The Contrarian

It’s run-off day in Texas, and the Republican race for U.S. Senate between Ted Cruz and David Dewhurst is getting all the headlines in Texas. But there’s another federal race today that could have a greater impact on the balance of power in Washington.

Many state and national Democrats are closely watching the Democratic runoff in Congressional District 23 between the unsinkable Ciro Rodriguez and the party favorite, state Rep. Pete Gallego. The winner will take on vulnerable GOP incumbent Quico Canseco of San Antonio. Democrats would very much like to win back the district, which stretches from San Antonio into West Texas—a victory that could be essential if they want to recapture the U.S. House.

Much of the party establishment is apparently rooting for Gallego because the state rep from Alpine has raised more money, and many observers think he has a better chance of defeating Canseco in the fall.

But few politicians are as pesky and dogged as Rodriguez. Ciro has represented San Antonio in Congress for two separate stints, and twice lost his seat. He was first defeated in 2004 in a Democratic primary by Henry Cuellar. He lost again to Cuellar in a primary rematch. But he earned a reprieve later that year when federal courts redrew the congressional districts. Ciro filed against, and later defeated, Henry Bonilla in CD 23. That was remarkable comeback No. 1.

In 2010, Rodriguez was unseated yet again by Canseco in an upset win for the Republican. After that kind of loss—Ciro’s third defeat in six years—most politicians would have called it a career.

But Rodriguez doesn’t quit. He surprised some Democrats by finishing ahead of Gallego in the May 29 primary. Despite being outspent and not being the party’s preferred candidate, Rodriguez received 46 percent to Gallego’s 41 percent (another candidate finished a distant third).

Rodriguez benefits from a loyal, motivated base in San Antonio. He pummeled Gallego in Bexar County on primary night, winning 56 percent of the vote—double Gallego’s total. In fact, nearly a fifth of all Rodriguez’s votes came from Bexar County.

While he’s popular in West Texas, Gallego will have to perform better in San Antonio if he’s going to win the runoff tonight. Gaining the endorsement of popular San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro certainly helped, and Gallego had the money to build support in the San Antonio market. He had raised and spent more than $844,000, according to the latest federal filings on July11, nearly three times Rodriguez’s total (Gallego’s biggest donors were beer distributors and trial lawyers).

But Rodriguez has been outspent in previous races and still won. “He confounds some Democrats with how he’s able to do this without spending or raising a lot,” said Jessica Taylor, with the D.C.-based Rothenberg Political Report, told the Dallas Morning News. Ciro also picked up his own big-name endorsement on Tuesday when Bill Clinton announced his last-minute support.

This seat will likely be Texas’ most competitive congressional election this fall. Tonight we’ll find out if the Democratic challenger in November will be many Democrats’ preferred choice or if Rodriguez will continue another improbably comeback.

Editors at the Washington Post plan to tighten their ethics policies after an Observer exposé this week revealed a Post reporter had shared story drafts with sources prior to publication.

On Tuesday, we published a story by staff writer Forrest Wilder reporting that the Post’s Daniel de Vise had shared multiple drafts of a March 14 article about standardized testing at colleges with press officers at the University of Texas. “Everything here is negotiatble,” de Vise emailed UT officials. He later added in another email that he’s “never had a dissatisfied customer in this process. And that includes an article a few months ago about a school with one of the nation’s worst graduation rates.”

Journalists traditionally have been taught that double-checking facts and quotes with sources is good practice but sharing whole story drafts is a bad idea. The fear is that giving access to entire drafts will grant sources power to alter the content and tone of the story. Wilder uncovered evidence that de Vise changed the substance and tone of his story at UT officials’ request.

Our story sparked intense debate among national media critics and on journalism blogs over the ethics of draft sharing. (Read reactions from Politico, Poynter, Romenesko, the Post’s Erik Wemple and Gene Weingarten.) The Florida-based Poynter Institute devoted an online discussion to the issue.

