Build Beto Back Better

and Train Song

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Build Beto Back Better

Beto can win.

I realize Texas Democrats tend to maintain unrealistic hopes in our relentlessly Republican state. But there is a solid chance for Beto O’Rourke to defeat Gov. Gregg Abbott next fall. I am not making this statement as a Democrat. I have never joined a political party, though I will say definitively that I will never cast a ballot again for any Republican after the GOP raised up Donald Trump. My fervent hope is that the Republican Party disintegrates and reforms itself with a new and intellectual form of conservatism that is dedicated to ideas and creating a stronger union, and that is not intended as punchline.

The Texas version of the GOP, though, is the reason Beto is not the long shot analysts claim. Governor Abscess and his cohorts have trampled on logic and turned hypocrisy into a modern art form to feed the right-wing ideologues who gave us Trump, and who also rule the Republican primary. The issues environment against the governor is target rich and nothing like what O’Rourke had to manage when running against Ted Cruz, (R) – Cancun. Abbott allowed Texans to die while the electrical grid collapsed, mismanaged the Covid virus to give the state 73,487 dead, led the legislative approval of an abortion law that is certain to kill women and clog courts, pissed away billions on a useless border wall, and suspended Constitutional rights to make a political point to his crazy constituents in the GOP base.

The one thing, in my estimation, however, that Beto O’Rourke missed in his Senate and ill-advised presidential campaign, was that Governor Abscess was giving his voters what they wanted. Beto’s tendency has been to speak to the great ideas that animated the American experience, but he needs to talk more directly to his customers, who are the voters. Politics in this country have, in fact, become a business, and not just one that generates donations to sustain policies. Elections are transactional. We want something in return for our votes, and not just a promise to work hard and keep taxes down, a pledge no one is ever able to keep.

If we vote for you, Beto, what do we get?

The candidate’s messages must be clear, but, initially, O’Rourke needs to concentrate on an important demographic group. In his race against Cruz, the El Pasoan did not adequately communicate with Hispanics in Texas. Although he has lived his life on the border, the former congressman is still an Anglo trying to appeal to Hispanics and they are accustomed to battered political promises. They may not trust O’Rourke, but he needs to give them a reason to take a chance on putting him in office because they know what they have in Abbott.

I was convinced he might have closed the gap with Cruz if he had only hammered home a message that he wanted to expand Medicaid in Texas. An estimated 62 percent of the Texas Hispanic population is uninsured, and their federal tax dollars are being transferred to other states to fund Medicaid. By the end of 2022, Texas taxpayers are expected to have missed out on more than $42 billion dollars over the past decade that could have been sent here to help fund Medicaid. Instead, their money helped other states. Although there is no logical reason for rejecting the federal assistance, Republican governors have said no to the expansion for more than two decades. A Governor Beto could end that idiocy with the stroke of a pen to help a state that has an estimated 4.3 million uninsured.

Medicaid expansion can also help O’Rourke appeal to rural voters, who Democrats consistently lose to conservatives. The failure to expand coverage under Medicaid has left dozens of Texas small towns without hospitals because of closure caused by financial duress. If the low-income patients and the indigents cannot pay their hospital and medical bills, facilities tend to go broke and close without Medicaid supplements. In the 1960s, Texas had 300 rural hospitals, but even as the state grows with rampant population increases that number of facilities has dropped almost in half to 158. Each closure costs a small community about $22 million in payroll and 170 jobs. Beto needs to campaign in every rural region that has lost a hospital or health care facility and commit his administration to expanding Medicaid in Texas.  

Vote for Beto and get expanded health care for Texans. That’s a nice transaction.

