestak is going to have to put in a lot of time making peace with Arlen Specter supporters. But a poll out yesterday showed that Grayson supporters in Kentucky simply hate Rand Paul in a way that goes way beyond the normal aftermath of a contested primary.
There are signs that numbers are looking better for Democrats. And as the health care rage starts to ebb and if financial regulation passes it may not be as bad as year as many may have thought for Democrats. With Democrats showing they can enact public policy that helps the American people, it will stand in stark contrast to the situation the GOP put us in the last time they were in power. Hopefully it will make voters think twice about putting them back in power in November.
Job growth in the private sector, especially in small businesses, is the key to economic recovery. Yet this year Texas nearly doubled the payroll taxes on our businesses. This massive tax increase on Texas jobs was caused in part by the diversion of $161.5 million which Gov. Perry used to subsidize companies he selected and publicized at numerous press conferences.
We know that unemployment insurance taxes have gone up, and we know that the increase is more than it would have been had Governor Perry not rejected $555 million in stimulus funds for unemployment insurance. But there’s another way in which Perry’s policies have adversely affected the unemployment insurance situation. As the Bill White campaign documents in this white paper on payroll taxes (PDF), the Perry slush fund known as the Texas Enterprise Fund has been siphoning money away from the unemployment insurance trust fund since 2005.
The Enterprise Fund has been a bone of contention since its creation in 2003. From the beginning, it’s been a mix of cronyism and bad economics, typified by the Lexicon case. Now taxes that businesses have paid that could have supplemented the trust fund or provided for training of people who have lost their jobs have instead gone to the Enterprise Fund, where they may have been used to support a competitor of theirs. Nice thing to contemplate when your taxes have gone up, and gone up more than they needed to, in a recession, isn’t it? That’s what Rick Perry’s leadership has given them. A press release from the White campaign that calls on Perry to restore the $161.5 million in diverted dollars to the unemployment trust fund and calls for an independent audit of the Enterprise Fund is beneath the fold.
Five members of Congress say they will ask the General Accounting Office to investigate how much homeland security money Gov. Rick Perry is sending to the Texas-Mexico border.
The request, from U.S. Reps. Solomon Ortiz, D-Corpus Christi, Rubén Hinojosa, D-Mercedes, Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, Ciro Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, and Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, is the latest development in an ongoing war of words between the border representatives and Perry over border security.
In a statement issued Tuesday, the congressmen say an average $125 million in Department of Homeland Security funding has been sent to Texas annually since 2006. They claim that Perry has consistently sent less than 10 percent of those funds to border law enforcement agencies. It is the border where the funds are most needed, the congressmen argue.
“Governor Perry’s own rhetoric indicates that he considers the border a critically sensitive area. We agree. Yet, Governor Rick Perry has disputed some clear-cut facts about border security funding,” the five congressmen said, in a statement issued Tuesday.
Perry’s response was to ramble on about killing snakes. The AAS is reporting today about his campaigns “outreach” to Hispanic voters, and if he can do that without running of the far right voters, Perry walks tightrope between Hispanic voters, conservative base.
Throughout the country, Hispanics see the law “as a personal attack on all Latinos,” Camarillo said.
In Texas, Republicans such as state Reps. Debbie Riddle of Tomball and Leo Berman of Tyler have pledged to push a similar proposal. Berman had planned to run for governor on an anti-immigration platform but dropped out last summer, saying that Perry had promised to pursue Berman’s key proposals.
After the Arizona law was signed, Perry waited several days to weigh in before finally saying he has concerns about it and believes “it would not be the right direction for Texas.”
The issue spotlights how important it is for Perry to minimize defections among the 30 to 35 percent of Hispanic voters in Texas who are likely to vote Republican, said Henry Flores, a St. Mary’s University political science professor who plans to publish research this summer showing that tendency.
Perry “needs to maintain his 30 percent bloc” of Hispanic voters, said Flores, who is also dean of the university’s graduate school. “He knows if he supports what’s going on in Arizona, he’s going to lose his Hispanic base.”
The punditry at the Texas Tribune believes Perry’s statement on the Arizona immigration law was “artfully put together”, in essence he left himself wiggle room to flip-flop on this issue in the future. It’s shocking that Perry would be trying to have it both ways on this, isn’t’ it?
[UPDATE]: Rick Perry Supported Raising Taxes on Small Businesses.