The Shadow Party: How a Washington-Based Liberal Activist Is Trying to Turn Texas Blue (Whether Texans Want It or Not)
Since Republicans took majorities in the Texas legislature and captured all the statewide offices in 2003, Texas has earned a reputation as a solidly Republican state in which no Democrat stands a chance of winning anything worthwhile. Or so it would seem, but the fact is Republicans don’t now and have never held a majority of elected offices across Texas since Reconstruction. Democrats still hold a narrowing majority of offices statewide, and that’s true even after several dozen local level Democrats switched parties and became Republicans this year. Hundreds of Democrats have switched parties over the past few election cycles, bringing Republicans closer to parity and bringing these officials in line with the state’s conservative majority. The highest profile party switcher of this cycle, state Rep. Chuck Hopson of east Texas, extended the Republicans’ majority in the state House to four seats, 77-73. But even that is a narrow majority at a very high level in a state with such a strong Republican reputation. And thanks in part to an out-of-state political operation, Democrats have actually made gains in Texas over the last couple of election cycles.
Texas’ Republican reputation has coincided directly with its rise to economic dominance, and with good reason. The Republicans have tried to live by three simple rules. They are 1) keep taxes low, 2) keep regulation fair and predictable and 3) don’t set up government as the be-all-end-all for every problem. Democrats loudly disagree with all three.
Texas must be doing something right. About 1,200 Americans pull up stakes and move to Texas each week, and companies as diverse as Facebook and Caterpillar have expanded here at a time when the national economy is still reeling from the recession. Texas is also rapidly urbanizing along the I-35 corridor that runs down the middle of the state, and has become both the nation’s leading energy exporter and a major high-tech hub. After redistricting next year, Texas could gain as many as four or five new seats in Congress. The Lone Star State’s voice will grow in Washington, and for the already threatened Democrats here and in D.C., Texas has become a prize that’s too big to continue ignore.
It’s against this backdrop that the Democratic capo Matt Angle operates. Angle has built one of the most sophisticated financial and activist operations networks anywhere in the country. Angle’s Tangle was built to pursue a singular goal: turn Texas blue whether the voters here like it or not.
Matt Angle declared his goal in 2005 when he launched his Lone Star Project: Elect a Democratic speaker of the Texas House, and elect a Democrat to statewide office. Notice there’s nothing in there about bringing better government to the state, or representing the people’s wishes, or creating a climate that fosters economic growth. To Angle it’s all about partisanship and power and the looming redistricting, and he has pursued his goals with a ruthlessness that is rarely seen even in Texas politics. Well, not at least since 2000, when the Democrats who were then a dying majority redistricted themselves into majorities that the state’s voters were no longer giving them. Rather than run on issues — Democrats in Texas lose on those — Angle is on a seek and destroy mission targeting Republicans in the state House on up to the governor’s mansion.
Well, yes, of course.
Until some Conservative rich guys start up their own organizations to broadcast the truth about what is going on, the chowderheads who still get their news mainly from the MSM will continue to vote for the corrupt politicos. Time to pony up.
It will take a lot more money than the other side, because we do not have the MSM on our side, with all their free advertising. May be better to just buy these lousy MSM outlets. Change their programming or put them out of business.
Thanks for the info we do not need Soros money in this state.
What does “manufacture an ethical charge against a vulnerable Republican” mean? I ‘m not arguing against the facts stated above as to how Matt Angle or his associates operate. Still, a politician who is “vulnerable” to an ethics charge must be doing something imprudent.
My point is this: Politics is now and always has been a cut-throat business. If a pol is in it for his personal ambition or monetary gain, he will indeed, leave himself “vul;nerable’ some day or some way. Politicans who don’t want people to know what they’re doing should get out of the the people’s business.
That’s not really true. For the most part, though it seems illogical on the surface or at least wildly ironic, it is generally only nice and good people who are vulnerable to this kind of thing. Real jerks and lawbreakers seem to shrug this kind of thing off and go on with what they are doing. Names like Rangel, Frank, Waters, Clinton and others come to mind. This tactic has been very effective for the Alinsky left. It does not matter whether the charge will hold water – only public perception really matters. Bill Whittle has a great Afterburner segment on this that he did right after Sarah Palin’s resignation that proves this point, I think, very eloquently. I recommend it to everyone in this discussion – it is a classic.
The formula also involves timing. How many times have dems made completely spurious charges or started a bogus investigation of someone right before an election timed just so the person can’t mount a response in time. If I remember correctly, we have Barbara Boxer as a senator because of this kind of thing. She was behind a conservative in the polls until, a day before the election, a weird story came out of nowhere that at one time he had been seen going into a stripper bar or something. He dropped something like ten points in the polls and Boxer won. The rest is history. Hundreds more examples can be thought of. As Whittle points out – the innocent are destroyed by false allegations while the truly guilty seem to shrug them off.
