'Politics as Usual – A Texas Legacy'
By Patrick Cox
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| Above: Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, speaks to her supporters. Photo by Callie Richmond for The Texas Tribune. |
Texas State Senator Wendy Davis of Fort Worth rose to national attention last week with her eleven-hour filibuster of an anti-abortion bill and Governor Rick Perry's subsequent personal attack. Texas politics and politicians have always been a source of amazement, entertainment, disbelief (they really said that?), and provocation. Sam Rayburn once said that all politics is local, but Texans often seem to find their way onto a larger stage and into political lore in memorable fashion.
One old saying compares the practice of the art of public speaking in Texas to a Longhorn: there should be two good points, but far apart, with a lot of bull in between. Noah Smithwick, a critical observer of Texas during the years of the Republic and early statehood, described the attributes and shortcomings of Sam Houston in his memoir, The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days: “Though his peculiar bent did not incline toward the founding of a nation, every instinct of his nature prompted him to resistance when the life and liberties of the nation were threatened.”
One may wonder about the theory of evolution when we move from Sam Houston to Texas in the twentieth century. In retrospect, it is somewhat incomprehensible that we would have had the theatrics the entire nation witnessed in the Senate with either lieutenant governor Bob Bullock or Bill Hobby presiding. As for the governor and other elected officials making ill-advised and misguided statements, we do have many examples in our history.
When it comes to women, Texas governors have demonstrated a proclivity for inserting the proverbial foot in the mouth; consult The Power of the Texas Governor for many illustrations. Governor Bill Clements made one such cardinal mistake in his 1982 reelection campaign against Attorney General Mark White. When asked about appointing a member of a minority or a woman to the Public Utility Commission, Governor Clements responded that he did not know of any housewife qualified for the regulatory board. To compound the governor’s problems, White’s campaign changed “housewife” to “woman.”
