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Doggett seriously. They said he was running for name recognition in order to run for another statewide office in the future. And Hance was given even less a chance than Doggett. By early April it was time for the media blitz. Doggett had laid the groundwork with organizations of teachers, workers, consumers, the poor, but he still needed to pull in the uncommitted, those he hadn’t reached, those who did not know him. And he had to do it in 30-second spots. Hance had the same dilemma. The size of this state works against personal contact and a serious discussion of philosophies. For the remainder of the campaign, issues had to be simplified; 30 seconds of air time had to leave an impression. In early April, a Doggett campaign worker complained to me about the fact that no television cameras had shown up for a press conference on Krueger’s social welfare voting record. “What do we have to do,” he asked, “drag a plastic backbone across a table?” Soon thereafter they brought out the plastic spine; the cameras appeared. Hance jumped on amnesty; the cameras came. This is not to say that. Doggett and Hance are not responsible for the tone of the last weeks of the campaign. Doggett has always been a street fighter on the state Senate floor, and Hance proved his ability to become myopic when the interests of browns, blacks, the disabled, the poor interfered with the Reagan tax package he sponsored. But to get that extra ten percent they had to stand out, they had to act tough, they had to fight. Even into the last days of the run-off Doggett was fighting the ways of the press. You turned on the evening news one night to see Doggett accusing Hance of voting against social security measures. You tuned in the next to see Hance say, “I did not.” The next night Doggett said, “He did, too.” Almost never was there an examination of the record. It’s no great mystery. Go to the Congressional Record. Go to the Texas legislative records. But there are 4 o’clock deadlines after 2 o’clock press conferences, and there are editors who say, “Just give me quotes.” No wonder the electorate becomes jaded, thinking there’s no measure of truth. No wonder they come to expect an appeal to the lowest common denominator in the political messages they receive. No wonder they get it. DOGGETT’S VICTORY in the Senate run-off is the second blow to the power structure of the Democratic Party in this state in two years. In 1982, the corporate establishment hung on to the governor’s seat only because their gubernatorial candidate grabbed the coattails of the populist rhetoric of his running-mates. But the real strength of that ticket began to show itself in the Valley, in the urban areas, in the old populist strongholds of north central Texas. Now along comes Doggett, who takes Bexar County by 66%, Dallas County by 70%, El Paso County by 55%, Harris County by 65 %, Hidalgo County by 71 %, Jefferson County by 62%, Nueces County by 55%, Tarrant County by 63%, and Travis County by 73%. The urban vote, the Mexican American vote, the black vote defeated the rural and semirural, Anglo, conservative Democratic vote. Nuclear freeze, labor, and feminist voters strengthened the new Democratic coalition. And not to be discounted is the Yuppie vote. Lloyd Doggett is, after all, no flaming radical. He’s the student-body-president type, the kind of guy who negotiated with the college president in your behalf after you’d taken over the English building to protest the war in Vietnam. He’s got that kind of appeal and should use it to his advantage against Phil Gramm. Though all three Democratic candidates are of the same generation, they represent two generations of power in the Democratic Party. And this time the new generation won. Texas is a state still in the throes of development. With this election, the old guard that controlled the feudal order of the Democratic Party has taken another serious, possibly mortal, blow. The mythology that defines the mainstream Texas Democrat as a conservative Anglo with roots in the country no longer holds. This is an urban state. We are diverse people of many interests. The Democratic senatorial primary has been an election to celebrate our diversity. G. R. Waiting for Hance Austin ISAT IN on a Mormon youth dance Saturday night at the Hyatt Regency for a good five minutes before I realized it wasn’t Kent Hance’s election night headquar ters. It seemed like the right crowd. But there were no TV cameras. The TV crews were waiting for Hance down at the Big Bend Room, along with a neat little bunch of suburbanites wearing stick-on Hance badges in America’s colors. It was not a big get-together. If Hance’s family had left, there would have been twice as much space in the room. And it was a small room. Family and friends did their best to exude confidence as Hance took the early lead, but the laughs they let out were light and airy. If there was a Big Bend ahead it would come after the city returns were reported, and it would be Doggett making the turn. The TV reporters did stand-ups about Hance remaining “in seclusion.” When they tired of that, they interviewed Bob Krueger, who was serving as Hance’s ambassador for the night. Krueger looked more relaxed than he did the night of May 5, when, as he was getting beat by Hance, he kept trying desperately to make ripples on the Charismagraph by saying such things as “There’s gonna be a round two, and a round three, and we’re gonna win them all. Count on it.” Now here was the ambassador standing tall this June 2, but looking slightly incongruous with the big letters “HANCE” on his chest. A radio reporter sat Krueger down and asked “Why’dja do it. Bob? Why’dja endorse Kent Hance?” He endorsed Hance “simply because it was the moral thing to do,” he said. In a race like this one, it “wouldn’t have been moral to remain on the sidelines.” “What about all this about, you know, Jess Hay and all, and the charges of political influence?” There was absolutely no truth to Doggett’s charge that he did it for political reasons, Krueger said, and that was just typical of the kind of campaign Doggett had been waging. At 9:15 Krueger told the radio reporter Hance would “go on to victory.” At 9:55 Hance’s press secretary, Ken Vest, told the TV reporters Hance wouldn’t come down for the ten o’clock news shows “because the race is tightening up.” But Vest caused his own excitement a little later when he started running around nervously charging that something was rotten because the Travis County returns were being counted at Democratic Party Headquarters instead of at the county clerk’s. At one point THE TEXAS OBSERVER 3