Team Kay takes aim at one of Governor Perry’s many vulnerabilities.
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has seized on [the Trans-Texas Corridor] as she seeks to take his job, saying the project and Perry’s transportation policies smack of arrogance.
“It’s part of the overall argument — he’s been there too long and look at the things he’s failed at,” Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said in describing Hutchison’s strategy.
Toll roads and transportation alone may not be enough to turn an election, but Hutchison seems to be using them as a way to raise questions about Perry’s competence, Henson said.
[…]
Hutchison has yet to present her own plan but she says she wants to reform and expand a state transportation commission. Her campaign says she opposes toll roads unless local officials and voters agree to them, and they say she worked in the Senate to halt federally funded toll roads.
“It is time to return to our tradition of free, quality highways and roads,” Hutchison said in kicking off her campaign last month. She calls the Trans-Texas Corridor “the biggest land grab in the history of Texas.”
I suppose we should be glad to know that somewhere in there KBH actually has a message and a strategy that goes beyond “Be my lovable self”. Two things, though. One, I’m not sure this issue is really going to move anyone who isn’t already in “anybody-but-Perry mode”, as Terri Hall puts it. I do agree that the TTC has turned people off from Rick Perry, and has created a constituency against him out of thin air, to borrow Paul Burka’s terminology. I just don’t think that constituency is growing any more, and I don’t think the toll road issue is going to be all that relevant in today’s political environment. I thought toll roads were going to be a game-changer in 2006, but in the end they were a dud. After all this time, and with the TTC being essentially dead, I just don’t see how this draws any new voters away from Rick Perry. It does energize some people, and that does matter, but until those people are energized for Kay and not merely against Perry, it doesn’t do much for her.
And two, not to be tacky about it, but where’s KBH been on this all this time? I certainly don’t remember her having much to say about the TTC before now, when it’s politically useful for her. Being against the TTC is easy, but having an alternative plan, which she doesn’t, is where it gets complicated. The anti-tollers already have a champion running for Governor, so if KBH really wants their support she’s going to have to do better than this.
She is jumping on a small bandwagon, pandering to a group on an issue she doesn’t even care about one way or the other, because it tested well in some poll she took.
There is no other explanation for her abrupt interest in toll roads. By the way, her husband does bond work for toll roads. She supports mega transportation projects at the federal level that take land all the time. She has championed a high speed rail plan that uses the same footprint as the TTC proposal and uses foreign companies to build it. Her attacks are not genuine but very hypocritical, which is why they are not catching on and why she fell from a huge lead to a deficit in all the polls.
She needs to let fringe candidate Debra Medina make those TTC attacks and become a more mainstream opposition candidate on her more comfortable turf, education and growing the scope of government in the field of health care.
Anything Kay’s camp says about the ‘issues’ smacks of rank opportunism. She is dim and he is mean; are there any substantive differences between the two?
Hubby Ray had a role in the infamous N-Group prison scandal in the 90s. Will that story be resurrected? It’s a terrific, sordid story.