Vice President Cheney stumped Friday for GOP
Senate hopeful John Cornyn in Houston. (AP Photo)
Posted on 07/19/2002 5:38:55 PM PDT by Theodore R.
Car dealers put support behind Tony Sanchez
DALLAS (AP) - Texas car dealers - a mostly Republican group that has not supported a statewide Democratic candidate in more than a decade - are shifting their support from Gov. Rick Perry to Democratic challenger Tony Sanchez.
Interviews and campaign finance records suggest a shift among the state's 1,300 car dealers, The Dallas Morning News reported in Thursday's editions.
"The dealer support for Sanchez is going to surprise a lot of people," said Sam Pack, the owner of three Dallas-area Ford dealerships and a Republican serving as a co-chairman of the Sanchez campaign. "And I think the number of people crossing party lines will surprise a lot of people."
During last year's legislative session, auto dealers saw both of their high-priority bills, measures lobbied to approval, killed without warning by Perry.
Perry's spokesman said he stands by his actions, as he does his 82 vetoes in 2001.
One of the bills would have raised the documentary fee dealers can charge on new car sales from $50 to $75, raising an estimated $62.5 million for dealers annually. The other would have allowed them to sell "gap insurance," unregulated policies to cover the shortfall when an outstanding loan exceeds the value of a new car that is totaled.
Perry spokesman Ray Sullivan said, "This was a clear case where Governor Perry sided with Texas families and consumers over a handful of political constituents. The governor did what he believed was right."
Sanchez's spokesman said the Laredo businessman has not taken a position on car dealers' pet bills, but when he does, they'll know about it.
"We're proud to have the support of a number of dealers, and all the people who were wronged by Rick Perry in his midnight vetoes," said the press aide, Mark Sanders.
The Texas Automobile Dealers Association, one of the strongest lobby groups in the state, generally supports candidates through its political action committee. Like many car dealers, Gene Fondren, president of the association, declined to comment on Perry's support among car dealers.
But campaign finance records show Fondren and his group have backed away from Perry.
Before the vetoes the group gave Perry an average of nearly $25,000 a year, political contributions totaling $78,900 over three years - including $20,000 on the eve of the 2001 legislative session.
Fondren, the group's lobbyist, personally kicked in another $26,000. That doesn't count additional substantial donations from individual car dealership owners.
After the vetoes, the contributions dried up, eventually sprouting anew on Sanchez's ledger. After he hosted a barbecue for dealers at his Laredo ranch, Sanchez got a $25,000 donation from the dealers' group in April. Fondren gave $1,500 in May, and individual dealers - former Republican donors among them - added thousands more.
P
ack said 60 to 70 of the Dallas-area car dealers - about half those in the region - have expressed interest in attending a planned $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser for Sanchez.
Drew Campbell, president of the New Car Dealers Association of Metropolitan Dallas, which is neutral in the race, said he'll be at the fund-raiser. "I go where my guys are."
The exodus by car dealers follows on the heels of a similar defection by doctors, whose trade group had not endorsed a Democrat for governor since 1986. They, too, were angered by what they said were Perry's surprise vetoes of several measures.
The race doesn't start until Labor Day, and Cornyn is holding his fire. Perry is already running ads. If I were doing his ads, I'd add one with a list of all the high-profile endorsements he's received, and then for a punchline note that Sanchez is endorsed by the car dealers(with a shot of some slick greaseball in front of a lot of $500 rent-a-wrecks).
I hope you're right, believe me.
" I fear that Sanchez may win the governorship and, even worse, that Kirk may win the Senator's seat."
Texas would be on track to look like what Kalifornia now looks like - politically.
Lord, what a nauseating thought!
Not to mention that in the past the election cycle in Texas kicks off Labor Day as the County Fairs are in full swing getting ready for the State Fair. If you are from Texas, you should know that! But why let that stand in the way of your continual trashing of Republicans.
Did you think that some of us have not noticed? LOL!!! Think again! Maybe you can point me to a thread you were on that you actually supported Republicans!
Unfortunately Kirk has portrayed himself as a conservative and the
media has managed to hold up that image. I wouldn't discount the dead
vote and the multiple voters and the 110% turnout in minority districts,
either.
I hope you're right, believe me.
Jimmy's Downtown
Eagerly awaited and delayed for months, Jimmy Rodriguez's sleek SoHo-style sequel to Jimmy's Uptown and Jimmy's Bronx Café finally makes its debut. Start an office pool: How soon will Derek Jeter be spotted here by "Page Six"?
Jimmy's Downtown
400 East 57th Street
212-486-6400
Jimmy's Downtown
So 57th Street isn't exactly lower Manhattan, but it's downtown if you're Jimmy Rodriguez, the nightlife impresario who brought the A-list to the Bronx. Now he's luring his blend of celebrities, politicians, and athletes to the sleepy neighborhood near the U.N. Could Kofi Annan be next at the bar?
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Jimmy Rodriguez strides through the front door of his Harlem restaurant, Jimmy's Uptown, a duplex with an onyx bar, soft golden light, and an R&B soundtrack. Men in crisp suits and women with ziggurats of teased hair grab at his hand, begging for attention. "Hey Jimmy, how are you, my brother?" "Hey Jimmy, I really need to talk to you." Rodriguez brushes them off in a polite rasp. He glances at his watch, fiddles with his cell phone. "She's late," he says, impatiently waiting for his girlfriend to arrive. "She'll just have to eat on the way."
