Oh no! Politics!
Amarillo Globe-News had an unsigned editorial a couple days ago.
Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, R-Midland, likely will have to fight to keep his job in the 2009 Legislature.
That's good - not for Craddick, necessarily, but for a democratic system of government that should hold our leaders accountable for their actions.
Craddick will have some explaining to do to his Permian Basin constituents and perhaps even to his House colleagues, some of whom have turned against him.
Is this a bad turn of events for Texas government? Not in the least. On the contrary, it produces a healthy cleansing of the process that occasionally gets cloistered too tightly in the hands of too few individuals.
To hear much of the Austin crowd talk, you'd think that there's something morally wrong with recruiting opponents for your legislative opponents. Just sounds like politics to me.
If someone keeps voting against your bills, one of the political tools is to recruit a challenger. Seems fairly standard to me, so I really can't understand some of the brouhaha from the Austin establishment. Sure, it destroys legislative comity, but legislative comity is hardly a goal in and of itself. Trying to pass legislation that you care about should be what politics is about. And sometimes to do that, you gotta give voters a choice.
The point is that recruiting challengers isn't successful unless there is voters have a reasonable basis to throw them out. Remember all the money that Leininger spent? It wasn't spent very effectively, because money doesn't win elections. Messages win elections, and money just helps get the message out. So if Craddick were to go recruit challengers to the fomenters, so what? It's unlikely the Craddick recruits will be successful unless there is substantial underlying discontent with the incumbent.
Posted by Evan @ 06/12/07 08:42 PM
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