Floor Play

Friday night is almost here! And you know what that means—sitting around the house, watching TV. (Come on, Royal Pains is back on USA.)

This weekend, though, I might direct your viewing to the latest Bill White ad, released yesterday. I’ve already watched it about five times. It turns out the White team has some fight in ‘em after all.

The first 30 seconds are genius. A cartoon Rick Perry tells reporters that those concerned about the dropout rate “try to tear down the state of Texas.” Standing in front of a “Governor for Life” podium, the Perry caricature’s eyes flit back and forth—not unlike Bill White’s eyes in Perry’s attack ads. As people say the dropout rate could be much higher, cartoon Perry just says “It ain’t. I’m stayin’.” And then “Hey look! Ya’ll see my new car?” Ha. (Please tell me you remember the Perry campaign’s NASCAR car, driven by Bobby Labonte!)

Magic. Absolute magic. Of course then this weird music chimes in, as though we’re now entering an ad for a doctor’s office, and a nice lady’s voice extolls the virtues of Bill White and evils of Rick Perry. A bit of a boring transition, but whatever—there’s still an extra sketch of Perry in front a “Re-Election Bidness” podium.

This is the first White ad that doesn’t rely on a narrative of “Aw shucks, my parents taught Sunday school and I like education.” Instead it goes on the offensive and pins the dropout problem on Perry. The dropout rate is a nebulous thing anyways, and in Texas, it’s been particularly hard to nail down. It’s not entirely Perry’s fault that we don’t have a definite number—the state tracks dropouts a few different ways—but in politics, it hardly matters. After all, Perry has tried to link White with almost every negative incident that’s occurred in the city of Houston. 

The ad dismisses the idea that criticizing the state of education or just general problems in Texas equates with “tearing down the state.” As the Texas Tribune notes, the exchange in the ad isn’t that different from a moment in the GOP primary debates. To win, White needs to find ways to slam Perry’s policies that can’t be dismissed with a simple “You’re tearing down the state.” Addressing the point directly is effective, and mocking Perry in the process is doubly so.

If the White campaign can create a narrative around Perry as only interested in power, not policy, it will help protect White against the inevitable onslaught of attack ads. It’s actually stealing from the Perry playbook—after the governor has painted Kay Bailey Hutchison as a creature of Washington, she had trouble making her attacks stick. She’d already been framed as the queen of bailouts and her legitimacy seemed in question. If White successfully frames Perry as “Governor for Life,” Perry’s attacks on White may lose their legs: He’s only interested in getting elected, the logic goes, so of course he constantly attacks.

The whole thing comes at a good time for White. Perry has come under fire for scandals around a environmental regulation broken by the Observer’s very own Forrest Wilder and the feds may take over some parts of environmental monitoring. That hasn’t stopped the Perry campaign from releasing their own ad, accusing Bill White of supporting cap and trade. (White’s team deny he’s ever supported the policy.) Perry’s ad isn’t quite as effective since it only links White to the Obama people through a memo. It shows footage of White saying he’s spoken about climate change, but nothing with White talking about cap and trade. Still, I would note the Perry people still have the best music, this time choosing to go with Twisted Sister.

Still, White’s folks needed to land a punch. They did. And thank the Lord this punch doesn’t include White family photos.

In fact, aside from a couple of pictures of his beaming face, White is barely in the ad. That’s probably for the best. We can focus all our attention on Perry’s weird witch fingers at 0:22.

Have a good weekend all.

If you’re a Democrat and a baseball fan, it’s been a rough week. Between last night’s would-be perfect game and Al and Tipper’s splitsville announcement, times have been tough. Well, dry your eyes. I have some good news and some bad news for the Democrats. (The baseball folks are already in enough pain.)

After last week’s primaries in Alabama, as we wait to see what will happen in Kentucky, a few pundits began a tumultuous debate about and whether there is a point at which the Republicans can get too extreme. Yesterday, Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic argued the Tea Party movement had exacted large costs for the GOP. Fivethirtyeight, the statistical approach to political blogging, pointed out that most voters don’t care about Nancy Pelosi, and the attempts to tie incumbent Democratic reps to the House speaker, whom Republicans love to paint as the Democrats’ exemplary extremist, aren’t likely to go far.

Sparking debate, Alan Abramowitz, a voting behavior specialist at Emory University, offered a post on The Democratic Strategist titled “Move Right and Lose: Evidence from the 2000-2008 US Senate Elections.” Oomph. Abramowitz argued senators who run as extreme conservatives don’t do as well electorally as their more moderate colleagues. “Based on these results, efforts by the Tea Party movement and other conservative activists to purge moderate incumbents and pressure Republican candidates into taking more consistently conservative positions are likely to have a detrimental impact on the GOP’s performance in future elections.”