Maybe what we need for the right is some sort of elite squad of high-profile lawyers to sue the heck out of these jerks. Or something. The real solution is an educated and grounded electorate, I suppose. Good luck with that…
Manufacturing ethics charges goes with the political process but isn’t it just a bit suspicious when all or most that are widely and conspicuously reported are against Republicans? And I don’t think this strategy is limited to Texas. Should the Republican party participate in kind? I don’t think so but they should at the very least immediately expose these tactics wherever and whenever they’re used with a very big megaphone. Unfortunately they don’t have one and the relative silence is what’s so damaging to the process.
Check out the criminal conduct of the dims, they pay no attention to laws, rules, there are no limitations on them as far as they are concerned. The left hounded a Conservative out of the House, he was from Texas, he is still battling the bogus BS charges brought against him by a DA down in Austin
The dims are corrupt to a fault, obummer is in office because no one had the nerve to call his hand on his birth certificate. He did illegal drugs and he is a demonstrated dirt bag and totally incompetent, yet he is in office. Some wonder if he still isn’t doing drugs, bet he is, my opinion of course.
“Still, a politician who is “vulnerable” to an ethics charge must be doing something imprudent.” Actually, I don’t think so. You can always find a vote on some issue that benefited some campaign contributor, or that disadvantaged some opponent, and claim that it constitutes corruption. You can always charge racism or some other -ism. I’ve been the target of Alinsky tactics, and they don’t require even a slight modicum of truth. In fact they rely on people thinking, “Where there’s this much smoke, there must be some fire.”
I thought Texas was made up of strong determined men that would, under no circumstance, allow any communist marxist individual to tarnish their state. I guess I was wrong! I guess the only thing left for Texas is the WOMEN to take over do the job the men are evidently not capable of doing
Mustang-though I dont live in texas, I travel there a few times a year on business. Trust me-Texas DOES have real men there who will have little use for the likes of George Sore Zero. They might FORM a “shadow party”-they wont SUCCEED.
Dude, are you serious???? Do you have any idea how many Mexicans we have in this state now? White people, statewide are UNDER 45% now.
Until we wrest control of the MSM from the Dems they will always out play us on 527s, organizations like Angle’s and ACORN, and control what is heard by the public. Even when we have big donors like the Kock brothers, or Richard Scaife they are enviscerated by the MSM until they are useless.
Nothing, nothing will ever change as long as the left controls the MSM. Even if by chance and overcoming the fruad the Dems will use in the next two elections, the MSM will tear us apart like they are doing to Christine O’Donnell in DE. Hell even our own GOP is getting in the act against her.
We need an organization that pulls together millions of conservative, right-minded and libertarian Americans who will force advertisers of the MSM to pull their advertising and shut them down. Then we need a Congress that will enact a law that any political organization will be taxed at 90% of what it receives in donations; charities and foundations need to be taxed at 90% if they give to any political organizations. These money machines need to be defunded. Then the playing field will be level and the people can make better decisions.
The left is TOO adept at this kind of war. And we haven’t got anyone to challenge this guy or the many others including Soros. So we need to fight them another way.
MSM? No need to boycott them, the last I looked they had the lowest book of all the news channels!
Texas has a cancer that is metastasizing and with any cancer you must first isolate it (which has been done by this brilliant wake-up article)and then deny it the protein it needs to grow-money. Promote and coordinate the cancellation of all subscriptions to print media and a corresponding mail,email,fax and phone call blitz to advertisers on these propoganda organs. Deny them their existance and they will fold.
The Dems want more tax revenue so give it to them.Any tax exempt organization that collects contributions for political action distribution should pay a state tax/fee on whatever sums it deems necessary to donate.
Argh. Thanks. I live in Texas. I had no idea. None.
I just didn’t know why Perry wasn’t strolling into the Gov’s Mansion, and Bill White had a chance. He’s a joke. He always has been a joke.
Our state works. I’ve looked at how all of my family for generations has ended up here- it’s because Texas is FREE and Texas Works! I left the state twice when I was young, to nightmares- Louisiana, where my best friend, whose husband had just died, violently. She was a widow with two small daughters.The Welfare woman denied her benefits. The people around her said ” Of course, did you expect benefits? You’re white!” All of them were complicit. These lovely little girls had obvious signs of malnutrition as she struggled to care for them for the next few years, until she caught on, and moved out of state. I took them in for months, myself.
I can’t send mail to Chicago, to my friend, because the mail system is politicized. The mailman cannot be forced to do good work, and deliver the mail to the right address, nor can he be fired. What sort of person votes for a person from a city like that?
