Poll Cat

I just did it. I cast my ballot in the special election to fill the state senate seat held by Teel Bivins (R-Amarillo). Senator Bivins has been tapped by the Bush administration to be ambassador to Sweden. Senator Bivins received acclaim (Texas Monthly named him one of the 10 best Texas legislators more than once.) and he won my heart when he pulled the plug on the Texas State Technical College-Amarillo. Senator Bivins cashed some favors to win TSTC-Amarillo a special $1M appropriation and when the promised results (increased enrollment) didn't materialize, Bivins led the way to close the largely duplicative 2-year institution. TSTC-Amarillo (like its sister institutions in Waco, Sweetwater, Harlingen, and Marshall) filled the void left by a closed U. S. airbase (and the accompanying payroll). I wish that Senator Bivins was fluent in Swedish. I wish that Senator Bivins knew Swedish history and culture. However, his main qualifications for the Bush appointment were his personal campaign donations and his campign fundraising in the 2000 presidential election. No matter, Senator Bivins is off to Stockholm. He leaves a state senate seat (District 31) that has been gerrymandered to include the Texas Panhandle and the Permian Basin.

Thanks to Congressman Tom DeLay (R-TX) and his willing minions in the Texas Legislature, I had a choice of 6 Republicans (3 from the Permian Basin—Odessa and Midland— and 3 from the Texas Panhandle) and 1 Democrat. The history of my franchise has been detailed more than once in Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves. I voted for 1 winning presidential candidate since 1964: Jimmy Carter in 1976. Today, I kept my record of political futility intact.

My vote in the Senate District 31 Special Election went to Jesse Quackenbush (R-Amarillo). Lawyer Quackenbush (personal injury and medical malpractice) has been the Don Quixote of Panhandle politics of late. He ran for State Representative as a Democrat against an incumbent Republican in 2002. The incumbent (Representative David Swinford) rolled Jesse in a landslide (68% to 32%). I do not live in House District 87, so I had no opportunity to vote for Quackenbush earlier.

Within the week after the 2002 vote, Lawyer Quackenbush changed party affliation and became a Republican. Quackenbush said that the Democrats were out of step with the mainstream. Based on the vote in 2002, the majority of voters in House District 87 found Lawyer Quackenbush's step a bit strange. After I cast my early ballot, I discovered that Lawyer Quackenbush left the Democrats because he is Pro-Life (strangely omitted by the local fishwrap). I imagine that the Pro-Life element finds Quackenbush embarrassing and eschews his identification with their movement.

However, my ballot was cast for another, more compelling reason. Quackenbush is the target of numerous letters to the editor in the local fishwrap. The biggest controversy in the special election revolves around Quackenbush and T. Boone Pickens (formerly of Amarillo and now living in Dallas). Pickens made a splash in the go-go 80's as a corporate raider. Ultimately the sharpies on Wall Street were a little shrewder than T. Boone and his Mesa Petroleum enterprise crashed. However, T. Boone is back with Mesa Water. Pickens owns ranch property in sparsely populated Roberts County, Texas. Pickens proposes to pump water out of the Ogallalla Aquifer and sell it to water-stressed cities like San Antonio. The pipeline to carry Mesa Water to San Antonio will be paid for by the lucky citizens of the Alamo City. Pickens will make a bigger killing with water than he ever did with oil.

Lawyer Quackenbush—seeking some press coverage—got himself quoted about the Pickens water scheme in the local fishwrap: If I'm elected to represent the 31st District, the only water Pickens will leave the Panhandle with will be the urine I leave on his pant leg. O, the cries of outrage at Lawyer Quackenbush appear daily in the local fishwrap. I suspect that Lawyer Quackenbush did not use the clinical term, urine, in his quote of the day. I strongly suspect that Quackenbush used a scatalogical reference to urine: p*ss. The local fishwrap cleaned it up for family consumption.

Quackenbush is not the first Texas politician to made reference to urine in an earthy way. John Nance Garner represented Uvalde, Texas in both the Texas House and the U. S. House. In fact, Garner was elected Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives in 1931. Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped him as his running mate and Garner served as Vice President for two terms (1932-1940). When FDR broke precedent and ran for a third term in 1940, Garner broke with FDR and returned to Uvalde.

As a young history student, I remember the quote most associated with John Nance Garner. Asked about serving as Vice President, Cactus Jack Garner replied: The vice-presidency "wasn't worth a bucket of warm spit," because "the Vice President is just a waiting boy, waiting just in case something happens to the President." However, the reporters changed what Garner actually said to the above quote that appeared in history book after history book. Garner actually said that the vice-presidency "wasn't worth a bucket of warm p*ss".... Garner was a Texan and talked like a Texan. When speaking in an earthy fashion, a Texan does not substitute urine for p*ss.

So, that is why I cast my ballot for Jesse Quackenbush. If this be (fair & balanced) political futility, so be it.