Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is supposed to be a star—a big star. Four years ago after he was elected Dallas County's first black prosecutor, Watkins leaped into the national limelight for his role in DNA-evidence exonerations of wrongly convicted prisoners.
Brian Harkin
Maybe Craig Watkins gets really bad advice from his Democratic Party friends. Maybe he just had a bad year. Or maybe he's not the rising star we all had him cracked up to be.
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So what's the matter with him?
Maybe the exonerations were a free gift, politically. If you're going to make your bones exposing deep-rooted racially tinged injustice, then Dallas may be the political pot at the end of your personal rainbow.
But Watkins also brought his own factor to the fight. He's handsome, well-spoken, with a sincere commitment to justice. People admire him for that. He should be scanning the horizon for at least a statewide post by now. Instead he's got his eyes on his own shoelaces all the time, trying to figure out why they keep tripping him up.
And they do. He's not at all where he should be or where anybody assumed he would be by now. In the election last November when Watkins was running for his second four-year term, everybody assumed he would lead the Democratic ticket in Dallas County.
He was supposed to be SuperDem, pulling all the other little Demmies along beneath his big blue cape. Instead, he barely won. He didn't lead anybody. He was the second-worst vote-getter on the county Democratic ticket.
Democratic county treasurer candidate Joe Wells led the ticket with a 4.04 margin of victory. John Warren, who won for county clerk, was just behind Wells at a 3.8-point winning margin. Gary Fitzsimmons took the district clerk post by 3.22 points. Clay Jenkins, the only non-incumbent among them, won county judge by 2.67 points. Watkins came in dead last at 1.24 points—not enough coattails for dog-catcher.
As prosecutor, Watkins has done a solid job walking a very difficult line—rooting out the bad convictions won by earlier regimes and the culture that produced them, while maintaining solid conviction rates on the good cases of today.
Every time another story emerges of an innocent person who has been jailed for decades on a bad charge, everybody feels the same sickness in the pit of the stomach—Republicans, Democrats, white people, black people, Latinos. We probably could have some lively debates about how it happened in the first place. But we all have seen, time and time again, that it did happen, and we all know that every time it happened a human being suffered an immeasurably cruel injustice. Nobody wants that. Everybody respects Watkins for going after those cases.
But what about the time he launched a criminal investigation into Dallas County Commissioner Maureen Dickey's vegetable and butterfly garden? Dickey accused Watkins of official oppression in early October of last year after the DA's Public Integrity Unit sought to interrogate her about a garden that volunteers were maintaining on the grounds of her road and bridge office.
Apparently the butterflies were on county property, whenever they alighted, and some suggestion was made at the time that county funds might have been improperly used to attract them. It is true that Dickey, a Republican, had been going after Watkins hammer and tong on a number of issues before he launched Butterflygate. There were no indictments, and it was unclear, had there been, who would have been indicted—Dickey or the butterflies.
Yeah. Look. Launching a criminal investigation into a butterfly garden is wacko. It's cuckoo. Somebody in politics needs to be able to imagine how things like this look. If we still had newspaper editorial cartoonists in this town, there would have been a drawing of Watkins leaning out of a speeding squad car with a big net, in hot pursuit of a bunch of mean-looking butterflies in a beat-up 1970s felony car.
Even though we were not treated to that explicit image in the newspaper, you can bet the public got the idea anyway. I think we can take the eight-point lead Watkins should have had over his opponent in the November election and toss two of those points in the toilet right there.
He was already on thin ice even before Butterflygate. A month earlier he had lost his temper in a public shouting match with county commissioners over budget cuts. The commissioners looked bad, but so did Watkins. The point is, he should have come out of that one smelling like a rose, not a skunk.
At a time of Draconian cuts, Watkins had managed to save 21 of 24 threatened positions in his department. He did it by jawboning the commissioners, who are the masters of his and all county government budgets, and by doing some skillful political maneuvering including an adept marshaling of public opinion.
Right up until the hissy fit, I thought he was running circles around the commissioners. He had already won the birthday cake. Those last three positions were like the little sugar frosting daisy on top. So he throws a gigantic public tantrum over the daisy. If we still had newspaper editorial cartoonists in this town, there would have been a drawing of Little Lord Fauntler-Watkins crouched in the corner, frowning and holding his breath while the commissioners laughed at him with cake smeared all over their faces.
