A new home for County Democrats

I'm excited to pass along the word that the Montgomery County Democratic Party will be officially opening its headquarters on Sunday, December 13th. The site is located at 1712 N. Frazier Street, Ste. 118, in Conroe. This is the shopping center where the 08 Headquarters was, just in an adjoining suite. It's the Courtlyn Place center across from the old Buckalew Chevrolet building.

From 5pm - 8pm, local Democrats will celebrate the grand opening and hold its Holiday Party at that time with a potluck dinner. You are encouraged to drop by and bring a dish if you want to help with the potluck, which would be greatly appreciated.

Funding a headquarters isn't free, and I would personally like to see this headquarters continue past the primary election. Having a physical place to organize and gather is essential to sustaining a strong grassroots campaign into a very important statewide general election. Please consider making a recurring contribution to the MCDP.

Thanks to all of those dedicated Democrats who have done so much to get this headquarters in working order.

A Couple of Ideologues Debate Right Wing Theories

At Austin’s suggestion I attended the candidates debate for the 8th Congressional District put on by the Conservative Coalition of Montgomery County. It was, to say the least, an interesting experience. As he mentioned the audience was a modest collection of about fifty people. The two candidates were critical of Kevin Brady’s leadership and felt that he hadn’t been a reliable conservative leader. Both agreed that Brady was mistaken for voting for the TARP ‘bailout’ of the banks last fall. This is an issue that has split both political parties, but it’s generally regarded as the more liberal Democrats and more conservative Republicans who have been critical of TARP. The two candidates who showed up were Tyler Russell and Scott Baker. Both candidates seemed like amicable fellows, with records of service in the Air Force and a few years of experience in the business sector. Tyler Russell often seemed to be put on the defensive by Mr. Baker who characterized him as not being realistic in what could be achieved. (While both were ultra-conservative, Mr. Baker more readily admitted the need to compromise to achieve some level of progress on their issues. Mr. Russell characterized that sort of stance as being more of the compromise with progressives that he believed had damaged the Republican-brand name under Bush.)
The format for the debate was actually quite good because most of the questions came directly from the audience members themselves. The first question was from Conroe ISD school board member Chris Irish, who asked what, besides the TARP bailout, did the two candidates present find lacking in Brady’s leadership in Washington. Tyler Russell stated that Brady had been supportive of the creation of the Medicare Part D (the Bush Admin. Prescription Plan). Conservatives have long been critical of the Republican Party’s creation of this program. There is a lot that’s lamentable about the program. (The mandate that the government not negotiate drug prices, the cost of hiring private programs to administer it, the donut hole, etc.) The conservative position has been that the government should never make any attempt to make medical care affordable for our nations’ citizens. When asked the same question Scott Baker said that he wished Brady would sponsor H.R. 227, which would declare the government was taking the position that life begins at conception. (He made the claim that the Supreme Court stated in Roe that if the Congress would make a declaration on the issue it would nullify the decision.)
The fireworks began when an audience member asked the candidates what role they thought the Federal Department of Education should play. Scott Baker stated that it should do very little besides educate people about the Constitution. I realized this would be an unpleasing answer for the crowd who had a very specific idea in mind. Tyler Russell served them the red meat when he stated that we should abolish the Department of Education (for being unconstitutional) and asked what good it would be to teach people about it if the government refused to abide by its limits.
The two candidates radical ideas came into particularly sharp focus when the debate turned to economic issues. A woman in the audience asked what should be done with the inheritance tax, which she considered theft or stealing. The two candidates were quick to reply that they both thought that the tax was unconstitutional (as well as a form of theft) and should be repealed. When it came to the income tax Tyler Russell said that it should be ended and replaced with a sales or consumption tax. This is a particularly extreme position on taxes that will never be implemented. Sales taxes are strongly regressive and hit the middle/working class very hard because they are more likely to spend a greater portion of their income. When Governor Huckabee endorsed a version of the ‘fair tax’ for his campaign last year it was revealed that the effective rate of sales tax imposed would be somewhere around 30 percent. Defenders of the program often say that the government could counteract the regressive nature of the tax by offering a program of quarterly sales tax ‘rebates’ but such a plan would probably require a tremendous bureaucracy t o administer. (Since a basic argument for the implementation of the sales or ‘fair tax’ is the elimination of the IRS one would have to wonder what the point would be when this problem is factored in.)
Scott Baker took the more ‘pragmatic’ approach by saying that while he supports a consumption tax he’d prefer to start with a ‘flat tax’ whereby everybody is taxed at the same ‘flat’ tax rate instead of the ‘marginal’ tax rates that are assessed on different levels of income. Mr. Baker stated that until the 16th Amendment is repealed it would be best to defer a consumption tax so as not to risk a ‘double taxation’ of income. The most basic problem with the creation of a flat tax is that the authors who first wrote a book popularizing the subject in the 1980’s admitted that it would raise the tax rate of people with middle-class incomes while giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy. Even as it did so it would still fail to raise the current level of revenue and result in larger budget deficits at the very moment Mr. Baker is expressing concern about the size of our budget deficits.
Both candidates expressed the wish to shut the border. Mr. Tyler expressed the desire to arm Predator drones with missiles, thereby creating a military situation resembling the covert Pakistan War along the border with the United States. Mr. Baker sensibly stated that he didn’t want the military involved in police work on American soil. ( Posse Comitatus) He then went on to suggest such extreme measures as the withholding of Federal money from ‘sanctuary cities’ and suggested that the Constitution is misinterpreted as meaning that anyone born in the United States is an American citizen when he believes that was never the intention of the Founding Fathers.
What was most noticeable about the debate, from my perspective, is the types of issues that were not addressed. While the candidates addressed the question of the country’s addiction to foreign oil there wasn’t a single question directed at the candidates on the issue of global climate change. I suspected that I knew why this was the case, and I feel that my suspicions were confirmed when a member of audience handed me a pamphlet from the Eagle Forum whose headline article stated that the purpose of the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen is the creation of “One World Government.” The author of the piece was Jerome Corsi who’s probably most famous for getting caught lying about John Kerry’s war record in 2004. When the subject of health care was raised Mr. Baker stated that Texas had made great progress by reforming the tort laws. Apparently the continued double digit percentage increase in the price of health insurance and the nearly one in four Texans who are uninsured (the highest level in the nation) are unimportant. I’m guessing results don’t matter to this crowd. After walking away from the event I realized that I had witnessed a very special kind of debate: one involving ideologues discussing theories. My guess is that several years from now both of these gentlemen will still be ideologues….discussing theories.

