Rick Perry vs World

26 September 2006

Sometimes blogs worm their way into the news cycle

FWST -- Blogger: Perry's next stop may be College Station

A rumor making its way around the state has Republican Gov. Rick Perry resigning in January -- assuming he wins re-election -- and persuading the Texas A&M University board of regents to name him chancellor of his alma mater.

Aggie Chancellor Bob McTeer has said he'll retire early next year.

Under the theory, first advanced in a blog by Texas Monthly's Paul Burka, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst would advance to the Governor's Mansion, putting Republican state Sen. Jane Nelson of Lewisville in line as a contender to replace him as the presiding officer of the Texas Senate.

I mostly pass it on because it's amusing that Paul Burka is described in the headline as a "blogger."

Posted by Evan @ 09/26/06 07:29 AM | Comments (0)

Cornyn brings home grant money

From the Chron:

The Air Force has announced that it will administer a $1 million grant to the St. Mary's University Center for Terrorism Law to study states' protection of information about infrastructure and cyber security.

Funding for the study was included in the 2006 Defense Department appropriations bill, but it had been unclear who would administer the grant.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a St. Mary's law school graduate, praised Thursday's announcement. The Texas Republican helped secure funding for the grant. He has said it's wrong to assume that the study's purpose is to restrict government transparency.

Jeffrey Addicott, the grant's author and director of the Terrorism Law center, has said the study would examine open records laws around the country and outline best practices for restricting access to information about the nation's infrastructure in the name of protecting it from terrorist attacks.

Posted by Evan @ 09/26/06 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

Rick Perry, Carole Strayhorn, Chris Bell, Kinky Friedman on abortion

This post by Lone Star Pundit details our gubernatorial candidates on abortion-banning trigger bill. That is, if the Supreme Court were to hold that the right to have an abortion is not a fundamental human right [essentially the standard for substantive due process], then this bill would then ban abortion.

I get decent amounts of hits from googlers who are querying about individual candidate's abortion positions, so I'll try to answer them.

I'm going to summarize quickly, and then excerpt LSP after the jump.

Rick Perry has been consistently pro-life.
Chris Bell has been consistently pro-choice.
Kinky Friedman is pro-choice, but pulled a reverse-Mitt Romney when he said he would sign a trigger bill banning abortion. I have no idea whether to view that statement as predictive of what he'd do if elected.
Carole Strayhorn has been reported as pro-choice without any complaint from her, then she waffled, then she was firmly pro-life, and now she seems to be prevaricating again. I think it's fair to say that no one really knows what she'd do.

[Read More]

Posted by Evan @ 09/26/06 12:53 AM | Comments (9)

Ron Kirk makes me giggle

BOR posts a video that the Chris Bell campaign is sending to big money Democrats in the hopes of raising money. My favorite line:

"This race is ours to win." -- Ron Kirk

Not surprisingly, the ten minute video featured quite a few trial lawyers, which makes sense since those are most of the big money Democrats in this state.

Posted by Evan @ 09/26/06 12:19 AM | Comments (0)

25 September 2006

What is Dan Patrick running for?

Word on the street is that Dan Patrick is doing a statewide mailout in the next week or so either through a) his state senate campaign, or b) one of his surrogates (eg, CLOUT).

Certainly some people are already whispering: what is Dan Patrick running for in 2010?

There was the recent purchase of KVCE 1160, which will provide a platform for Patrick's views. No doubt Patrick knows that the metro areas of Houston and the Metroplex provide almost half of the votes in a statewide Republican primary.

And after his obliteration of two state reps and a Houston city councilman in March's SD7 primary, Patrick must be feeling good about his campaign appeal. The Chron didn't exactly offer sympathetic coverage, but that certainly didn't hurt him at all. In fact, it probably helped him.

Now there's a statewide mailout on the way.

I'd say the smart money is on Patrick running statewide in '10. The question is whether he decides to try and take on Dewhurst or Kay Bailey for governor, or whether he runs for a lower statewide office. Imagine how much fun a Dan Patrick/David Dewhurst/Kay Bailey Hutchison primary would be. Assuming Rick Perry doesn't run for re-election, of course.

Despite Republican hegemony in this state's politics, we still haven't had a real GOP primary. That ain't gonna last forever.

Posted by Evan @ 09/25/06 05:35 PM | Comments (7)

22 September 2006

Another day, another poll

Texas Credit Union League poll, by Hamilton Beattie (D) and Voter/Consumer Research (R), 800 Likely Voters, from 9/5 to 9/18

Rick Perry 42 %
Chris Bell 20%
Carole Keeton Strayhorn 18%
Kinky Friedman 12%
James Werner 2%

Fav/Unfav
Perry 55/27
Strayhorn 41/26
Friedman 27/31
Bell 23/16
Werner 10/6

Perry pulls 71% of the 'phant vote, Bell pulls 44% of the Donks.

Friedman pulls 6% of the GOP vote, while getting 14% from the Donk vote. Meanwhile, Strayhorn also gets more support from the Donks than the GOP, 20% to 15% respectively.