The maître d' brings him a vodka tonic. His chef comes out of the kitchen with a tower of grilled shrimp and avocado salad. "Can I get one of these in a container to go?" Rodriguez asks. Al Sharpton is standing at the bar; a line of cars is clogging the street outside. "We gotta get moving," Rodriguez says.
The 23-year-old he's been dating for the past seven months has just pulled up and is waiting in the driver's seat of his pearl-white Cadillac SUV. "She's one year younger than me," he says, with a mischievous grin. "Well, so what if I can't count?"
Jimmy Rodriguez is 39 years old. He is six feet three inches tall and an imposing 230 pounds. He hooked up with Carrie (he refuses to divulge her last name, perhaps in deference to his wife, from whom he has been separated for almost a decade but never divorced) after running into her one night at the China Club. "I had met her like five different times," he says. "She says that each time I'd see her I'd reintroduce myself." The China Club is a favorite haunt of the athletes who cram Jimmy's Bronx Café, the Knicks and Yankees and ballplayers from out of town who -- along with local pols and Manhattan celebrities -- helped turn it into that borough's most high-profile nightspot. In the early days, the papers anointed him the Latin Toots Shor. The label is outdated -- Toots, after all, had only one place. Rodriguez is building an empire.
"I don't want to be a multi-millionaire," he says. "I'd be happy if at the end of twenty years I've built maybe 50 places, am building another five every year, and have got like a million dollars in the bank." For a high-school dropout who started off selling seafood from an ice-filled trash can under the Bronx River Parkway, his confidence is boundless. He's preparing for the opening this month -- with a party thrown by Governor Pataki to celebrate Women's History Month -- of his third space, a sleek SoHo-style bar and restaurant on 57th Street that he's coyly dubbed Jimmy's Downtown. "Where is downtown anyway?" he asks. "When you live in the Bronx, this is downtown."
"I think it's great that Jimmy's opening in midtown," says his friend Norma Kamali later that evening in the VIP balcony at the Apollo. "Jimmy's like a magnet. He draws people to himself. He's just responding to demand." Rodriguez and Kamali have been friends ever since event planner Robert Isabell first dragged her up to the Bronx Café, an enormous complex on Fordham Road, in the early nineties. During baseball season, the three of them sit together in the best seats at Yankee Stadium.
The new place (all Jimmy's, with no investors, he claims) is set to be as visually dramatic as his Harlem outpost; Ilan Waisbrod, the designer behind BondSt and Eugene, plans to put suede on one wall, big red roses on another, and a giant red pillar in the center of the dining room. Rodriguez says he nixed a proposal to put flat-screen TVs on the ceiling in the men's room. "When a big game is on, nobody would ever leave the bathroom," he says with a grin. Despite the new restaurant's somewhat sleepy location -- on a residential block on the far eastern end of 57th Street -- Rodriguez is showing plenty of his signature confidence. "How many places do you go where you find Latinos, African-Americans, Caucasians, people from all over breaking bread, listening to jazz and R&B and old school and a little salsa and a little merengue and a little cha-cha-cha?" Of course some of the "people from all over" are drawn by the prospect of seeing one of Jimmy's boldface friends in a front-room banquette: Spike Lee, Venus Williams. Even Ian Schrager, the nightlife arbiter of a different decade, has checked out the scene. "Schrager came up to the Bronx a couple of times," says Rodriguez. "He told me, 'You've done what I did in my time without the drugs.' "
But although he surrounds himself with cops and politicians, Rodriguez's image isn't quite squeaky clean. Growing up in the Bronx, he got into his share of trouble -- a lot of which he terms being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and even spent a week in jail. Mariscos del Caribe, the seafood restaurant he opened with his father before striking out on his own with the Bronx Café, was investigated for drug dealing. And the Bronx Café has had its problems -- gunshots on the sidewalk, alleged drug dealers inside -- enough to have sparked a temporary ban of the place by Major League Baseball in 1995. More trouble followed that same year, when Rodriguez hosted a reception for Fidel Castro and furious demonstrators lined the blocks around the Café.
Still, Rodriguez's brushes with controversy have only added to his mystique; he's at once charming and slightly sinister, Frank Sinatra with cappuccino skin. When Rodriguez swings over to the parking garage across 57th Street to grab his white Jaguar convertible, the owner throws up his hands and insists, "For you, Jimmy, no charge." Late one Thursday night, Rodriguez and Carrie pass a glamorous mob gathered on the sidewalk outside the Mercer Hotel. "Hey, it's the Post fashion party," says Carrie. "Did you get an invite?" "I don't need one," says Rodriguez. A few minutes later, he's shaking hands and chatting with the burly men guarding the door.
With Rodriguez, even the smallest favors aren't easily forgotten. "Jimmy's heavy on the issue of loyalty," says Congressman José Serrano. "No matter how successful he is, he never forgets that he comes from the streets."
Late afternoon, the day before the Bronx Café will celebrate its ninth anniversary, Rodriguez is in Katz's Deli on Houston Street, wearing a dark-blue Versace suit and eating a hot pastrami sandwich. "I have so much going on, I have to be focused, to be a little bit smarter for the next couple of months," he says. "I can't be going to bed at five in the morning anymore." He wipes the mustard from the side of his mouth and waves across the room, acknowledging a stout black guy in a World Series Yankees jacket -- "one of the guys who rakes the field in the fifth inning." Rodriguez pauses. "I can't wait for the new place to open," he says. "I'm going to target everyone and everywhere. It's close to the U.N. -- why can't I have a couple of heads of state there once a month? Why not? It's nice enough. I can make it happen."
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