Reply #4: A good article in the Economist about Texas [View All]

[sonias]

Tips to Burnt Orange Report where I picked up the story.

The Economist 7/9/09
A special report on Texas
The red and the blue

Whisper it softly, but Texas looks set to become a Democratic state

THE elected sheriff of Dallas County is a lesbian Latina. The leading candidates to become mayor of Houston in November include a black man and a gay white woman. The speaker of the House of Representatives is the first Jew to hold the job in 164 years of statehood and only the second speaker to be elected from an urban district in modern times. In this year’s legislative session, bills to compel women to undergo an ultrasound examination before having an abortion (to bring home to them what they are about to do) and to allow the carrying of guns on campus both fell by the wayside; a bill to increase compensation for people wrongly convicted sailed through. Lakewood, in Houston, the biggest church not just in Texas but in America, claims to welcome gays. As Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" might have said, we’re not in Texas any more.

Or at least, not in Texas as we have recently come to know it. A Democratic-voting Texas would be nothing new, but political memories are short, and the blunders of the Bush presidency have coloured global perceptions of what Texas is like. It mostly voted Democratic in presidential elections until 1968, when, alone among the former Confederate states, it went for Hubert Humphrey, and 1976, when it voted for Jimmy Carter. Many of those voters were highly conservative "Dixiecrats" and later flipped to the Republicans. But there has always been a strong radical streak too. William Jennings Bryan was hugely popular in Texas. Jim Hightower, a former Texas agriculture commissioner and the perennial voice of Texas populism, says that "Texas has always been a purple state"—up for grabs by either the red Republicans or the blue Democrats.

:kick: For going Blue! Yes we can!

Sonia