The day after our story appeared, Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli responded by emailing Poynter that the paper would be cracking down on draft sharing. On Thursday, the Post made it official. The senior editors sent a memo to staff that began, “Over the last several days, there have been reports raising compelling questions of journalistic ethics in the practices of allowing sources to set rules on the use of quotations and the sharing of story drafts,” according to Poynter.

The editors detailed changes to the Post Stylebook that include, “Some reporters share sections of stories with sources before publication, to ensure accuracy on technical points or to catch errors. A science writer, for instance, may read to a source a passage, or even much of a story, about a complex subject to make sure that it is accurate. But it is against our policy to share drafts of entire stories with outside sources prior to publication, except with the permission–which will be granted extremely rarely–of the Executive Editor or Managing Editor.”

Kudos to Post editors for reacting so quickly. And kudos to Forrest for a terrific piece of accountability journalism

Update (12:10 a.m.): The Democratic primary race for Congress between Beto O’Rourke and incumbent Silvestre Reyes is bragging late into the night (curse you, Mountain Time Zone). O’Rourke continues to lead—and there have been several unconfirmed reports that O’Rourke will pull it out tonight. But according to the Secretary of State site, O’Rourke, as of this writing, remains just a breath away from a runoff. With 74 percent of the precincts reporting, O’Rourke has 50.2 percent of the vote. Reyes trails with 44.4 percent. If Reyes loses tonight, you have to think the $200,000 in negative ads from Leo Linbeck’s Campaign for Primary Accountability had something to do with it. Reyes told me late last week that the Super PAC was the “Bane of my life.” And with that, good people, I’m calling it a night.

Update (11:40 p.m.): Looks like Ciro Rodriguez and Pete Gallego are headed for a runoff in the key Democratic congressional primary in San Antonio. Rodriguez, a former congressman who lost to Quico Canseco in 2010, has been ahead most of the night in CD 23. But in the last hour, he’s dropped below 50 percent and into runoff city. Rodriguez did well in his home base of San Antonio. But Gallego, a state rep from Alpine, made up ground as returns came in from West Texas. With 78 percent of the vote in, Rodriguez still led, but with just 48 percent. Gallego has 38 percent and John Bustamante had 12 percent. The winner of the likely runoff will face Canseco in the general election. That’s a big race nationally. Canseco pulled the upset in 2010 and is vulnerable. It would immensely help the Democrats’ efforts to retain control of the U.S. House if Rodriguez or Gallego can topple Canseco.

Update (11:28 p.m.): So Ted Cruz dragged Dewhurst into a runoff for the U.S. Senate seat, and feeling emboldened, broke out the serious smack talk. He splashed the word “Showdown” across the front of his website and challenged Dewhurst to five debates between now and the July 31 runoff. That’s a lot of bravado from a newbie who’s never won a single election. The conventional wisdom is that Dewhurst is in trouble in a runoff, and you have to think Cruz has a good shot. But, stiil, Dewhurst won 48 percent of the vote tonight. Cruz has a big deficit to make up. The big questions will be which candidate wins the support of the people who voted for Tom Leppert, who won 14 percent, and how different will the electorate look in a Texas runoff in July. 

Update (10:36 p.m.): Ralph Hall has been in Congress nearly as long as I’ve been alive. I was 3 years old when the now-89-year-old first went to D.C. from northeast Texas. He was a conservative Democrat back then. Now he’s a Republican. But little else has changed. He’s headed back to Congress for 17th term, easily winning his three-candidate GOP primary tonight. With 89 percent of the vote counted, Hall was crusing with nearly 60 percent. Hall easily survived attack ads from Leo Linbeck’s Super PAC that said he’d been in Congress too long.