Dueling TX-8 Teabaggers

                 Russell                                                                        Baker

What does a debate between two teabaggers look like?

That was the question that I was in my head as I went to the recent debate of the Republican candidates for the 8th Congressional District. Incumbent and usual teabag panderer, Rep. Kevin Brady failed to show. I guess he was a little scared from his previous encounter with the teabaggers up at the pizza joint in Conroe.

So that left us with Tyler Russell and Scott Baker, both teabaggers who have taken the oath to support Glenn Beck's 9/12 cult.

After today's news that the Tea Party actually polls better than the Republican Party on a generic ballot, I was wondering how much trouble the Tea Party candidates will pose to incumbents like Brady. Could they really do some political damage, or at least make guys like Brady blow a bunch of money in defense? The performance at the debate would surely give me a clue.

Unfortunately, I was unpleasantly surprised. About 50 people showed up, hardly the large turnouts that they claim at their actual Tea Parties. I guess if you can't bring your Obama=Hitler signs with you, it just takes all the fun out of the event. What respectable teabagger wants to go to a stuffy "establishment" event like a debate? But, I digress.

All that I knew about the candidates was that both were Air Force veterans and fairly young (Russell is 28 and Baker is 34). Baker started out his statement with some pretty typical teabag fare. Then, came Russell's turn. "I'm Tyler Russell and I'm running to be your next Congressman" he exclaimed with his high-pitched screech. Yikes. A few people actually laughed out loud.

He then rattled on with the usual drivel. The debate went on, with questions directed from the audience, not from the moderator. While both candidates sounded like they were reading from a Heritage Foundation handout (they literally did a few times), Russell's drivel was more of the hard line, doctrinaire sort. He looks at compromise as total capitulation and thinks if he just shows up to Washington and sticks to his "conservative principles" that everyone will see the light and fall into line. Baker, while offering similar hyperbole, is the more moderate or practical (if you can even say that) of the teabaggers. Yes, apparently the teabag comes in a few flavors.

For instance, while Baker says we may need to reduce some of the unfunded mandates of the U.S. Department of Education, Russell says we should just abolish the entire Department, regardless of the consequences. Where Baker says we should go after employers who employ illegal immigrants, Russell says we should send them all back to their country of origin. We'll be covering more of the actual substance of their debate in a later post.

All in all, looking purely through the teabag prism, I'd have to say that Scott Baker won the debate. He was far more articulate than Tyler Russell and his answers, while still pretty nutty, seemed thought out. Russell's delivery was terrible. He stumbled around and didn't seem to know what he was talking about, calling border guards "INS agents" when the INS doesn't even exist anymore and even if it did, they don't guard the border.  Every now and again he would employ some blatantly obvious maneuver to throw in one of his great personal attributes, which is only good politics if you are smooth at it. After each question, he'd puff up like a chicken getting ready to lay an egg and seemed a tad bit too emotional. He came off as a big braggart whose ideological fervor crowds out any shred of pragmatism. Political beliefs aside, he's not the kind of guy you want representing you in Congress.

