The Texas Observer

If Democrats want to retake the Texas House tonight, they likely will have to win both of Travis County’s hotly contested races — in which incumbents Donna Howard and Valinda Bolton are trying to stave off GOP challengers.

So Travis County Democrats have kicked their turnout efforts into high gear.

“We’ve mostly been doing phone bank calls,” said Matt Glazer, head of communications for the Travis County Democrats, “going to door-to-door, encouraging people to come vote. We also have people outside polling places, distributing information on down-ballot candidates so people vote for them.”

Glazer said that Travis Democrats were focusing their turnout efforts “county-wide.” They aim to get out newly registered Democrats who haven’t voted before, and to remind those who voted in the 2008 presidential primary that there are important local races going on as well.

Glazer said the election seemed to be going off more or less without any major hitches, despite the fact that officials were estimating that anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 more people would be voting today than normal.

That’s been helped by high levels of early turnout in Travis, as in the rest of Texas. Those early turnout numbers, according to an analysis today, are very encouraging for Democrats. Of the nearly 300,000 early voters in Travis, 43 percent had a “Democratic only” voting history, compared with just 11 percent “Republican only” — and 15 percent Green. Sixteen percent of Travis’ early voters were new to the process — another good sign for the Dems.

“The Travis County Election Board has done an awesome job,” Glazer said. “Despite the record turnout, there really haven’t been any problems.”

As the Senate’s proposed $700 billion bailout bill goes thudding down to ignominious defeat—an hour after John McCain rushed to claim credit for its success—it’s worth remembering another vote, in another time, that just may have helped get us where we are today.

On September 23, Jay Bookman from the Atlanta Journal Constitution reprinted a Molly Ivins column on the 10th anniversary of its original publication. In it, Ivins argues that proposed deregulation of the banking industry is going to lead to “financial disaster.”

Watching Washington Mutual and Wachovia’s catastrophic collapses, it’s easy to forget that way back, oh, about 10 years ago, things seemed pretty good. The economy was going through one of the biggest booms in our history. People had savings accounts. Students could get loans. Major banks weren’t failing. And the Senate met to vote on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a proposal to, in Ivins’ synopsis, “eliminate barriers between banks, brokerage firms, and insurance companies.”

Her critique is worth quoting at some length. “This sets up financial holding companies that offer all three types of services simultaneously. The most obvious risk is that a blunder in the insurance or brokerage end of the business could bring down a bank, putting insured deposits at risk. The taxpayers, of course, then wind up with the tab, as we did with the savings-and-loan mess.

“So what we have here is (1) increasing likelihood of a recession dead ahead, (2) banks already looking at serious trouble because of stupid lending policies, and (3) a bill that effectively further deregulates the banks and hurts consumers, making it even more likely that banks will get themselves into serious trouble . . . Veto, veto, veto.”

Almost a year after that column, as the bill went to a vote in the House, U.S. Representative John Dingell (D-Michigan, and now chairman of the Commerce Committee) stood before the House to warn that the act would create “a group of institutions which are too big to fail.

“Not only are they going to be big banks, they are going to be big everything, because the are going to be in securities and insurance, in issuance of stocks and bonds and underwriting, and they are also going to be in banks . . . Taxpayers are going to be called upon to cure the failures we are creating tonight, and it is going to cost a lot of money, and it is coming. Just be prepared for those events.”

Nine days later, on November 12, 1999, President Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act into law. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), co-sponsor of the act, was there to claim credit.

“The world changes,” he said, “and Congress and the laws have to change with it. We have learned that government in not the answer. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom.”

He added, “I believe that this is the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been part of making it a reality.”