I was pleased to see O’Rourke essentially launch his gubernatorial effort with a border trip. He had little choice but to distance himself, at least slightly, from the bad optics for which President Biden is being blamed. Beto is using his early travels as a kind of a listening tour, he says, before he begins to roll out policies, but he will need to address the border problem in detail, and without much delay. Regardless of the militarization of the Mexico-Texas frontier by Governor Abscess, there is, technically, little a state governor can do about stopping immigrants. The task belongs to the federal government. O’Rourke should not try to parse the issue and campaign between the lines of rhetoric.

He needs to stand behind immigration laws but call for a more humanitarian response than what is being offered by the current governor, who is erecting a shipping container and a police car wall near Del Rio while he arrests undocumented border crossers and tosses them into jail without constitutional rights. Many have gone weeks without legal representation or any knowledge of their family’s locations as they wait to be processed through overburdened local courts that are enduring the injustices of the GOP policy.

A Texas governor’s jurisdictional authority is only north of the Rio Grande, and it has nothing to do with arresting people on federal charges or exercising the duties of the Border Patrol and INS. Beto needs a distinct and understandable border policy that explains what he can and will do and acknowledge that the rest is up to Washington. If he has insights and commonalities to share with border voters from his life in El Paso, he should use them to articulate a policy that offers humanity without constraining the law. His speeches and conversations need to be about the centuries-old relationship between the two countries and the generations of families that have lived on both sides of the border and how the river has united, not divided, us.

Hispanics and rural voters have the potential to put Beto in the governor’s mansion. He won all the metro areas when he ran against Cruz, but O’Rourke needs to work exceptionally hard on this gubernatorial race, in part, simply because of his ethnicity. He is another middle-aged white man at the top of the Democratic ticket in a state that is  demographically a minority majority and Hispanics increasingly wonder why neither party has been able to develop leading ethnic candidates for statewide office. Culturally, O’Rourke has appeal to ethnic voters from the border. He speaks fluent Spanish and was raised in El Paso, which gives him insights not possessed by his Republican opponent. Beto can address border issues without being accused of xenophobia and trying to scare voters into supporting him by claiming he will protect them from the invading hordes coming north in caravans.

On the matter of abortion, though, he must be careful with the Hispanic vote. They tend to be overwhelmingly Catholic and their church is against abortion. Beto, of course, must say that no one wants abortion, but these are decisions that belong not to churches and government institutions but to the privacy of a woman, her God, and her family and counselors. There is a necessity for him to describe what might happen to the U.S. and Texas court system if strangers are allowed to sue people who help Texas women get an abortion and why there is nothing good that can come of citizens snitching on each other over private matters. He also needs to detail the horror that a teenaged girl must face if Greg Abbott’s law forces her to carry her rapist’s child to full term. Women are already motivated against the new Texas law and providing them scenarios of the damage it will render will only increase their support and turnout for him on Election Day.

Abbott’s record gives Beto the materials he needs to define the governor. Much of his policy platform is demonstrably immoral. When Texans were freezing to death under a collapsed energy grid, which he had been forewarned about and was responsible for, Abbott was so disturbed he took a $1 million dollar donation from one of the gas companies that made billions when the system failure drove up energy costs to consumers. The natural gas companies raked in billions in profits as Abbott’s constituents literally froze to death.

A total of 210 Texans died under circumstances caused by the failure of the electrical grid in sub-freezing temperatures, which sustained for about a week. Natural gas sellers, however, generally Governor Abscess supporters, made $11 billion dollars in nine days. Meanwhile, he is facilitating a significant monthly rate increase for homeowners to pay for repairing the grid, you know, so the energy companies can do something else with their cash. There is something pathetic about a governor who claims to lead a state and cannot keep the lights on and the heaters running in homes in the third decade of a new millennium. Abbott opposes even modest regulation on natural gas companies and energy producers.

