wasn't that a great triple overtime basket ball game? (0.00 / 0)
...even though UT lost on a freaky three by OSU's center?
At halftime, I was so anxious to get back to that game that I couldn't even spell or comment. But you all kept going, so here are a few thoughts.
Charles makes an important point. There are many people trying their best to rebuild the Party in Texas, and we better learn how to play as a team - and that means play on the same team.
For starters, let's put an end to calling 2006 a disaster. That is pure crap. Could we do things better? Sure, we all make mistakes and have to own up to them and learn from them. But a lot of good was done in 2006, and it's better to build on it than to tear it down.
On TTLA, they are a trade association. And neither TTLA nor their staff have ever controlled the TDP. Not ever. Many of their members and TTLA itself have been good to the Democratic Party and individual Dem's in many elections, but they haven't been good to every Dem or TDP in every race or in every election year. I've seen them work with TDP (agreeably and less agreeably at times) when they had mutual strategic goals and when the players got along, and there have been times when they went their own way when they didn't. And that's as it should be, because a political party can't be dependent on any one group or association.
Likewise, no single consultant has ever controlled TDP - and rarely could one say a consultant elected a candidate single handedly. One of the worst things about this thread is all the credit being given to consultants and advisers. Give us all a break, businessfolk.
For example, the Donna Howard race was mentioned as it related to consultants. I know who won that race - Donna Howard. She was the right candidate at the right time. Her face on TV was believable. Her consultants ran a smart race. The County Party's mail program linking Bentzin to DeLay's TRMPAC consultant(thanks, Ben) was masterful. And a lot of people busted their butts to turn out the vote. Yes, it was a team working for a good candidate - and that's true in most wins.
Back to 2006 quickly. TTLA did not support, fund or recruit several of our winning Dem House candidates - like Hightower Pierson, Hopson and a few others. And it's been said that they pulled the plug on Joe Heflin's race before E-Day. But TDP and the HDCC and other groups like the teachers (in Tx House races) stuck with those candidates and made a winning difference. At the same time, TTLA backed and funded targeted Dem's like Vaught, Cohen and others from the get go to the end. The point is, everyone played their part and no one group or operative was in control.
The Governor's race was another story and it frustrated the hell out of me. And how it got that way was a curious mess. As was noted in a previous comment, many major individual trial lawyers like O'Quinn and Watts and Nix and Baron ended up supporting Bell. And none of us really knows if backing Grandma was Russ Tidwell's mistake or if he was simply working for key TTLA players who had been convinced already by others. Around Austin, there were a lot of insiders who never understood Grandma's limited potential as an "independent." Remember, in those early days when those donors were forming their opinions, Bell wasn't even a favorite of many of the BOR crowd who were Bob Gammage fans, and look where Gammage ended up on the race.
Hell, just weeks before filing opened in the Governor's race, the twisted logic of those who backed Grandma was an Austin parlor game that was going on at about the same time John Sharp helped out Perry by taking the Tax Commission appointment in late 2005. I know some folks who vilify Sharp for that, but who are any of us to say Sharp wasn't sincere when he said he did it because he wanted to help his state solve a problem? And attacking him then would have done no more to defeat Perry than attacking Russ Tidwell will do to help us win in 2008 and 2010.
If the purpose of this post was to go after Russ Tidwell, as SmartyPants suggested he would in another post a while back, that's been done. Big Whoop. There's a point where vilification serves no constructive purpose, and this thread may have reached that point, because what Russ does is TTLA's business.
We have our own business to do, and carrying out personal vendettas for whatever reason is a bad use of our time. Disagreement and constructive criticism within the Democratic family is fine, but it has to result in a consistent, pragmatic plan to win - and that takes a lot more work, a lot more money and a lot more strategic planning than will be delivered by this blog post.
