San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
BROCKHOUSE IN 2021: NEW YET FAMILIAR
Mayoral hopeful still divisive but is trying a more reflective style
Bouncy like an athletic TED-talker, Greg Brockhouse is objectively handsome, with just the right amount of gray in his hair, often wearing jeans and his HOKA running shoes at campaign events along with T-shirts that yell, “GREG FOR MAYOR.”
Brockhouse also is one of San Antonio’s most divisive public figures. To challenge Mayor Ron Nirenberg in the May 1 election, he has rolled out a more reflective persona and some dense policy initiatives, but his campaign formula is still heavy on name-calling, conservative talking points and raw grievance.
To watch him campaign, one would think Brockhouse was sponsored by a caffeine-laced energy drink. City Councilman Manny Peláez, who both praises and chastises him, calls him “indefatigable.” A Republican confidante, Bexar County Commissioner Trish DeBerry, says, “He’s the best retail politician I’ve ever come across.”
“I get to sleep at about 1-1:30 a.m., and I’m up by 6, when my kid is getting ready for school,” Brockhouse said as he fast-walked, Harry Truman-style, down the 4200 block of Dauphine on the East Side on a warm March afternoon.
“That lady is 85,” Brockhouse said of the first homeowner he approached. “We have her marked as ‘negative’ toward me in the last race, but now she sounds like she’s leaning for me. She wanted to know how the immigrant children are being treated down on the border. Interesting.”
Brockhouse can carry on basic conversation in Spanish with barely a gringo accent because he grew up speaking the language with his Hispanic mother, Patsy.
Most of the people at home in this working-class area at 3:30 p.m. are seniors. The chatty neighbors tell him a woman across the street is 107.
“I won’t startle her with a doorbell,” Brockhouse laughs, returning to his jacked-up, fourwheel-drive Toyota truck. “I can see the headlines.”
If there is a new Brockhouse, he looks and sounds familiar. He can talk endlessly and knows he must resist the temptation to dominate conversations.
That evening, at a Republican women’s club forum, he joked with the largely white, older and unmasked crowd that it was asking too much to hold him to 30-second responses.
“Faith, freedom, family … with lower property taxes,” Brockhouse said in a rush, to amused applause.
This is Brockhouse’s second attempt at unseating Nirenberg. He served on the City Council from 2017 until he lost the mayoral race in 2019 in a bitter runoff by 2.2 percentage points, fewer than 2,700 votes.
Brockhouse, 48, insists he is a more mature and chastened politician.
“That loss in 2019 profoundly changed me,” he said in one of several recent interviews. “I’m 180 degrees different now. I’m more free. I’ve never been more confident in who I am.”
The question now for San Antonio is whether Brockhouse can build on that narrow margin of defeat or whether voters have tired of the personal and political baggage that hampered him in 2019.
The baggage is serious.
Two of his wives, in complaints to police years apart, accused him of domestic violence. During the 2019 race, Brockhouse spent weeks obfuscating and evading questions about one of those incidents.
His current wife — Annalisa, now married 14 years — told officers in 2009 that he threw her to the floor after an argument and that he “had been drinking a lot” after losing his job.
The police report was later expunged. But after a copy was leaked to the San Antonio Express-News in 2019, the candidate for mayor said he had no memory of the incident, then insisted for the rest of the campaign that it never happened and suggested the document was fabricated.
After his defeat, Brockhouse admitted that his wife had called police that night. He appeared next to Annalisa as she told a TV interviewer she had accused him falsely because of postpartum depression.
Brockhouse and his second wife, Christine Rivera, had separated when she called 911 in 2006 and told police he had shoved her while retrieving belongings from the house he had moved out of. Brockhouse and Rivera’s new boyfriend fought, and Brockhouse also called 911, to allege assault.
He denied shoving Rivera. Brockhouse wasn’t charged in either incident.
Some suggest the domestic violence narrative has run its course as political currency and that the candidate should be judged by his more recent history.
“That cow has been milked,” said Brockhouse supporter Mike Helle, former president of the
San Antonio Police Officers Association.
Brockhouse had strong support from the police and firefighters unions in 2019. So far, neither organization has issued an endorsement in the current mayoral race.
Moving past Trump?