Those are dots Beto needs to connect for Texas voters. Over and over and over. His rhetoric can be aspirational and inspire Texans to get out and make a difference, but he must be willing to get negative as hell and portray the Texas governor as the lesser soul that he is. In a state that is increasingly minority, Abscess leads his party to redraw congressional district maps that demonstrably diminish representation of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The constitutionality of those new lines will be put before federal courts but given the makeup of the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans it seems unlikely there will be changes ordered. Even if litigants get a favorable decision from the Fifth Circuit, the case will certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court, which has been empaneled by Republicans precisely so it can rule to keep conservatives in control of the country.

Beto also needs to toss the anchor of Republican idiocy around Abbott’s neck. Abbott and his party fought tirelessly to stop the Biden administration’s passage of the infrastructure bill, a new law that is bringing $35 billion dollars to Texas for bridges, roads, freeways, and public transportation. More than $400 million alone will be dedicated to charging stations for electric vehicles, and just under $3 billion will go to improve water infrastructure in a thirsty and drought-plagued state. Not a single Texas Republican in Washington voted in favor of those improvements, and Abbott was in full support of those politics. That is a sentence for an O’Rourke speech.

Beto needs to make Abbott pay for the politics of his party, and all the candidates in his party need to speak with the same voice up and down the ballot. Tell voters that there is no such thing as Critical Race Theory being taught in Texas public schools. Make them understand that the conservative right is simply trying to rewrite history so that we do not learn about our past, and unless we own our history we cannot grow from our experiences and improve our country. CRT is a scare tactic to animate parents and create conservative school board members to control what is taught.

Those same voters, in particular Hispanics, need to be educated by the candidate on redistricting. Even as the minority population in the state has shown the most growth, the Republican-controlled legislature redrew congressional districts to make sure there was no increase in minority representation and to ensure that white, conservative officeholders remained in the majority. This is an easy story to tell and ought to anger ethnic Texans who are being disenfranchised by Republicans.  

Abbott and the GOP see what is coming. It is a demographic certainty their party will lose control unless they develop policies that attract minorities, which has not happened, and the raw numbers are frightful for the conservatives. In 2020, 80,305 more White Texans died than Hispanics, which was the sixth straight year that number was above 80,000. Obviously, in a decade, you are looking at an 850,000 difference between death rates for Whites and Hispanics. That is a lot of voters disappearing from the GOP party base.

The other end of the demographic spectrum is even less hopeful for the GOP, and this figure ought to frighten the right. The number of White K-12 students in Texas public school declined by 307,385 since the year 2000 while the Hispanic enrollment increased by 1,305,408. A safe guess is that, unless the GOP begins to speak to the issues those children will care about as adults, the chances of them voting Republican are not good.

Those transitions in the electorate are slow but there are already numerous circumstances and dynamics in place, which, if properly addressed by policy ideas and explaining the failures of Governor Abbott, Beto O’Rourke begins to become very competitive. He cannot travel the state trying to be his generation’s JFK. Beto must deliver a campaign that explains what he will accomplish while he is governor and how it will change millions of lives for the better. The other track will need to be nasty and attack Abbott for all his failings and his innate ability to not even understand the harm he is doing to Texas and its citizens.

His campaign against Cruz was aspirational and inspirational, but it was not a winning campaign. American politics is a history of candidates that have run and lost and tried again and reconfigured and run and lost and tried once more and then won. O’Rourke can put that losing part behind him if he does more than just run around Texas and give speeches. Offer a product that Texans want to buy with their votes. And make them understand more clearly how they are being harmed by the current governor. These are not small tasks, but they need to be accomplished.

Because democracy in Texas is running out of time.

(I love trains, and I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t. Seriously. I’ve ridden them across Canada and the U.S. and Europe, the high speed TGV in France, the Eurostar, the ICE in Germany, the Canadian National up from Windsor to North Sydney, Nova Scotia, the Aztec Eagle in Mexico, the Amtrak Zephyr, Inter-American, Acela, and more than I can remember. I’ve tried to write about trains through the years but nothing I create ever seems equal to the experience. The story below has been picked at for more than a decade but it shows why I love trains. There seems a convergence of journeys and stories in every station and on each coach, regardless of where we are all bound).

