“Ann Richards is a lesbian!”
The words were shouted at my mom by a frat boy in the bed of a pick-up truck in downtown Austin and it’s still one of the most bizarre and hilarious things I can remember. It was sometime in 1990, when Ann Richards was running for governor against central casting Texas rancher manchild Clayton Williams. My mom and brother and I were walking back from an event downtown (a political rally or the Pecan Street Festival? I don’t remember) when my mom saw the young man throw an empty case of beer out of the truck bed and onto the street.
She scolded him and I froze, looking at her and then at the truck. The man shouted “Ann Richards is a lesbian”, the truck peeled off around the corner, and Squee and his friends were gone.
My mom wasn’t wearing an Ann Richards shirt or holding a sign, it just was the best insult he could think of for a woman in Austin telling him off in public.
I often think of that encounter when I look back on that time in my childhood, and the political climate of Texas at the time. Ann Richards was a bonafide liberal Texas hero, Molly Ivins was alive and kicking, Barbara Jordan would in 1992 give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and George W Bush was but a partial owner of the Texas Rangers.
Truth be told, Ann Richards didn’t win that election by much in 1990, and was fortunate to run against a man who compared rape to the weather (‘If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it”), refused to shake Richard’s hand after a debate, bragged about not paying taxes, and said of his opponent “I’ll head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt.” If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
It would prove to be one of the last victories before more than two decades in the wilderness for Texas democrats, and would only seem distant as the years passed.
Over the past six months or so in Israel, I watched the senatorial campaign of El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke from afar. I watched as he became a household name in Texas, a hero and heartthrob for democrats on both coasts and everywhere between, and most strangely, someone people in Israel (Americans, but still) started asking me about. I wished I could see what the campaign looks like up close, and the feeling was almost like being in Israel during that 2005 Longhorns season. For months I was captivated and hopeful, even though it felt like a serious longshot, a dream that’s still further down the road.
Distance is good for daydreaming, and from afar Beto looked like a man who could win, even if at times he seemed more a cause than a candidate. He looked and sounded like the type of charismatic candidate to inspire beaten-down democrats across the United States, the one who in his victory, would position Texas as the salvation of a defeated party.
Truth is, if you’re a liberal looking for Texas to save you, you’re probably too far gone and with Beto, it felt at times like he was chasing something bigger, that Texas was a stepping stone and he was running against Trump more than Cruz.
Still, it was close. I don’t know if he was “too progressive for Texas” (or what that even means), or if he “should have run as more of a centrist.” All I know is that even with all the talk about how unpopular Ted Cruz is, he’s still a hard-right incumbent in Texas, and he was almost beaten by a Democrat Congressman from El Paso who embraced Colin Kaepernick, said he would vote to impeach Trump, and trafficked in Obama-esque “we’re all one Texas” platitudes of togetherness in a state and an era that trafficks so much in hatred, fear, and negativity to drum up support.
Looking around, there’s good reason to be inspired in defeat and not just mourn a dream deferred. There were six counties that Trump won in 2016 but which Cruz lost to Beto, including Tarrant County, home of conservative Fort Worth, the only major city in Texas that Trump won in 2016. There were also the suburban Austin counties of Hays and to the north, Williamson, the latter’s sheriff department being the sum of all fears for Austin stoners in the 90s. Democrats also picked up 12 seats in the Texas statehouse, 19 black female judges were elected in Harris County, and voter turnout surged across the state, to more than 8.3 million votes as opposed to just 4.6 million in 2014.
There was also something great about seeing a superstar from El Paso, probably the most slept-on big city in Texas – closer to Colorado Springs than Austin, a shorter drive from Las Vegas than from Houston. He embodied some bilingual Texas ideal of brotherhood between places like El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, amid an era of outright hostility towards immigrants and “migrant caravan” panic. At least this is what I projected upon him, and like his rhetoric and his lanky frame, Beto seems – like Obama – to be a politician people project their own hopes and aspirations upon, and mold his image to their ideals.
And so it was, he could be the one to make Texas blue or purple, the one to show to the world that our Texas was always there, that most of us didn’t go anywhere. He would bring victory to the other Texas, the diverse, pluralistic, largely-but-not-only urban Texas, and spell defeat for the guys throwing empty beer cases and calling Ann Richards a lesbian.
The thing is, there were never two Texas’, it was always one state, full of families with people from both sides of the political spectrum. Beto seemed to speak to a lofty, maybe even naive sort of Texas a la Obama’s there are no red states or blue states keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He didn’t try to traffic in stereotypes, unlike many a Texas politician, brandishing the played-out, “real Texas vs those hippies in Austin” hot takes. In a divisive era maybe the odds are stacked against this approach, but there’s something refreshing about it.
So now he has a crushing loss but also a national profile and a much better catchphrase/rallying cry than “yes we can”. All the people I see on Twitter and Facebook calling for him to run for president in 2020 – none of them from Texas – still sound like they’re high and should calm down, but there’s big stuff ahead and what we’ve seen so far for Texas democrats in this election was more than any of us probably should have expected.
There’s a ton of work left to do, and while it’s not light yet, it might be getting there.