Update (10:00 p.m.): In El Paso, Beto O’Rourke, a former city councilman, is leading Democratic incumbent Silvestre Reyes. The Secretary of State site shows O’Rourke leading 51 percent to 43 percent in early returns. O’Rourke is known for once endorsing legalization of Marijuana to reduce cartel violence. He also was a key supporter of El Paso’s push to provide health benefits to domestic partners of city workers, a major symbolic victory for gay rights. Reyes is famous for once confusing Shia and Sunni facitons in the middle east while being nominated to head the House Intelligence Committee (you just can’t make this stuff up). More recently, he was dogged by allegations of helping his family members land jobs with a federal contractor. A loss by Reyes would be another victory for Leo Linbeck’s anti-incumbent Super PAC, Campaign for Primary Accountability. Reyes would be the fourth congressional incumbent the group helped defeat nationwide. While O’Rourke is ahead—and at least one El Paso media outlet was calling the race for him preematurely—this one still seems too close to call.

Update (9:40 p.m.): Some predictable results on the Democratic side. Marc Veasey and Domingo Garcia are headed for a runoff from the 11-candidate field in the new Democratic congressional district in North Texas.

Update (9:17 p.m.): Lloyd Doggett continues to confound Republican attempts to toss him from office. The Austin congressman trounced Sylvia Romo tonight in the Democratic primary in his new redrawn district. With 20 percent of the precincts reporting, Doggett was cruising with more than 70 percent of the vote, a tremendous victory. The AP just called the race for him. The interim redistricting maphad placed Doggett in a majority-Latino district that ran to San Antonio, but it didn’t matter. Of the five Anglo Democrats that Tom DeLay tried to unseat back in 2004, Doggett is the lone survivor.

Update (7:36 p.m.): Well, scratch Eddie Bernice Johnson’s name off the list of congressional races to watch. The polls have been closed less than 40 minutes, but the Associated Press and Texas Tribune have called the race for Johnson, the 10-term (soon-to-be 11-term) Dallas incumbent. In early returns, she captured 70 percent of the vote, avoiding a runoff despite facing two challengers. Republican Joe Barton may not be far behind. The man they call “Smokey Joe” for his support of industry has 66 percent of the vote in early returns. More updates to follow.

Posted earlier: The makeup of Texas’ congressional delegation will be largely decided tonight.

Thanks to gerrymandering and Republican dominance, the general election in November won’t provide that much suspense. Whoever wins the four-candidate race for the GOP nomination will be heavily favored to win Texas’ open U.S. Senate seat in the fall. Most of the U.S. House races are safe seats for one party or the other (with one major exception, which I get to in a moment).

So tonight’s the night to determine, for the most part, who Texas sends to Washington.

I’ll be liveblogging the results of Texas’ Senate race and key U.S. House primaries. The big question in the Senate race tonight is whether Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presumptive favorite, can avoid a runoff. It’s looked for months like Dewhurst would win the nomination outright. But recent polls show Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite and former solicitor general (read the Observer profile of Cruz here), gaining on Dewhurst. Former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert and ESPN football commentator Craig James are also running. If Dewhurst fails to capture 50 percent of the vote tonight and lands in a July runoff with Cruz, the lite gov may be in trouble. Cruz has boldly predicted that he’d win a runoff.

Many observer believe Texas will have only one competitive U.S. House race this fall—the San Antonio seat held by Republican Francisco “Quico” Canseco, who won this Democratic-leaning district in a 2010 upset. That makes tonight’s Democratic primary an important race to watch. Long-time Democratic state Rep. Pete Gallego of Alpine and former congressman Ciro Rodriguez, who lost to Canseco in 2010, are squaring off to see who will challenge Canseco in the fall.

I’ll also be closely watching incumbents Silvestre Reyes (D-El Paso) and Ralph Hall (R-Rockwall). Both are long-time congressmen—the 89-year-old Hall is the oldest man in Congress—who have credible challengers. And both are targets of the Leo Linbeck III-backed Super PAC called Committee for Primary Accountability. The group has embarked on a well-publicized and well-funded nationwide crusade against congressional incumbents. (Read our story on the Linbeck Super PAC, and the Hall and Reyes races here.)

