I am sitting in Austin, Texas, supposedly the Cadillac of Liberalism, at the temporary platform committee meeting of the Texas Democratic Party.
I am watching. Bubba is participating. I am fully convinced that the only reason they put him on this committee was to give his progressive patootie a heart attack.
When Texas was a one party state, Democrats got pulled off the tracks by blue dogs. So, we politely asked the conservatives to form their own party. In the days of Ann Richards, the Texas Democratic Party stood for something. Well, the Republicans responded by sending a few of their own back to the Democratic party … as political consultants. Now the damn blue dogs even have their own caucus at the state convention, where they plot to keep the Democratic Party so vanilla that we seem to be an afterthought in the voting booth.
The blue dogs argue that if we stand for something like a moratorium on the death penalty or medical marijuana, or marriage equality, some damn Democratic sheriff in some damn rural east Texas county won’t get re-elected or some fool county commissioner in deep fool west Texas will leave the party if we let someone dying of cancer smoke a joint.
Whoop-de-damn-do.
They grabbed a little power and a regular paycheck where they don’t have to actually work for a living, and sit around all day playing with numbers trying to prove that if we don’t kowtow to blue dogs in Lufkin, we can’t win Texas.
That’s hogwash.
Trading the youth, urban, female, and progressive vote to win a county commissioners race in a county with 10,000 voters is …. Well, it’s gonna give Bubba a heart attack.
So, I’m fixing to take my seat and watch Bubba and a handful of other strong progressives get whipped by people who think the Democratic party in Texas needs to continue to stand for nothing, but this time we need to do it a little softer.
If you’re going to the Texas Democratic convention in June, please oh please elect someone from your senatorial caucus to the platform committee who is smart, tough, and progressive.
Changing the platform won’t change the blue dog culture, but it’s a damn start.
The meeting starts at 10:30. I’ll try to Tweet it. #tdpplatform. but, remember — tweeting is not natural to me. I can’t saying hello in 140 characters.
UPDATED: Maybe it’s the time and place of the meeting but out of 16 people here, I only see one person here under the age of 55, two South Asians, one Hispanic, 5 women. Every else is an OLD white male.
NOTE, State Rep Garnett Coleman, an African American, just showed up to lead the meeting. (He had been in a meeting at the Capitol.)