Democrats Set to Elect Hispanic as Texas Party Chair Later
than Sooner in Move on Which Survival Depends in Red StateMIKE HAILEYThe future for the Democratic Party in Texas is less than two months away.
On the second Saturday in June - baring developments completely unforeseen - the Democrats will usher in a new era when Gilberto Hinojosa of Brownsville is elected to be the Texas party chairman at the biennial state convention in Houston.
Hinojosa - a former Cameron County judge who's been leading the local party organization for the past four years - faces token competition in the state chair's race from longtime activists Fidel Acevedo of Austin, Rachel Barrios-Van Os of San Antonio and any other potential contenders who could emerge between now and the time the delegates begin voting on the floor of the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Hinojosa could encounter some resistance from progressives who try to cast him as an extension of the same party establishment that's been in control throughout a meltdown that began in the late 1990s. The 59-year-old lawyer has already sparked trepidation among Democratic consultants in Texas with statements on how he thinks the party has wasted money on expensive media advertising and direct mail campaigns that have been their bread and butter in a state where business has been much better across the aisle.
But Hinojosa has assembled an army of supporters since launching his bid for the state party's top job a year ago - and he'll be heading to the convention on June 8-9 with endorsements from a long list of major party players including Democratic legislative leaders, local elected officials, former statewide officeholders, trial lawyers, labor and high-profile activists like outgoing TDP Chairman Boyd Richie himself.
But Hinojosa appears to be unstoppable at this point in his crusade for the post that Richie won initially six years ago - and while he has a resume that's tailor-made for the position - he has the potential to be the savior for a state party that's appeared to be on life support in recent years more as a result of what he represents than the credentials and qualifications he offers on paper.
In a state where Democrats have long known that Latino population growth will be their saving grace if they have a future here at all, Hinojosa's on track to become the first Hispanic state chair for a Democratic Party that began operating in Texas before the Civil War. He's the first Hispanic - in fact - to ever make a serious run for state party chair in this giant border state.
To say that the election of a Latino as the Texas Democratic Party leader is long overdue may be the understatement of a lifetime for anyone who has access to maps and calculators.
While some Hispanic and African-American lawmakers have had various degrees of influence in Democratic Party decision-making in Texas, white folks have always been in charge at the TDP.
State Rep. Aaron Peña - an Edinburg Republican who served five terms as a Democrat before switching parties 15 months ago - had been laying the groundwork for a campaign for state chair in 2000 before shifting his sights to the House seat that he won for the first time in the Rio Grande Valley two years later.
Peña had been planning to challenge Molly Beth Malcolm when she was seeking a second two-year term as state party leader after capturing the post in 1998 when Bill White gave it up so he could get back to work full-time as a lawyer in Houston. While Malcolm was nervous about the prospects of having to do battle with a Hispanic opponent, she had solid support at the time from a Democratic power establishment that had Martin Frost as its titular unofficial leader when he was still a U.S. representative and one of the most powerful Texas Democrats in Washington.
Malcolm, who'd been a Republican until defecting to the Democrats in the mid-1990s, was the face of the state party from a public relations and figurehead perspective during her tenure as the TDP chair for a five-year period that ended in turmoil in 2003.
Pete Laney and Gonzalo Barrientos had a voice in major state party moves and decisions as the Texas House speaker and Senate Democratic Caucus chairman respectively when Malcolm was the chair. But Frost was the godfather for all practical purposes - and a small group of wealthy trial lawyers who controlled the party purse strings had sign-off authority that they essentially shared with veteran congressman from the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
While Frost had a political organization that had evolved into a smooth-running machine by the time he and others anointed Malcolm as state chair - and Hispanic Democrats had become bitterly divided and were fighting among themselves in local turf wars instead of uniting for a state party takeover like Peña hoped to lead before pulling the plug on his campaign for the party leadership post long before the election 12 years ago.
But Peña was told that he wouldn't have a chance to win the state chair's job as a result of a longstanding agreement that reserved the vice-chair's position for Hispanics and African-Americans on a rotating basis and essentially prevented them from being the state party's top leader.
As a border area legislator who wasn't afraid to defy the status quo, Peña did his dead best to warn the Democratic powers that be that the party's support in South Texas and other Hispanic areas was slowly eroding because they were taking the Latino vote for granted. But that was a message that the party establishment didn't want to hear - and they found it easy to dismiss Peña as a malcontent who couldn't be trusted after he and about a dozen other House Democrats backed Republican Tom Craddick in his winning re-election race for speaker in 2007.