Train Song

“There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind who were crucified for what they tried to show. And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time but the truth remains and someone wants to know.” – Kristofferson

In the morning dark, he stood in a cold corner at the entrance to the train station up in Michigan. A young blind man was sitting on a vinyl chair across from him and they had in common their guitar cases.

“Looks like a narrow case ya got there, Dave,” he said. “Must be electric, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, it is.”

Dave pulled his white cane closer and tilted his head toward the voice. A cab driver had dropped him at the station, referred to him by name at the end of his daily routine, and said Dave’s ride to work would be along momentarily.

“How long you been playin’?”

“About ten years.” Dave had turned to face the speaker.

“Yeah, I’ve been at it about 40, myself,” he said. “I play acoustic. All I seem to do. Hours and hours on end.”

When I looked at the guitar man, I was reminded of the fictional conversation between the young Kris Kristofferson and the grayed and wrinkled musician in a Nashville bar. He sized up Kristofferson and his guitar and said, “It’s a rough life, ain’t it?” The answer was, “Yeah, I guess so.” “You ain’t makin’ any money are ya?” “You been readin’ my mail.”

But this bard was no longer a boy and his chances of becoming Kristofferson had long ago expired. His hair was strung in tangles from a bald spot on the top rear of his head and a pair of outsized glasses teetered crookedly on his nose. The profile lacked a chin and his overbite almost hid the lower row of teeth.  A small shoulder pack was on the floor between his feet and it was covered with the kind of dirt and grease smears that come from years of sleeping under bridges and an open sky. A frayed blue pullover sweatshirt was all that kept him from the cold and I noticed his canvas shoes were an unidentifiable color after the miles and the music.

Amtrak’s Southwest Chief Along the Old Santa Fe Trail

“What do you play?” Dave asked.

“Only my stuff. All original.”

“Oh wow. Hours and hours?”

“Yep.”

When the agent opened the door to the station, he seemed relieved to be indoors and sat quickly on a chair. He pulled out a thick book from his backpack and it had the kind of clear plastic cover that protects library loaners from wear. I watched him read and thought that he was consuming words like food but it was only a novel by an unknown author. He turned away from the pages after a while and kept looking around at people until finally he stood and went to the ticket window. I was a few feet distant

“Yes, I called on the 800 number last night and made a reservation?”

“What was the name?”

I did not hear the rest of the conversation but the ticket agent stood motionless and patient as he reached into his pocket and delicately removed several twenty-dollar bills. He held them in front of him for what felt like a long time but I did not know if it was because they were so rare and precious to him or he wanted others in that room to see that he was in possession of money. I watched him slowly count them off and then slide cash in a neat pile under the window in exchange for a ticket.

“I’m going to New Mexico,” he said. I realized that he had been aware I was watching him make his ticket purchase.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“Something different than here and it’s warmer.”

His tee shirt was thin and had the name of a painting company in black letters across his chest.  “Meyer Painting, LLC.” I thought that maybe he had done some work for them to buy his ticket.

“Are you going to sing and play out there?”

“Mister, I’m going to sing and play wherever I am.”

“Yeah, I reckon so.”

He took up his book when he sat down and read for 30 minutes or so and then dug in his pack and pulled out a pencil stub and a white card. I thought he might be making notes for lyrics but he quickly finished a scribble and walked back to the ticket window and slid the paper beneath the glass.

“Mam,” he said. “You were very helpful to me and I just thought I’d give you this web site address. In case you’re interested, all my music is there.”

She smiled, pleased that he had thought of her and maybe because she felt for a moment like she was doing something more than just the prescribed duties of her job. When he got back to his seat he put down his pack and his book and picked up the guitar case and held it against his chest with his hands locked by intertwined fingers.

I thought the guitar was the only thing he had ever owned or maybe it was the only thing that had never slipped away.