Brockhouse, an Air Force veteran who said he now sells home mortgages and runs a janitorial business, promises this run for mayor will be his last try for elected office if he fails.
This time he’s hired a young Republican adviser, Matt Mackowiack, who helped Tony Gonzales pull off an upset victory over Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones in November to keep the 23rd Congressional District in GOP hands.
Camera-ready, Brockhouse effortlessly speaks in campaign videos for 10 to 20 minutes straight, no script, without awkward pauses and needless
“likes,” laser-focused on neighborhood issues such as dumping of trash on roadsides, retention of military base missions and the work of Animal Care Services.
“I’ve always had a gift for speaking from the heart,” he explains. “I was in Toastmasters when I was 18 in Montana in the Air Force and you learn public speaking … hand gestures, eye contact, and you could literally just give me a piece of paper with a word on it and I could speak forever about it.
“I also have this skill I like about myself. I can take something complex and really convey it to people. It’s God-given.”
Perhaps to blunt criticism that he is more bluster than substance, Brockhouse has released multipage plans for everything from “comprehensive winter storm recovery and accountability” to a public safety manifesto that calls for, among other things, a “Vaccine rollout Shock and Awe Plan” with mobile medical units sent to nursing homes and “strict adherence to phased rollout qualifications.”
But if the meaty policy side doesn’t win over voters, there is still Brockhouse Classic, where he labels Nirenberg “shameful, cowardly and undemocratic” for dodging his demand for a debate.
The most attention-getting addition to his 2021 campaign has been a weekly “BrockCast” podcast on his Facebook page that started almost two years ago.
It’s full-throated Brockhouse, in the right-wing style of radio hosts Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck — manic, glib and sometimes funny in his stream-of-consciousness, shotgun rant at “woke” liberals, “clueless” City Hall and a mayor he dismisses as boring and phony.
“They’re taking our city,” he declared on one show, “and turning it into something we are not!”
Peláez called Brockhouse a “virtuoso” at this kind of thing, with the podcast giving him a way to take people’s ordinary frustrations with government and “powerfully laser-beam them at City Hall.”
Riffing on everything from mask compliance to the vandalism of Confederate statues, Brockhouse said Nirenberg shouldn’t have a San Antonio police security team if he’s in favor of “defunding the police.” Actually, in the months since last summer’s racial justice protests, Nirenberg and the council approved a city budget that increased police funding.
Brockhouse also often misrepresents Proposition B on the May 1 ballot as an attempt to defund the police.
Pushed by a group called FixSAPD, the measure would repeal collective bargaining rights for San Antonio officers, which proponents say would make it easier to discipline or fire bad cops. Nirenberg has told the police union president he thinks police should be able to bargain collectively, but he has avoided taking a public position on Proposition B.
For Brockhouse, fact-checking seems a tiresome distraction from his self-appointed role as a native son trying to save his homeland from establishment and progressive types.
And yet, even though he routinely invokes hot-button Republican targets on his podcast (gun control, Nancy Pelosi) and prides himself on candor and introspection, his “speaking truth to power” routine screeches to a halt when asked if he voted for Donald Trump.
“I’m not going to answer questions of a partisan national nature,” he said, citing the nonpartisan legal framework of Texas municipal government and suggesting that broaching that topic is an attempt to divide San Antonians.
He will concede that Trump’s child separation policy on the U.S.-Mexico border, and Trump supporters’ assault on the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory, were both “abhorrent.” But mainly he wants to change the subject.
“President Biden is my president, and we have to all pray for his success,” Brockhouse said, growing impatient. “I think we’re all ready to move past Donald Trump.”
“I’ve always had a gift for speaking from the heart. I was in Toastmasters when I was 18 in Montana in the Air Force and you learn public speaking … hand gestures, eye contact, and you could literally just give me a piece of paper with a word on it and I could speak forever about it. I also have this skill I like about myself, I can take something complex and really convey it to people. It’s God-given.”
Greg Brockhouse
Working relationships
Shirley Gonzales is not particularly fond of Greg Brockhouse.
At times, the councilwoman has called her former colleague disingenuous and sexist. A full year before the domestic violence accusations surfaced, she tangled with him at a 2018 council session over how he questioned Amy Hardberger, a self