Reagan's legacy in Texas includes growth of GOP
(Commentary: Dave McNeely)
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Texas ping list!. . .don't be shy.
No, you don't HAVE to be a Texan to get on this list!
Posted on 06/10/2004 4:52:05 AM PDT by Arrowhead1952
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, June 10, 2004
The late President Reagan is given huge credit for the growth of the Republican Party in Texas, and rightly so.
Beginning with his unsuccessful effort in 1976 to wrest the Republican nomination from President Ford, and then when he won the presidency in 1980, the former California governor helped spur the growth of Republican numbers in the Texas Legislature and local offices.
In 1979, there were 24 Republicans in the 150-member Texas House of Representatives, and four in the 31-member Texas Senate. After Reagan's victory in 1980, the number grew to 36 in the House and seven in the Senate.
By 1985, after Reagan's landslide re-election, the number grew to 52 in the House but dropped to six in the Senate because of creative Democratic redistricting.
Another Reagan legacy, which has helped Republicans win every statewide office and control of both the Texas House and Senate, was choosing Texan George H.W. Bush as his running mate.
There was a Bush on the ballot in seven of the 12 elections from 1980 through 2002. The result is that Democratic presidential candidates haven't campaigned seriously in Texas, except in 1988, when U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas was the vice presidential nominee.
That means Democratic officeholders below the presidential level have steadily lost or quit, to be replaced by Republicans.
The GOP growth in Texas actually began before Reagan, however. In 1978, businessman Bill Clements became Texas' first Republican governor since just after the Civil War.
With Clements' ability to appoint members of state boards and commissions and to fill judicial vacancies, it became respectable to be a Republican.
And others who had been Democrats, like Reagan, began to switch.
Elected to the U.S. Senate on Reagan's coattails in 1984 was Phil Gramm, who had switched parties in 1983.
Carole Keeton Strayhorn, with a different last name at the time, switched in 1985 to run for the U.S. House against popular Democrat Jake Pickle in 1986. She got stomped but kept running and is now state comptroller.
The person Strayhorn seems bent on opposing for the GOP nomination for governor, Rick Perry, switched parties in 1989 to run against Democratic Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower the following year.
Perry won, and in 1998 he was elected lieutenant governor. He became governor when George W. Bush left that office to become president.
Another legacy of Reagan's in Texas was making a low-taxing, low-spending state even more so.
Perry, who said Reagan influenced him greatly, told Republicans at their recent state convention that Texas was the only one of the eight largest states to write a budget last year with no new taxes.
Of course, Democrats say Reagan's legacy includes what Bush the elder called "voodoo economics" before becoming Reagan's running mate. With deficits every year he was president, the national debt more than doubled.
Dave McNeely's column appears Thursdays.
The bold is just to show that he considers what the RAT party did was "creative Democrat[ic] redistricting" but slammed the Republicans this past year. Just another RAT in the media.
MaNeely slams Reagan ping
However the most important name of all was left off.
Are you going to make it tonight to meet JimRob?
Sorry. I cannot make it, even though I wish I could. I am on annual training with the National Guard this and next week. Ft Hood and Ft Bliss.
Ping
Impossible - how dare you speak such slander. Everyone knows that only Republicans gerrymander, leaving persecuted minorities out in the cold.
Exactly. Luckily Tom 'The Hammer" Delay had a long memory and returned the compliment this time round.
What happened in Texas demonstrates why it's so important to organize at the state level to benefit at the Federal level. For decades the Democrat party gerrymandered at the state level and thus held the US House of Representatives. Only now is that advantage beginning to wane which is why the press is whining about gerrymandering.
Reagan's legacy in Texas includes growth of GOP
(Commentary: Dave McNeely)
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Texas ping list!. . .don't be shy.
No, you don't HAVE to be a Texan to get on this list!
"By 1985, after Reagan's landslide re-election, the number grew to 52 in the House but dropped to six in the Senate because of creative Democratic redistricting."
Gee, my local rag ( The Corpus Christi Ca Ca Times) told me the GOP is the only party that participated in creative redistricting.)
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