I know people who have left, to go to the welfare rolls in Massachusets. Two sisters–one stayed to be free- she had a job- and one who went home- she wanted to stay in a welfare hotel and get a welfare check.
Why are politicians being nice to Dems here? They tend to have enormous, embarassing character flaws. The Republicans tend to be tall, handsome, hardworking, decent, humble guys. Make fun of GWB all you want, but when he was in a room full of Reps, they all looked the same- cowboys- real ones- with real ranches.
ari
montereyjack has it.
Go after the advertisers. In a country where the majority is fiscally conservative, and the economy not too hot; I don’t think too many companies will risk alienating the customer.
Every where you turn its Soros funding some left scheme! This man is the head of the Medussa!
Democrats are evil, evil incarnate. Simple as that.
I got news for George Sore zeroes. Your ass isnt wanted in Texas, the home of the Alamo
and defenders of freedom and capitalism. Your “shadow” (commie scum) “party” and its other self, the CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS, will not succeed. Unlike in 2002, Sore zeroes , no one knew about you then. Now your name is sheet in these parts, as well as yopur pals John Podesta and the racist punk Van Jones(we know they both work for YOU, Sore Zero). The best lawyers in the country happento be in Texas, and mos tof them DONT LIKE YOU. You see what happened to Mike Cas-ho in Delaware? Imagine 100 times worse Sore Zeroes.
#12. dv,
We could use you here in Nevada. The sheeple here that “love” Scarry Reid are multiplying as Kalifornians are coming here for more freebies. As promised by Mr. Reid.
What does “manufacture an ethical charge against a vulnerable Republican” mean?
You mean like leaking sealed divorce documents as Obama’s operation did when he was running for state senate in Illinois?
The Democ-rat Party is a malignancy that must be cut our of the American body politic. Both its programs of failure and the way they’re imposed are an explicit threat to America and its way of life. They wsill destroy our economy and our prosperity.
This is why we MUST drive the MSM out of business and do it the free market way. Stop all your subscriptions to magazines and newspapers. Do NOT watch the network news. Get the real and balanced news from FOX. This is what I did. If everyone did this, soon they will all sink into bankruptcy and we wouldn’t have to worry about their biased liberal reporting any more.
Many thanks for the heads up! I hope people all over this great nation read this and are forewarned to this particular form of domestic enemy of America.
Absolutely; stop subscribing to left wing papers and magazines. Starve them to death, and then don’t let the dems give them federal money to survive. This has been informally proposed by worried libs. If they want to survive, stop spinning the truth. I read the NY Times for forty years, until I couldn’t take any more. Now I read a better written paper,the Wall Street Journal, with writers who respect the Constitution, Christianity, Family Values, and American Exceptionalism. Let’s try to save this country while there is still time. I lived through WWII and I believe these are more perilous times for our liberties!
I’ve been living in Texas for over 10 years now and I think it’ll take more than George Soros and several billion dollars to pull one over on the average Texan. Of course if you ‘import’ more Californians here, it might be a close fight.
Republicans may actually already have a majority of elected offices in Texas, because many cities and towns in the state, especially the smaller ones, have nonpartisan municipal elections, including the small city I’m from. And Republicans dominate in most of the smaller cities and towns, except along the Mexican border, and in the suburbs of the large cities. The mainstream media in Texas probably does lean liberal, but it is still much more conservative than the MSM on the Coasts. The Dallas Morning News, for instance, has a conservative editorial board.
Texas would have been fully Republican as of twenty years ago, had the had the party refrained from embracing the far-out religious right.
Maybe so, but it wouldn’t have been worth it.
This month’s ‘TEXAS MONTHLY’ magazine (no real Texan actually subscribes to it because it has anti-Texas values and makes fun of our traditions) carried a silly article on cutting the budget which is the most destructive set of acts imaginable to anyone who understands where the tax revenues come from and where they go. The real problems with the current budget? The costs of educating 60% of public school children who speak only Spanish at home have driven the education budget billions in the hole. The skyrocketing costs of Medicaid are hitting hard, because of the influx of so much cheap labor which has driven down income for blue collar workers….The TM article did NOT even mention the root causes of our current budget problems; they ran the article just before elections, as an anti-Governor Perry ad for the leftist with a shady past, the ex-mayor of Houston, Bill White. The TM also ran an article on how White could win!! Such ‘journalism’ is popular with the large contingent of ex-Californians who came here when their companies moved…..The media hate Perry because he is a typical old-style Texan, clean-living, who was a West-Texas rancher with an Air Force stint as an airline pilot, who isn’t afraid of being honest, even when it isn’t politically correct. (His book on the Boy Scouts proves his courage.) God Help Us All who love our state.