Let me translate that: Democrats, this is your good news.

And it gets better. Abramowitz posted two days later, showing that the same “extremism” on the left doesn’t lead to the same problem. Ultra-liberal senators didn’t see the same costs in elections as their ultra-conservative counterparts.

But wait, Democrats. Don’t start dancing in the streets quite yet.

I called Abramowitz to ask if his findings spelled hope for folks like Bill White in Texas. His answer? Well, not exactly. Texas, it seems, is a special case.

“Someone like Perry could be vulnerable because he’s so conservative,” he said. But then again, “It’s pretty hard in Texas to be too conservative, at least in the Republican primary.”

It turns out that Abramowitz’s findings are more relevant to swing states. For example, Sen. Tom Harkin is more liberal than Iowa, the state he represents, but he’s done just fine, while those more conservative than the state, like Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, can find themselves out of office. In Texas, Abramowitz says, the voting population is pretty extreme.

Since the ’50s, the traditional view of voting behavior has been that successful candidates try to accommodate the “median voter,” and that those candidates who took strongly conservative or strongly liberal stances would repel such median, moderate voters. But as electoral districts have become more ideologically homogenous, pandering to the moderates isn’t as important as appealing to the base.

“If you’re in a strongly Republican district, you don’t want to move to the center,” says Abramowitz. “Any gain you might get … would be offset by the risk of being attacked as a RINO.” So much for tradition.

But wait! scream Dems. What about the findings, the bad news for conservatives—he promised they’d be hurt electorally!

In most cases, “It’s not going to hurt [the conservative] enough to matter,” Abramowitz explained. In other words, being an ultra-conservative can hurt, but not as much being a moderate.

“When you come under a strong challenge is when it can make a difference,” Abramowitz said. “If you have a strong Democratic challenger and there’s enough resources to make people aware.” Wonder if one of those will emerge.

In the mean time, baseball fans, Bud Selig might just reverse that call.

Over at the Texas Tribune, Reeve Hamilton has the latest update on Texas’ application for the Department of Education’s Race to the Top grants. Which is to say, we’re still not willing to apply for education stimulus money—at least not in the case of the big money. However I noticed that for less politically-charged education grants, it’s a different story.

You may remember, if you’re an education nerd, Education Commissioner Robert Scott declined to compete for the first round of (one-time) competitive grants that the U.S. Department of Education was offering in January. Today Perry announced we also won’t be applying for Round 2. (Applications were due today.) Texas was eligible to receive between $350 million and $700 million.

The reasons are the same. Gov. Rick Perry and Scott both criticized the competition for assigning extra points for states that signed onto the initiative for a national curriculum. Texas would lose 70 points out of a possible 500 for not participating. Of course, that didn’t preclude a win, and TEA spent around 800 hours on the application before they scrapped it.

“Texas’ application would be penalized by the U.S. Department of Education for refusing to commit to adopting national curriculum standards and tests or incurring related ongoing costs,” read today’s release from the Governor’s Office. Both Perry and Scott also emphasized just how small the grants are—$700 million is a drop in the bucket for a education budget well over $40 billion.

The decision worked politically, particularly in the first round. Forty states ultimately applied for grants, but only two—Delaware and Tennessee—got any funds. Perry looked smart for forgoing the process and sticking to his anti-stimulus guns. Having only given out $600 million in Round One, the Department of Education has $3.4 billion to dole out on the Round Two winners, all to be announced in September. (As a few savvy observers have noted, September wouldn’t be the best time politically for Perry to receive a rejection, if he had applied.)

Despite the loss in points from not signing on to national standards, Texas was still eligible to apply, but Perry stood firm today, saying this is another example of the federal government “trying to coerce states like Texas.”

Oh, and there’s one other thing: On Friday, TEA sent out a press release. It just got an $18.2 million grant improving student data management system. It may not be a lot of money, but guess where it’s from: the federal government’s stimulus funds.

While diligently searching for some political news (hey, you never know the implications of Lindsay Lohan’s latest dramas) I happened on a rather unexpected tale.

Quick! What do Rep. Ciro Rodriguez and Sen. John Cornyn have in common? You’re wrong if you guessed party, ethnicity or likelihood of re-election. (Rodriguez has a battle ahead while Cornyn isn’t even up till 2014).

