Burnt Orange Report

Barbara Ann drops in

By Jim Dallas

Yesterday (and this would have been blogged sooner if not for the server outage) was going along pretty slowly until Professor Douglass, whose election law seminar I am in, announced we were going to have a guest speaker: his old friend Barbara Ann Radnofsky. That made for a nice surprise, and was educational to boost.

(Most of the hour was spent talking about the logistics and legal-istics of fundraising and campaign planning. Because I am paying tuition and you are not, however, I'm not going to deal with that at length. Sorry.)

It had been a few months since I had last seen Mrs. Radnofsky on the campaign trail -- and indeed, aside from the "Gumbo Zone" debate on the Internet this week (which, for what it's worth, Radnofsky is getting a tremendous kick out of), I had almost forgotten that she was running for Senate. Not that she isn't trying -- far from it; it's more a symptom of my general lack of time and ability to follow politics.

But at some point in the last few months, it seems, Radnofsky has either gotten a lot more confident, a lot better at inspiring confidence in others, or both. Maybe it was what she had for breakfast yesterday morning. Regardless, I'm suddenly feeling a lot better about next year.

Part of this new-found enthusiasm is based in the fact that she seems to know exactly what she's doing, something that still surprises me (a little bit) given that this is her first campaign.

Granted, some people may read that last statement and react with a Gumbo-riffic wince. For what it's worth, I think the development zone idea is a good one, because it acknowledges the reality that the Katrina disaster is not one which is limited to the Gulf Coast but has resulted in a flood of "internally displaced persons" into Houston (and other place), many thousands of whom may never leave -- a reality which will profoundly change our culture and the economics of Harris County.

But the biggest reason that I've come to the conclusion that I should back Radnofsky one-hundred-and-ten percent is simple: Senator Hutchison is probably more vulnerable than I had imagined her to be, in large part because she's currently residing in a bubble created by the relative unseriousness of previous challengers (read "Dancing" Gene Kelly, of Universal City).

Of course, pretty much all of our candidates are dark-horses at the moment. But the dread feeling that Texas Democrats are hopelessly lost in the political wilderness is starting to lift.