Robert Butler answered the door in his underwear. He does not usually do that, he will later explain emphatically, but the knocking sounded so urgent that he was afraid there might be an emergency.
Knocking loudly, and persistently, on Butler's door seems to be one of the few ways to find him these days, and even that doesn't always work. One of his neighbors, Ron Eaton, said that when he needs to rouse Butler, "I just grab a good-sized stick that's pretty sturdy and bang on the window 'til he answers."
Butler's elusiveness would not be noteworthy, except that the 65-year-old retired state employee is one of two Republicans facing off in the April 13 runoff for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission.
With minimal campaigning, Butler won about 23 percent of the vote in the March 9 primary election, forcing a runoff with incumbent Victor Carrillo, the favored candidate of the GOP leadership who was appointed to the commission last year by Gov. Rick Perry.
[...]
Butler has been hard to find. His home phone doesn't work. Reporters and GOP officials have no idea how to get hold of him. And he hasn't shown up at various candidate forums.
[...]
His car doesn't work, so he has to take taxis when he wants to run down to a local newspaper and place an ad. He has a few thousand dollars, according to reports he has filed with the state Ethics Commission. He also has no campaign manager or Web site, and his campaign headquarters is the fading house on Magnolia Street with its unkempt yard and discarded Democratic yard signs in the carport.
[...]
The GOP has been burned before when its Hispanic candidates have lost or done poorly in statewide races.
Xavier Rodriguez, Perry's appointee to the state Supreme Court, lost a 2002 primary to Justice Steven Wayne Smith.
And Tony Garza, Carrillo's predecessor at the railroad commission, placed fourth in the 1994 primary for attorney general.
The GOP's quest to elect more Hispanics has been hampered, many political observers believe, by an instinctive reaction among some Republican primary voters to pick an Anglo name when they are not familiar with the candidates in a race.
[...]
Butler is running, to the extent that he can, on his experience of 40-plus years on the state payroll at various agencies.
He said he's been to so many Railroad Commission meetings that he knows how the place works. Among other things, Butler wants to speed up the process of finding owners of land where oil leases could be made.
His last bid for public office -- a seat on the State Board of Education in 2002 -- didn't go too well and was marred by several arrests for public intoxication.
But Butler said he believes elected office is his destiny, particularly since God spoke to him in a dream several years ago and convinced him to switch from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
"I was standing before God. He was in a cloud. I couldn't see him," Butler explained. "He talked in the same kind of way that we think. I didn't hear a voice, but he seemed to say to me, in a thinking sort of way, 'Why are you in a party that supports abortion?' "
Amusing. Then again, Texas Democrats have done silly things ourselves, such as nominate Gene Kelly for U.S. Senate in 2000 (to name one recent example). Victor Carrillo ought to easily win the run-off next Tuesday. He's by far the best candidate of the two. Texas Republicans often have trouble nominating minority candidates for statewide office (just ask Xavier Rodriguez), but I'll give them some credit for trying.
