What Happened in Texas Is a Running Off the Rails

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

01 August 12

kay, so now Marco Rubio won't have to carry the entire future demographic weight on behalf of the Republican party anymore.

Texas had two chances to resist the blandishments of Tea Partier Ted Cruz, whom it is overwhelmingly likely to send to the United States Senate, the World's Greatest Deliberative Body, in favor of a bland lump of conservative muenster named David Dewhurst. On the issues, there is no logical reason why this should have happened, much less why it should have happened once in a preliminary election, and then again on Tuesday night. Dewhurst was as pure a cultist as Cruz is, and he was the official endorsee of Rick Perry, as Governor Goodhair continues on his remarkable one-year streak of consecutive electoral embarrassments. (Among Texas Republicans, there was room to Perry's right. Who knew?) The first big tell in this election was the day Perry got booed at the Republican state convention because he had endorsed Dewhurst, who only was his lieutenant governor. Right now, to paraphrase Gordon Gekko, if Goodhair endorsed a funeral home, nobody would die.

However - and this is the big, honking However in Republican politics these days - Dewhurst's greatest fault as a candidate apparently was that Goodhair liked him. Proximity to the Republican "establishment," as Jim DeMint and the Club For Growth define it, was enough to doom Dewhurst as a candidate, even though the "establishment" in this case was represented by a governor who talked openly about seceding from the union. There is a temptation to believe here that Republican voters in Texas, realizing that their party is staring at an electoral abyss going forward, voted strategically for a Hispanic crackpot over a country-club sycophant. There is a temptation to believe that Texas Republicans have behaved intelligently in choosing Cruz not once, but twice. There is also a temptation to believe that Drano is Chateau Petrus. Please do try to resist it.

This is a guy who believes that Sharia law is "an enormous problem" in the country today. This is a guy who believes that George Soros is at the bottom of a secret United Nations plot to eliminate... golf. (Here, of course, Cruz is immersing himself in the paranoid Bircher fantasies regarding our old pal, Agenda 21.) This is a guy who's a nullifier, thereby putting himself on the opposite side of the Constitution not only from Barack Obama, but from Sam Houston, for chrissakes. This is the guy that a majority of Republicans in Texas believe should represent them in the Senate and they said so, not once, but twice. They wanted a crackpot. They got a crackpot. The real power driving this election wanted them to have a crackpot, so it gave them a crackpot.

This was a triumph for out-of-state-money and out-of-state influence. Rand Paul and Sarah Palin both were more relevant to this election than the governor of Texas was. This was a signal that conservative extremism knows no limits and recognizes no national boundaries. The Tea Party now has morphed into a movement made up solely of three elements: corporate money, television hucksters, and suckers. The first of these make the other two elements possible. If you are a Republican officeholder, especially in a staunchly Republican state, and you don't see what can happen to you in what happened to David Dewhurst, you should begin your search for a second career right now. If Rick Perry is own self doesn't hear the bell tolling, he's a fool. Right now, I'm betting Goodhair's setting all his mighty mental powers to the task of trying to figure out how he can become more acceptable to the forces that beat him Tuesday night without putting on a gray uniform and personally storming up Little Round Top.

There is an alternate temptation, as I hinted at earlier, to look at Cruz's victory as another attempt by Republicans to reach out to the growing Hispanic community that threatens to sink the party as its grumpy Caucasian base steadily dies off. The problem with this theory, of course, is that, while Cruz was storming to victory, the Republican secretary-of-state attorney general, a guy named Greg Abbott, remains one of the most enthusiastic voter-suppression advocates anywhere in the country. It is Abbott who went to federal court and argued in favor of essentially gutting the Voting Rights Act. If Cruz is supposed to represent a building wave of conservative Hispanic voters that is going to power the GOP over the next few decades, it'd be nice if Greg Abbott weren't working so hard to prevent Hispanic voters from casting their ballots.

There are those innocent souls who believe that the current raging extremism that is driving the Republican party will run its course, like a fever, and then the party will take to its bed and return to cool reason, and to its role as an honest partner in the business of governing the Republic. Well, lass' sie nach Texas kommen, kids. They are going to continue to slake their thirst with salt water, and the rest of us are going to have to live with the delusions that follow. What happened in Texas was in every sense a "runoff." Something's gotten into the water supply for all of us.