I attended a typical East Dallas Dem-fest last week -- a fund-raiser for U.S. Senate candidate (Cornyn’s seat) Emil Reichstadt. Got there for the tail-end of Emil’s remarks.
Over the weekend what kept replaying through my head were remarks not by Emil but by lifelong loyal Dems with whom I chatted after the speech, out on the lawn of the extremely interesting Robert Bellamy estate. If I distill it all down to the basics, I think this is what several of them were thinking:
If Oakley can get elected mayor -- with this wild-ass, off-the-wall, barricaded gunman campaign of his -- then it’s finally really true: Republicans are dead in Dallas.
Some people thought maybe it was already true when Jim Foster got elected county judge. If a nebbishy nonentity from nowhere can win the top county spot just by being on the ballot, maybe it means people out there hate the party of Bush/Cheney so bad that whoever is on the Democratic ticket wins from here on out.
But Foster could have been a fluke -- a Being There thing, a Casper whom nobody even noticed on the ballot. Oakley, on the other hand, is aggressively obnoxious, causing even the most die-hard Dems to gasp and hold their hearts over the sheer vileness of his campaign in the last couple weeks.
What if that doesn’t matter? Has the day finally arrived when a Democratic candidate can be exuberantly awful and people will vote for him anyway because he’s not a damn Busher? And if so, what would we call this?
I think I’d call it simple equity. --Jim Schutze
