ustxtxb_obs_2002_02_01_50_00005-00000_000.pdf

01, 4.1.4t,.. 74r r For the last three years, Morales has been dogged by questions raised by his successor, Republican Attorney General John Cornyn, about an allegedly fraudulent effort by Morales to cut a longtime friend into the payoff. A federal grand jury continues to investigate Cornyn’s allegations, and there has been some whispering in Austin circles that Morales’s lastminute candidacy is merely a maneuver to get the feds to back off. It’s a charge his supporters vehemently deny. During the lunch break, Team Sanchez was out in force, putting out fires all over the Hyatt’s large, open-air lobby. A slate of candidates must be approved by two-thirds of the delegates to get an endorsement, and there was good reason to fear the kind of meltdown that last happened in 1990, when factions representing Jim Mattox and Ann Richards fought to a stalemate and there was no labor endorsement for governor. “It’s been a full-court press for 36 hours and it’s still going strong,” said Communications Workers of America member James Willborn. “Tony was hoping for a knockout, but it’s not going to happen that way.” Willborn, who lobbied for union police officers for thirty years and has attended his share of COPE conventions, said Morales would have won the labor had entered the race and come to labor early. In any case, Willborn said, the excitement Morales had brought to the primary fight would be good for everyone involved. “Tony was supposed to be anointed,” he said, laughing and shaking his head, “but that’s not the union way.” orales is hardly the ideal candidate for labor or for progressives in general, who make up a considerable portion of primary voters. But after barely a week of .111. campaigning, the Morales candidacy demonstrated the latent strength of the anybody-but-Sanchez contingent in the party. Their leader at the Hyatt seemed to be San Antonio labor lawyer and former Texas AFL-CIO general counsel David Van Os. Throughout the convention, Van Os could be seen huddling with delegates, low-talking about the “real” Tony Sanchez. Bundles of red notebooksdossiers of every ugly fact about Sanchez’s career and its unfortunate intersections with the Bush clanwere tucked under his arm like samizdat tracts. “I think it would be a tragedy and a disgrace if an organization that’s supposed to represent the working class endorsed a rich oil man just because he’s got money,”Van Os said. It was not, as party leaders had charged, Morales who .had split the Democrats, but those who recruited Tony Sanchez in the first place, Van Os said. “If Sanchez gets the nomination, tens of thousands of loyal Democrats will skip the governor’s race, because they won’t be able to 2/1/02 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 5