All in all, it's really a shame. If the teabaggers could mount a decent challenge to Kevin Brady, they might actually come close to beating him in a Republican primary. Stranger things have happened and I think many Republicans are underestimating the grassroots power that these groups have in a primary. But instead, they have split their teabag vote amongst two candidates, neither of whom possess the stature or skills to beat Kevin Brady.

And that's more of a reason why it was a shame that Kevin Brady didn't show up tonight. He claims he has votes on Monday night, but I think he truly was recollecting his previous scuffles with the tea zealots. Had he been there tonight, I'm sure it would have been less akin to a Jr. High debate, and more akin to a conservative form of mud wrestling.

Thank you, Madame Chair

Filing season is upon us and the Montgomery County Democratic Party is accepting applications for those wishing to run on the Democratic ticket. So far, only one candidate has filed; Adrienne Cadik for County Chair. When I heard, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I was not relieved that only one democrat filed, I'm confident there are more to come. I was happy that Adrienne had decided to dedicate herself to at least two more years as our County Chair.

Adrienne has been the County Chair since 2008 and was elected countywide in the March primary. I have worked with her on various projects and serve on the Senior Advisory Committee at MCDP. I have been impressed with the organizational and leadership skills that she brings to the table and over the past two years, we have made significant progress under her direction. While we are under no illusion that we are going to turn the county democratic in any election cycle in the near future, we are making an effort to get there. We are getting back to the basics, getting organized, increasing infrastructure, increasing communications, and increasing our fundraising base.

While we will continue to chip away at republican votes on our way to a competitive election county, in the meantime we will be a viable party, able to deliver precious votes to statewide candidates.

From my perspective, here are some major accomplishments since Adrienne took office:

• Administered a primary election with an historic turnout of 31,000 voters and 6,000 precinct convention attendees
  
• Conducted a County Convention with a record number of 1,500 delegates
  
• Operated a highly successful, strategically located campaign headquarters, allowing centralization of campaign activities and a visible Party presence in the community
• Coordinated the campaign for the general election, including developing a targeted precinct strategy, recruiting a team of volunteers, distributing Party and candidate campaign materials, supplying and training campaigners and poll workers, and organizing phone banking and block walking
• Made concerted GOTV efforts in strategic precincts, increasing democratic performance; Montgomery County cast 36,000 votes for President Obama, a 28% increase over 2004
• Hosted three successful fundraising events and an election night party, attracting serious statewide candidates as speakers.
  
• Cultivated a positive image of the party through active public relations efforts
  
• Created a formal budgeting and financial planning process
• Increased political contribution income to record highs
• Fostered a strong relationship with the new Young Democrat chapter
  
• Increased communication among all democrats by utilizing an email blast service, building a list of 6,000 recipients
• Increased communication and interaction with democrats through social networking sites
• Revamped the party website, resulting in a state of the art online presence and significant tool for online organizing
• Provided training and informative bi-monthly meetings for the county executive committee

And this list will be growing in the coming weeks as the county party prepares to re-open its headquarters and initiates a sustaining member program.

All in all it has been one of the greatest eras of progress in the recent history of the county party. It's true that the 2008 election season generated maximum excitement on the democratic side, but the MCDP leadership worked strategically to harness that excitement and to keep it alive through a dull off-cycle year.

Working with Adrienne and the rest of the MCDP leadership has been one of the most rewarding things I have experienced. This and all of the reasons above are why I am excited that Adrienne will seek another term as our County Chair. The stability of the party must be further strengthened and we must continue to build on our accomplishments in 2008 and 2009 as we go into 2010. Even if we only end up with one democrat on our local ticket, I'll be glad that it is Adrienne.

Farouk still going strong

With all of the drama in the TX-Governor's race this past week, many speculated what will be of the candidates still in the race.

I received an invitation to a campaign event for Farouk Shami, the Houston businessman who has pledged to spend $10 million in his pursuit for the Democratic nomination. The event was at his palatial residence on Lake Woodlands in Montgomery County.

I must admit, that I now know what Elise Hu talked about when she called Shami's last campaign event "The Farouk Show." I can say the experience was unlike anything I've experienced in Texas politics.

Firstly, my pickup truck was valet parked. Then I went through the well staffed registration and was led through the house that reminded me more like a downtown museum, to the party room and lakeside pool. The place was packed full of supporters, or those just wanting to see what this candidate was all about. We enjoyed catered barbeque, a wine bar, live music, and the Texans/Colts game on a projector. The place was crawling with staff people and security, all in perfect Farouk uniform.