George W. Bush Approval/Disapproval
58/39

Couple of quick comments:

1. Yikes! A 13 day sample! Ok, no campaign pollster will ever have a poll in the field for 13 days. Both of these firms do campaign polls, but they weren't doing this poll for a campaign. They were doing it for a third party. 13 days is a long time. Generally, you want to have your polls in the field for 3 days or less.
2. Remember, I pass polls along. They are good for data points if you're a junkie. I even pass along the worthless Zogby internet polls, and have since I started this blog. Why? Because if you carefully consider what Zogby's worthless polls are telling you, occasionally you can glean a nugget of truth. However, buyers beware.
3. This poll started right as the Labor Day ads came on. So, some of the sample is from people unlikely to have seen campaign ads, and some of the sample is from people who likely have seen at least an ad or two. This makes the sample somewhat less reliable, though still way, way better than Zogby's internet polls, and definitely still a sample worth thinking about.
4. Frankly, because of point 3, I wonder whether the pollsters compared the first half of the data to the second half of the data. Because those are different samples.

Posted by Evan @ 09/22/06 07:27 AM | Comments (1)

Well, he is an actor

Jaime Castillo:

You can imagine my surprise when 10 or 15 minutes into our Hill Country journey, Perry was down on all fours mimicking a camel in the aisle of a custom bus.

I kid you not.

After the governor learned that another journalist had spent her youth in Saudi Arabia, Perry started telling stories about the six weeks in 1975 he spent at the same military installation as an Air Force pilot.

Breaking into a wide smile, Perry recalled the day he saw a bright red Ford pickup on a desert road. In the driver's seat was a Bedouin man wearing a traditional headdress and in the bed of the pickup was a camel, kneeling.

Slinging his 6-foot 1-inch frame onto the bus floor, Perry dug his black cowboy boots in the carpet and craned his neck.

"The camel was peeking around the cab like this," he said. "I looked at the driver, and man, I said, 'He's Texas.'"

I'm amused, even if I'm not sure why from Castillo's re-telling.

I emailed Castillo asking exactly what the joke was. Was it that the camel was like the dog in the back of a pickup? Castillo didn't seem quite sure, but seemed to think that it was.

The anecdote is a little silly, but I doubt the Perry folks mind much. After all, Perry's been a bit of a punching bag in the media with three folks running against him. So stories help humanize him.

Oh, and need I remind you that the governor is an actor?

Posted by Evan @ 09/22/06 07:01 AM | Comments (0)

Still ain't working

I have to comment on this, talking about Strayhorn's new ad (all her ads, really):

Mrs. Strayhorn stands in front of a stark white background and talks directly into the camera. The simple design and the candidate's calm, authoritative demeanor are aimed at counteracting contentions by Gov. Rick Perry's campaign that Mrs. Strayhorn is "angry" and "shrill."

I see where they are coming from, but I think this is one of the things that rings false about Strayhorn's ad.

Look, I know most voters aren't really paying attention yet. But certain things tend to filter through, and that's been the general confrontational style that Comptroller Strayhorn has adopted over the past few years and past few months on the campaign trail.

She's supposed to be tough (it's in her ~~nickname~~ slogan!) and impassioned. That has trickled down through the filter to your average not-caring-that-much-yet voter. So when an ad like this is on, I just don't think it jibes with what the majority of voters feel to be true about Carole Strayhorn.

Related: why this ad doesn't work.

Posted by Evan @ 09/22/06 06:35 AM | Comments (1)

Edwards, Taylor spar over immigration in CD17

Dan Genz in the Waco Trib-Herald:

Central Texas voters are being treated to a hostile debate over immigration reform as Republican nominee Van Taylor spars with U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco.

The latest Taylor television ad accused Edwards of making illegal immigration "even worse" with his votes in Congress, while the Edwards rebuttal asks, "What will Van Taylor lie about next?"

Taylor said eight votes over the past decade show Edwards is weak on illegal immigration enforcement and has supported giving illegal immigrants food stamps and other federal welfare benefits.

Edwards responded that Taylor is using only redundant, insignificant or misleading votes to make claims without mentioning Edwards' votes to ban giving illegal immigrants food stamps in 1996 and to promote stiffer penalties for illegal immigrants who have been arrested in 2005.

Just a data point, I don't really have much to say.

Posted by Evan @ 09/22/06 06:27 AM | Comments (1)

21 September 2006

Text of Rick Perry's new ad

Rick Perry's ad came out a day before Strayhorn's ad, but it's not intentional that I didn't get to writing it up.

Here's the text of the Guv's ad, "Schools":

"Public school funding, student achievement and standards are all up. I'm proud of Texas schools. Since I became governor education funding has increased 9 billion dollars. We passed a two thousand dollar teacher pay raise, and the nation's largest merit pay program. We've accomplished a lot but we still can do more. That's why we're directing schools to spend at least sixty-five percent of their money on classroom instruction. Education is our future, and my highest priority"

I noticed that ABC13 factchecked the ad and said, "Perry's ad for education was too truthful."

This made me laugh. I never thought I'd hear that about anyone's ad. ABC13 also reprints the Perry camp's factual support for their ad.

Posted by Evan @ 09/21/06 06:32 AM | Comments (0)

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