Finally, there’s a smattering of other interesting congressional races across the state, including (but not limited to):

—Austin Congressman Lloyd Doggett’s attempt to fend off a challenge from Bexar County Tax Assessor Sylvia Romo;

—The 11-candidate race for the newly drawn Democratic seat in Dallas-Fort Worth, headlined by state Rep. Marc Veasey and former state Rep. Domingo Garcia.

—The plight of two long-time, yet controversial members of Congress from North Texas—Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson and Republican Joe Barton—who both face multiple challengers.

Check back for updates throughout the evening.

I was talking to a couple from Philadelphia at a cocktail reception on the East Coast last week. When I said I worked as a journalist in Texas, the husband mentioned that he’d heard the state had executed an innocent man. He asked if I knew about the case.

“Well,” I said, “you’ll have to be more specific.”

Yes, it has come to this: Credible claims of innocence in multiple cases of men executed years ago. It’s becoming a disgrace for the state. What else can we say after the recent disturbing revelations in the case of Carlos DeLuna?

DeLuna was convicted of stabbing to death 24-year-old Wanda Lopez at a Corpus Christi convenience store in 1983. His conviction was based largely on the shaky testimony of a single eyewitness. Police had the eyewitness identify DeLuna at the crime scene while DeLuna was in custody—not ideal policing practice to say the least. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. Yet the state executed DeLuna in 1989. Now it appears they had the wrong man.

In 2003, Columbia University law professor James Liebman and a group of students began an eight-year reinvestigation of DeLuna’s case. Their results were recently published in a book-length Columbia Human Rights Law Review article.

The evidence strongly suggests that not only did Texas execute an innocent man, but that prosecutors and police could have easily discovered that another man named Carlos was the likely perpetrator. Carlos Hernandez, who looked remarkably like Carlos DeLuna, had a record of stabbing people with a buck knife—the same weapon used to kill Wanda Lopez. It was widely rumored in the neighborhood that Hernandez had committed the murder. Corpus police officers even heard those rumors, yet didn’t act on them. DeLuna himself told his attorneys about Hernandez, yet his defense team and the prosecution claimed they couldn’t find such a person. At trial, prosecutors suggested that Carlos Hernandez didn’t exist. But he did. An investigator hired by Liebman tracked down Hernandez in a matter of hours. He had died in prison in 1999.

Texans have sadly grown accustomed to the horrifying tales of wrongful conviction after more than two dozen DNA exonerations in Dallas County and the high-profile cases of Anthony Graves and Michael Morton. But the DeLuna case is one of the most dispiriting yet. Though the details are different, what happened to DeLuna is eerily similar to the infamous Cameron Todd Willingham case and to the Claude Jones case. (If you’re not familiar with the Jones story, which the Observer broke in November 2010, then read this story. DNA tests debunked the key evidence against Jones, who was executed in 2000, though the tests didn’t conclusively establish his actual innocence.) Then there’s the case of Ruben Cantu, a former special ed student executed in 1993 for a crime he almost certainly didn’t commit.

In all these instances, prosecutors, judges and police officers could have easily unearthed major problems with the evidence: the existence of Carlos Hernandez in DeLuna’s case, the debunked arson evidence against Willingham, the DNA test that Jones requested before his execution but wasn’t granted, and the key witness who said police pressured him to implicate Cantu. As with Willingham, Jones and Cantu, officials in the DeLuna case seemingly didn’t care to learn the truth. And an apparently innocent man is dead because of it.

Now Texas is quickly gaining a national reputation as the state that executes innocent people.

The Austin American-Statesman published a wonderful profile of Ronnie Dugger on Sunday. If you haven’t read Brad Buchholz’s the story yet, I highly recommend it.

Ronnie, of course, is the Observer’s founding editor, the man who, back in 1954, started this publication and authored the creed we still follow today, “We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of humankind as the foundation of democracy. We will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit.”

