Help wanted
Election Day is almost a year away, and now is the time for serious candidates to step up.
Nobody with a lick of sense thought he had a chance.
A guy who recalled wandering the streets as a vagrant, foraging through garbage cans for food, decided to run for Congress against a powerful incumbent with four decades of seniority. Of course, he lost. Two years later, he ran again and lost again. Then on his third try, a wild thing happened. A tidal wave of disaffected voters flooded polling places on Election Day 1994 and flipped the balance of power in Washington, carrying the once homeless political novice into office.
That’s how Steve Stockman ended up in Congress. Anybody who’s followed this kooky Cinderella story knows it ends badly. After a rocky political career promoting crackpot conspiracy theories, the FBI accused Stockman of diverting funds from a conservative charity and nabbed him before he could board a plane headed for the Middle East. His trial is set for next year.
Stockman’s ignominious story bears two important lessons. Sometimes the unlikeliest people win elections if they just keep trying. But without qualified candidates running in party primaries, sometimes voters end up electing real losers.
Typewriting instructors once taught their students a practice phrase that merits mention here: Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their party. Election Day 2018 is still almost a year away, but the filing deadline for the March primaries is 6 p.m. Monday. Now is the time for serious candidates to take a deep breath and run for office.
If you’re upset about what’s happening on any level of government, run. If you’re tired of what you see happening at the courthouse, at the Statehouse or on Capitol Hill, run. Even if the odds are against you, run.
Our political discourse, especially here in Texas, is suffering from a dearth of vision. The GOP in our state is dominated by zealots obsessed with stale ideas, a divisive social agenda and opposition to adequately funding anything except flooding the Mexican border with state troopers. Moderate Republicans are either disillusioned or cowed into silence. Meanwhile, Democrats aren’t offering much of an alternative. All too often, their priorities put precedence on the special interests of key support groups like Planned Parenthood and trial lawyers.
The only path either party can follow to pull our political system out of this ditch is through new plans and principles presented by new candidates. And yes, those new candidates have to be willing to lose, because even people who lose elections can have a profound impact on public policy. Consider how Barry Goldwater lost the presidency but inspired a generation of young conservatives, or how Ross Perot came nowhere close to winning the White House but ignited an influential debate on the national debt.
As Texas Republicans learned in the 1970s and 1980s, changing the political landscape in a one-party state takes a long time. But it doesn’t happen unless candidates with the courage of their convictions put their ideas before the voting public even in election years when victory seems like a long shot.