A good friend texted me Tuesday to ask if I’d watched the Texas Democratic Party’s response to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s state of the state address. He’d delivered that speech on Monday and addressed several major issues, including defunding the police and dealing with the COVID pandemic. Whether one supports Abbott or not, the speech lays out his priorities and real policies and ideas as the state legislature’s 87th session gets underway. That’s what it’s supposed to do. He also made some bipartisan nods and, in general, delivered a decent outlook for the state ahead as it faces troubled times.
Knowing my friend, I asked if he was highlighting the Democratic response because they’d beclowned themselves. Yep, he replied, they had. I hadn’t planned to bother watching, but after that, how could I not?
Here it is in all its left-wing, out-of-touch glory.
You’ll note a few things here that have become common in every message Democrats roll out. There are folk songs either from or reminiscent of the 1960s.
It’s 2021. The ’60s were a very long time ago. But there must be a plank in the D platform mandating dreary, old-sounding folk music in everything they do.
There’s also racial division and nods to immigrants, legal or otherwise (mostly the latter). How opening the border during a pandemic helps any Texan is never addressed. Democrats pretend there are free lunches to be had all over the place.
The video repeatedly claims that Texas is being “left behind.” By whom? The Democrats don’t say, probably because Texas isn’t being left behind. Its economy has grown sufficiently that it would be the world’s ninth-largest economy if it was its own republic again. New Yorkers and Californians and other blue-staters are moving to Texas in massive numbers. There’s a large Facebook page dedicated to helping them find communities, schools, and homes. Don’t worry about them, my fellow conservatives. These folks know why they’re moving to Texas. And Facebook will probably find some reason to shut the page down before long. Criticizing Democrats seems to be viewed as “hate speech” on the platform nowadays.
One of the most important issues of 2020 was Austin’s and Dallas’ decisions to defund their police departments. Democrats did that. Austin’s city council got out way over their skis, defunding police by about one-third of the budget. Leading the nation in performance art as governance isn’t a good look and it has real consequences outside the council chambers: Austin’s crime is on the up, and police officers are leaving through retirements and resignations in large numbers. It’s a mess. Former APD Chief Art Acevedo has slammed Austin from his current post in Houston — which did not defund its police.
Austin’s antics also cost the Democrats one of their seats on the city council in December. You’d think that might get their attention. But you’d be wrong.
The Democrats’ response video makes no mention of any of this. It does, however, hate on the police in one section. That’s just before the four-minute mark, when an activist brings up police brutality, which is real, but never addresses what happens when you defund and demoralize police. It never addresses basic public safety. This is an 80-20 issue, and it’s one where the Democrats could demonstrate some ability to read the state’s opinion on the matter. They would have to have that ability, though, which they do not.
It never addresses the riots or the businesses burned and looted in Austin and Dallas at the height of the violence last summer.
There’s also a nod to union labor, which fails to grok the fact that Texas is a big-time right-to-work state. That pro-union section also fails to note the utter chaos the teachers’ union is causing in Chicago. There, with Democrats in charge, the union is actively hurting kids by preventing them from returning to school until its unreasonable demands are met. The Democrats, forced for once to lead because they cannot plausibly blame Trump (but they’re trying!), are failing to lead.
There’s no nod to the real priorities of Tejano voters, which are family, the Second Amendment, good jobs, and the right to life. Texas Democrats are losing their grip on the Tejano vote the farther the party drifts left on all those issues. The video, which stars the very regional talents of the Castro brothers, makes no note of this. Why the camera captures him straight up the nostrils is also never explained.
Democrats from Biden on down have become openly hostile to Texas oil and natural gas production, which directly accounts for one out of every eight jobs in the state, and funds public education. The video fails to mention this.
The video demonstrates the Texas Democrats’ total failure to, as my friend put it, “read the room.” It’s as if a GOP consultant somehow finagled the contract to write up the Democrats’ response, and that consultant handed in a gem of a script. And the Texas Democrats ran with it!
For what it’s worth, I didn’t write it. I could tell them how to win here. But I won’t.
And now they’ve got Beto O’Rourke, the radical fake Latinx known for jumping up on bartops, threatening to run for governor in a couple of years.
None of this should make the Republicans complacent. Hollywood money is sure to keep pumping up Democrat coffers here and the media will do its best to fluff up another Beto if one is to be found, or the actual Beto, if a substitute doesn’t materialize.
But Texas Democrats prove once again that they deserve no power in a state they consistently fail to understand, and whose success they would destroy given half a chance. That’s what turning Texas “blue” would do.
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