Buchholz writes that Ronnie, who recently returned to Austin after some years in Massachusetts, is the “godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.” That’s inarguable. 

Earlier this month, Ronnie, 81, was honored with a George Polk Career Award for his many years of outstanding journalism. The Polk Awards are among the most prestigious prizes in our field, and the lifetime achievement award is a tremendous recognition of Ronnie’s work.

He received the award at a gala dinner in New York on April 5. I’ve pasted below the speech Ronnie gave that night. True to form, his speech begins with a few words about the early days of the Observer, but then quickly moves on to a discussion about the looming dangers of nuclear weapons. If you know Ronnie, it’s not surprising that on the night he received a prestigious career achievement award, he talked not about himself but about an issue close to his heart. With Ronnie Dugger, what matters most isn’t personal fame or recognition, but making the world a better place.

I’m deeply honored to be present among this award’s inspiring special achievers this year.

Texas in 1954 had no big-city daily newspaper in which one could sense freedom of conscience.  A group of us decided to build The Texas Observer into an independent liberal weekly paper that would introduce freedom of conscience into the press of the state.

From the first I sought to practice journalism according to three basic standards, accuracy, fairness instead of “objectivity,” and moral seriousness.  We were a tiny group, running on a shoestring, and we lost money at once and for the next 44 years.  But we found and told a lot of stories that would have been lost, and somehow together we made a go of it.

Once I did a story establishing that the man who was chairman of the Texas state agency regulating the oil companies was also drilling wells for them for his profit.  I gave him his full say, of course.  There was not a ripple in the rest of the press.  A year or so later the Dallas Morning News of that day—it’s a much better newspaper now– reported the same story as if it was new.  In that and other ways doing the Observer was like playing a guitar, but with no sound coming out of it.

In due course our freedom attracted serious reporters and writers, Billy Lee Brammer, Bob Bray, Jim Hightower, Elroy Bode, Willie Morris, Robert Sherrill, Kaye Northcott, Geoff Rips, Molly Ivins—too many more to name.  Then there were supporters making up the deficits with money—lumber heiress Mrs. R.D. Randolph, insurance man Bernard Rapoport, oilman J.R. Parten, banker Walter Hall, and thousands more with $5 to a hundred.  And the people on the business side, two of whom, Sarah Payne and Cliff Olafson, gave their lives for it.

The unattended-to injustices overwhelmed us, as they still do the staff 57 years later.  One day in 1955, a subscriber in East Texas phoned me that he had read a two-inch story in his area daily that somebody had driven through a little country town for blacks only, shooting bullets.  I went out there and got the story.  Bullets slammed into a schoolbus and houses, landing around a woman who was kneeling at her bed saying her nightly prayers, plugging into a café, killing a boy of 16 and injuring two younger girls who had been dancing together.   The publicity led to a trial and to Southern justice for one of the two young white men who had done it, “guilty, five years suspended”; no trial at all for the other one.  But the story was told, and 50 years later is part of the memorialized history of East Texas.

Now, here I am, the old guy you see, but still a reporter trying to find stories.  I’ve been worried since the fifties about Hbombs, and I’ll wonder a little with you now if we’re doing enough, and on a long-enough timeline, on the story about the likelihood of an Hbomb holocaust that would decimate, or end, life on earth.  That possibility seems like an old story, the Cuban missile crisis–Gorbachev and Reagan solved that, didn’t they?—end of the cold war.  But no, it’s not over.  It’s worse.

The present form of the story, like that about North Korea, is the daily drumbeat that Israel well may now bomb Iran, that is, attack it, to get at its nuclear program, and the consequences for the next two or three years. Could we not be overlooking some profound truths and questions concerning this spasmodically worsening situation, the rising danger of an Hbomb holocaust?

Why are nuclear weapons called “weapons of mass destruction” when morally they are weapons of mass murder?

If we put aside the Soviet collapse, the disassembly of grotesquely surplus nukes, and cosmetics, is it not true that there has not yet been any effective nuclear disarmament?