The answer?  Some crazy dude wants to kill them both. According to Politico, such threats to Senators and Congressmen were up 300 percent in the first months of 2010. The surprise is how many Texans appear in the story. Both Cornyn and Rodriguez found themselves targets by the same man, while Debbie Stabenow, a senator from Michigan got some scary phone calls from one of our state’s less likable fellows.

Politico reports:

Last September, the documents show that a veteran in a counseling session said he wanted to ‘kill everyone who does not help me’ — and that he included in the list Cornyn, Rodriguez and first lady Michelle Obama. When police checked on the man, they found that he was frustrated that those individuals hadn’t helped him with a retirement claim process through the Office of Policy and Management.

Luckily for Cornyn and Rodriguez, before police came, the man’s wife had already hidden his gun collection and wouldn’t let him drive.

Poor Stabenow’s unsavory phone calls came from a Texan man, living alone with 20 guns. (I can’t imagine why he hasn’t found a girlfriend.) Why the threats to a senator whose district is over a thousand miles away? Well, he was just worried that the government would ban Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Oh.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime of kids’ sports movies, it’s that winning isn’t everything. Remember Hoosiers, when Gene Hackman tells the kids that if they play to their potential, “I don’t care what the scoreboard says at the end of the game, in my book we’re gonna be winners!” Sigh.

You don’t hear that kind of talk in politics. But if you look to the third parties right now, it’s sort of the political version of D2: The Mighty Ducks. Surely you know the one—where the LA street hockey kids join forces with the Minnesotan ice hockey team to defeat the Icelander hockey team?

Perhaps I should explain. The Greens just offered 93,000 signatures, almost double Texas’ requirement, to the Secretary of State in the hopes they make it onto the ballot. The secretary’s office must determine if at least 43,992 of the signatures are acceptable, the minimum needed.

But there’s a larger question at work. Getting legitimate signatures isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds—each person who signs must: a) be on the voter rolls; and b) not have voted in a primary for another party. Since so many important races in Texas happen at a primary level—that’s to say, one party dominates a district and the primary outcome pretty much tells you who’s going to hold office—it can be hard to find engaged voters eligible to sign these third party petitions. It’s not easy and it’s very expensive.

To help ease the way, the Texas Greens and Libertarians are working together to to make it easier for third parties to get on the ballot. They’d like to see the legislature lower the requirements around signatures or at least allow those who vote in major party primaries to also sign the petitions that allow third parties to get on the ballot.

“The real problem with [gathering signatures] is the amount of time and effort put into that is something that really hampers your ability to do much of anything else,” says state Libertarian Party Chair Pat Dixon.

Dixon doesn’t have to worry so much about signatures—if a party garners 5 percent of the vote, they don’t need to resubmit petitions. The Libertarians almost always get their requisite percentages and rarely need to gather signatures. But they’ve allied with their fellow third party, raising awareness and hoping to push legislators to ease the burdens around getting on the ballot. They’ve lobbied the Capitol before to reform elections, but they’re hoping the joint effort this year might be more fruitful.

“At this point i would say there’s probably not too much competition between us—probably there’s more cooperation than competition,” says Nicolas Freeman of the state Green Party.

Dixon has always been up-front about the Libertarians’ low odds of winning any major races, but he’s long believed that success at lower levels (the Libs have been more successful at local elections, holding nine positions in city councils, water authorities etc.) along with visible candidates in House and statewide races can bring the party recognition. Furthermore, he hopes that the long-shot candidates’ decisions to run or stay in the race give them some leverage in the electoral outcome.

“At the state level we recognize our political disadvantage and do not expect overnight success,” he emailed me in April. “However we have clearly demonstrated our influence in the results of the election.  We can play ‘kingmaker’ and help determine who gets in and who gets taken out.” (Can’t you just hear the theme song Hoosiers?)

What’s sweet is that the Libertarians may not benefit from having the Greens on the ballot. No one really knows how strong the Green candidates might be in Texas, and while the Freeman says the Greens will try to get people who don’t normally vote “off the couch,” they may also draw some former Libertarian voters. Dixon knows that as well.

“It will have some kind of an impact on the [other candidates],” he said. “It remains to be seen how strong some of these candidates are.”

The Libertarians are trying to help them out nonetheless—the little guy helping the even littler guy. And remember, even after all the petitions, the drives and the cooperation, neither party is likely to hold a seat higher than city council, although Dixon believes they will still have clout lobbying on the ballot access issues.

It’s like that moment at the end of The Bad News Bears. The kids lose the big game, but then they get to raid the coach’s beer cooler. Well, it’s kind of like that.