Go back to the 1990-94 period, the last under full Democratic control in Austin, and you can see the plans under Ann Richards to implement a state income tax became the third rail of Texas politics — so much so that Democratic Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock saved his own skin as Richards was being ousted by George W. Bush by pushing the through a state law mandating that the implementation of an income tax had to be approved by the voters via amendment referendum. So that doesn’t mean if the Democrats get back into power some day they won’t try to do it, but there is a safeguard level to where they can’t just go down to Austin some spring in an odd-numbered year and implement it by legislative fiat, before the voters know what hit them (though I’m sure they’d love to have some state or federal judge mandate an income tax on the voters based on ‘failure to fund’ grounds).
In this election cycle, Bill White has actually been trying to run to the right of Rick Perry on a number of issues, which Perry left himself open to by moving to the left in the wake of the 2006 state elections. The Texas Toll Road/eminent domain kerfuffle, Perry’s push for mandatory cervical cancer vaccinations for all sixth grade girls in Texas and the reported $18 billion state budget deficit (which is shrinking due to the economy recovering faster than the rest of the nation) are where White’s trying to do the same thing some Rahm Emanuel-sponsored candidates did to Republicans in ’06 and ’08, which is peel off not-paying-attention voters who normally would trend moderate-conservative.
And it might have worked, too … if White had been the Dems candidate in 2006. Four years and a D.C. demonstration of what the Democrats really believe later, and not only is White not going to get the benefit of the doubt against Perry (who smartly tacked back to the right in 2008 because he saw Kay Bailey Hutchison’s 2010 primary challenge looming), but few of the down-ballot Democratic hopefuls are going to get in either, because the state’s voters are so mad at the national party. That will give conservative Republicans a major boost in 2011-12, since the Legislature will be doing the state and U.S. House redistricting over the next two years, and for the first time with the Legislature fully in Republican control. That will make it harder in the next few cycles for the outside activists to swing the state back to Democrats’ control, since odds are you’re going to see a handful of deep Blue Democratic districts surrounded by a sea of red ones when the lines are drawn for 2012.
I would not be too sure about the redistricting. Most population growth in Texas has been minority growth. The new seats Texas gets will have to reflect this per the voting rights act. Of the four or five that Texas might pick up…I would say at least three will be minority districts. Which means they will probably be Democratic.
they can come..they can build….and they can manipulate….but in the end….they will run with their tails between their legs…clean out of Texas
Angle should go Dangle
From funding the Orange Revolution in Ukraine to promoting Democrats in Texastan, my what a tangled web Mr. Soros weaves…
I think something amazing is going on in West Texas. The bluest part of the State seems to have a purplish haze … must be the expansion of Ft Bliss and the extra soldiers moderating the libs out here.
We can only imagine the terrifying power Dr. Evil is ammassing to put us all in Marxist chains. Be afraid, be very afraid!
Caution: Not just a shadow party in Texas, but a shadow government in the USA has been constructed, too, as envisioned by Sharpton, Shabazz, Obama and Holder, pretty much in their own words, if you’ve paid attetion to bizarre, not-exactly-subtle comments which they and other black leaders have made.
I had a ex-friend in Texas who was an active member within the official Texas Democratic Party. And he was openly boasting about how they were going to use illegal immigrants and every other method they had available to completely rewrite Texas voting districts so that Republicans could never win another election ever again. I was taken back by how militant and zealous he was to win no matter the costs. You could see the utter fanaticism in his eyes and hear it in his voice. It reminded me of how the militant leftist communist revolutionaries reveled in their bloodthrist when they raped and murdered the “bourgeoisie” during the 20th century. Watch out for the left. A lot of them are completely flipping nutballs and will stop at absolutely nothing to create their “socialist utopia”.
I had a ex-friend in Texas who was an active member within the official Texas Democratic Party. And he was openly boasting about how they were going to use illegal immigrants and every other method they had available to completely rewrite Texas voting districts so that Republicans could never win another election ever again. I was taken back by how militant and zealous he was to win no matter the costs. You could see the utter fanaticism in his eyes and hear it in his voice. It reminded me of how the militant leftist communist revolutionaries reveled in their bloodthrist when they raped and murdered the “bourgeoisie” during the 20th century. Watch out for the left. A lot of them are completely flipping nutballs and will stop at absolutely nothing to create their “socialist utopia”.
ghosrder69_1968@yahoo.com gsmith53@dc.rr.com glenn@drivedemocracy.org aaronthethinker@yahoo.com
These are the email addresses he uses
Okay… for every Dem that turned Repub… we just added another RINO to the ranks as I see it. There will be no clear majority of Repubs even if it looks like that on paper.
Here come yet another defense piece by Bryan Preston. It is getting so obvious, Bryan.