Why is the deterrence doctrine against nuclear attack so numbly accepted?   Deterrence has to mean retaliation.  It posits retaliation with nuclear weapons.  Mass murder for mass murder.

Has deterrence “worked,” as is so commonly said, or did the skin of our teeth work, barely saving us three times from at least tens of millions dead?  An Hbomb explodes in millionths of a second with several times the heat of the core of the sun.  Tens of millions of degrees.  Heat, blast, radiation, no life.  Only one failure of deterrence can be, the experts say, a billion dead.

Unimaginable.

When in the 1960s I asked President Johnson in the White House about nuclear weapons, he flared into anger against me that I had done so and exclaimed, “I’m the one who has to mash the button.”  Richard Garwin, one of the three inventors of the Hbomb, told me in an interview in 1986 that what we’re doing with deterrence is buying time, that nuclear proliferation can’t be stopped, there will be a nuclear war, and a billion people will die.  Why are so many of us so confident this will not happen?  Are we lemmings?  Is this not the most important subject on the world, whether it will happen, or can we prevent it?  More nations keep getting the bomb.

There is still no international control of these weapons that can end life on earth.  Is Gorbachev not right in cautioning us very recently that we need enough effective international governance to keep events from becoming “dangerously unpredictable”?  Are they not already so?  As Robert Jay Lifton said to me this morning, unpredictability is all right, except on nuclear weapons.

Dr. Garwin’s prophecy is coming toward true.

How have nine nations become nine separate owners of the Hbombs that can be sent to mass murder the people of any large city, or a country?  Why are these weapons still, 67 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, none of our business, with possibly apocalyptic facts about them blocked off from us by nine separate systems of military secrecy?

For example, does Israel have five nuclear-armed submarines in the Mediterranean, as indicated in the recent well-sourced book How the End Begins?

Jonathan Schell reports in his book The Seventh Decade that 50 more nations know how to make the Hbombs.  They are secrets no more.  Why, then, are Hbombs still a national, not an international, question?

Why has the actual and prospective nuclear policy and practice of the U.S., Israel, and Britain segued away from the promised disarmament into attacking nations we don’t trust that we believe insist on getting the weapons that we keep on having?

What really is happening to and in our own nuclear arsenal of almost 5,000 Hbombs?  Last fall in Los Alamos a former director of nuclear bomb development at our lab there told me what we should be doing is making our nuclear weapons more usable.  Might that be what we’ve been doing?

President Obama calls for a nuclear-free world, but not likely in our lifetimes, he added.  Why not?  We say other nations mislead us about their nuclear plans.  Are we reporting and analyzing, with the emphasis needed, whether our own government is also guilty of hypocrisy on this?

Why does our country, after 67 years, still not have a “No further first use” policy about our nuclear weapons?

How long has it been since one of us asked the President that question?

And what is the political and ethical responsibility of the American citizen for our Hbombs?

What, if aimed, are American nuclear bombs aimed at?  If exploded on target, how many people will they kill?  If we use them either to attack or retaliate, what would that do to our standing in the history and conscience of humanity?

This subject can turn anyone into a melancholiac, but none of us knows if the Hbomb holocaust will come, and  where there’s uncertainty there’s hope.

Dr. Lifton speaks of “species consciousness,” that we are all one species, all in this together, and one senses that this consciousness is spreading, although slowly, around the world.

And of all the looming subjects of our time this is the most nonpartisan.  Killing all of them and all of us must not  be a political, an ideological, a religious, a nationalistic purpose.  Preventing Hbomb holocaust is the all-partisan story, partisan to all of us and everything else living.

I believe we journalists have a professional and ethical responsibility to penetrate this story more deeply than we have on behalf of our readers and watchers.  A story that hasn’t happened yet is hard to investigate.  Perhaps we should have a new discussion on this among us.  If the holocaust comes we are not likely to be around to report it.

May our thought, our work, and our words do what we can.

Thank you again.