The former hairdresser-turned billionaire spoke to the crowd from the spiral staircase. He touched on a variety of Texas issues that he hopes tackle as Texas Governor. His message is clear: Jobs. He hopes to bring them to Texas by encouraging manufacturing, especially that of solar panels (which power his house, in part).  He also briefly touched in his perception of the problems with our criminal justice system, education, the state budget, healthcare, and immigration. These issues were discussed in general terms, with no specific solutions offered. I guess at this stage in his campaign, such proposals haven't been completely baked, which I'll give him no flak for.

I have not yet made a decision on who to support in his primary, so I will limit the extent to which I editoralize, and will simply relay the facts. My overall perception was that the campaign itself was very organized and very staffed and the jobs message comes through clearly. He does not make the case for why he is the best Democrat to beat the Republican nominee and he makes no mention of any other candidates in the race.

I will make this observation; if Houston Mayor Bill White decides to run for Governor, this race will become difficult for any candidate already in it. A large war chest can help with name recognition and message delivery, but it can't guarantee a win. In order to win over thoughtful Dems in the primary, all candidates need to put forth detailed policy proposals. I applaud candidate Hank Gilbert for doing that already. Additionally, we need to be sure that the nominee is the best possible person to beat what is likely to be a vulnerable Rick Perry. As a resposible primary voter, we must take electability into account when supporting  any potential nominee. As I've said, Mr. Shami is in the nascent stages of this campaign, so he's just introducing himself. But the clock is ticking, and for a candidate who faces an uphill climb to win a statewide race in a state that hasn't elected a statewide Democrat in 15 years, we can't be convinced soon enough. 

Farouk for Governor Event Invitation

From Gov. Good Hair to Gov. Hair Care?

Who?

That’s the reaction I invariably get lately when I mention Farouk Shami, the latest contender in the race for the Democratic nomination for Texas Governor. Oddly, I’m usually only talking about this with fellow political junkies, people you’d expect to have caught on by now. I guess with this race, it's hard to keep up.

Then I mention “CHI”, and if it’s a female, their eyes light up. They really love those flat irons and associated haircare accessories. In fact, they seem to dedicate their vote for Governor on the basis of the greatness of this miracle product. After nearly ten years with a Governor Good Hair, will Democrats try to trade him in for a Governor Hair Care?

I don’t even know what a flat iron is, and I certainly don’t know about BioSilk, but they seem to have been the greatest things invented for the American Female since eye shadow. And of course the man behind it all is Farouk Shami: epitome of the American story, self-made man, and…Montgomery County Democrat.

At MoCo Report, we cover Montgomery County Politics, particularly the left side of them. So, it’s a big deal that one of very own local Ds is running for Governor. Many local democratic activists have already signed on to his campaign and I have already received two event invitations from them, one at Mr. Shami’s Woodlands home.

What will be the Shami effect in this primary race? While some may speculate about his viability in a general election showdown, you can't discount someone’s ability to affect a primary when they pledge to spend $10 million of their own money on the campaign.

Other candidates have taken notice. Hank Gilbert tacitly acknowledged Mr. Shami in an email blast yesterday when he stated, “our Party's nomination isn't for sale to the highest bidder.”

Mr. Gilbert has done a great job of communicating what he perceives as Texas' problems and what his proposed solutions are to fix them, an arguably much better job than Tom Schieffer, Kinky Friedman, or Felix Alvarado. So far, Gilbert has set the bar when it comes to the level of activism and number of sound policy proposals. Will Shami meet those standards? Most Democrats haven’t made up their mind yet on this race and I know they’ll listen intently to each candidate with an open mind before doing so. Even if you are already leaning one way, you should listen to what a new candidate has to say.

Well, we don't have to wait long. Mr. Shami is expected to officially announce this Thursday that he will be a candidate for the nomination. He’ll make this announcement while standing in front of one of his facilities, with which he brought 5,000 jobs to the Houston area. It's a great campaign narrative that complements his American story well. But, the burden is on him to tell us what he’ll do to fix the many problems Texas faces. We need to know that a businessman can be trusted to clean up Perry's corruption. We need someone who can further the cause of turning Texas Blue. And we need to know why he'll be a better person to beat Perry or KBH. Most agree that a business success story and a large war chest will not be enough to convince most Texas Democrats. We're looking for the meat.

I'll be there on Thursday and I'm looking forward to hearing what the Farouk Shami vision for Texas is. Follow me on Twitter (austinstout) for live updates from his announcement.