Democrats were confident that they would remain the party of choice among Hispanic voters as long as Republicans were pushing illegal immigration crackdowns and backing budget cuts that hit hardest in places with a lot of poor people like the Rio Grande Valley. But the words of caution that Peña had been issuing for several years appeared to have a measure of validity in 2010 when a handful of Hispanic Republicans won seats in the House where there had only been a couple of Latino GOP members in the previous decade and none during the session in in 2009.
Having already been labeled as a traitor by fellow Democrats who were threatening to target him in the primary the next time he ran, Peña beat them to the punch when he severed his ties to the Democratic Party that he once dreamed of leading and joined the GOP in a move that sent shocks waves through political circles across the state. While Republicans attempted to protect Peña in redistricting, that simply wasn't possible in the last remaining Democratic stronghold in Texas outside the inner cities. Peña knew he'd have little chance of winning on the map that a federal court designed for the May 29 primary election, so he decided not to waste his time and other people's money on a re-election campaign that would give Democrats the opportunity to send a signal about what future party switchers could expect as payback.
Hinojosa won the job as Cameron County Democratic Party chairman in 2007 - a year after Richie rode the Frost machine to victory in an open state chair's race that featured former Texas House member Glen Maxey as his chief rival. While Maxey had been an effective legislator, his major claim to fame had been the fact that he'd been the only openly gay state lawmaker ever in Texas. But the most significant thing about the battle for state chair between Richie and Maxey was arguably the fact that both of them are Anglo in a state where a majority of the residents just a few years from now will be Hispanics who the GOP is courting in hopes of making incremental gains at the Democrats' expense.
Democrats have had occasional glimmers of hope in recent years like the time they came within two seats of taking the state House back from Republicans in 2008 after net gains in the two previous election cycles. But the Texas Dems found themselves back at rock bottom in 2010 when a giant red wave swept Republicans to victories in 99 House races a month before defections by State Rep. Allan Ritter and Peña lifted the GOP to its first supermajority in the west wing. State Rep. J.M. Lozano of Alice pushed the Republican count in the House to 102 when he followed Peña's lead and signed on with the GOP last month.
But the only Democrats who would give the state party organization any credit for the gains that have been few and far between would probably be those who were running it. While Frost was ousted from Congress in 2004 on a map that Republicans approved a year earlier, his team retained control of the state party for several more years as a result of the massive amount of money that Dallas trial lawyer Fred Baron pumped into it before he died in 2008. But even though the Frost machine appears to still be in business to a loose-knit degree in the DFW area, Democrats have come to depend in the past few years on Houston attorney Steve Mostyn as the party's biggest contributor by far. That's opened the gates to the kind of transition that the Democratic Party in Texas is undergoing now with Hinojosa on the brink of taking over as state chair - regardless of whether Mostyn has had much to do with his campaign or not.
While Hinojosa came up through the standard party ranks as a lawyer who represented migrant worker groups such as Rural Legal Aid before starting his own firm, he presents a threat to the status quo because he sees the road to the future as a trip back to the past in some ways. Hinojosa wants Democrats to get back to the basics of grassroots campaigning that relies more on door-to-door contact than major TV buys and other high-dollar tactics. Some of the party's longtime political consultants in Texas might be considering career changes before long as a consequence.
Ironically, perhaps, one of the Democrats who was most responsible for the campaign mindset that Hinojosa wants to change was Tony Sanchez, a Laredo banker and oilman who became the party's first Hispanic nominee for governor in Texas as the leader of the so-called dream ticket in 2002. But Sanchez spent record amounts of money on a race that ended when Republican Governor Rick Perry won re-election in a landslide that probably set the Democratic Party here back years.
John Sharp - the nominee for lieutenant governor 10 years ago - helped recruit Sanchez because he understood the critical need to have Hispanics in the highest places before the Democratic Party could make a comeback in Texas. Sharp works now as the Texas A&M University System chancellor - a job that he needed Perry's support and recommendation to get. Sharp probably could have been governor or U.S. senator by now if he'd switched parties like Republicans tried to get him to do for years. But Sharp's still a Democrat - and he's backing Hinojosa for state party chair this year.
As the convention approaches and after the curtain falls on it, Democrats will be hoping that they didn't wait to elect a Hispanic as state party chair until it was too late.
Mike Hailey's column appears regularly in Capitol Inside
