Pretty good overview of the Ag Commish primary race between Hank Gilbert and Kinky Friedman.
The winner will face Republican incumbent Todd Staples, who heads the state Department of Agriculture, which has a biennial budget of $905 million, 666 full-time employees, and oversees initiatives concerning consumer protection, healthy living, and rural economic development.
The outcome of the Democratic primary is hard to predict. Gilbert, a 50 year-old rancher, has swept the endorsements of mainline Democratic organizations and, according to the latest campaign finance filing, has more cash on hand, thanks largely to contributions totaling $150,000 from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Farouk Shami. But Friedman, a 65 year-old author, has vastly more name recognition. At a Veterans of Foreign Wars event in late January in North Austin, veterans and, especially, their wives, lined up to have their photos taken with Friedman as he chomped on his cigar. They plunked down $20 for copies of his 2009 book “Heroes of a Texas Childhood.”
“Gov. Perry is going to have a hard race on his hands,” said G. Paul Hayes, a veteran who lives in the East Texas town of Burkeville, where he is senior vice commander of Texas VFW district 2.
He could be forgiven for the mistake, as Friedman hammered home another point about Perry: “Rick Perry talks about vets while he’s here, then walks out the door and forgets them,” he said. “That’s standard operating procedure.”
[…]
Some Democrats want nothing to do with Friedman, who they say acted as a spoiler for Democratic candidate Chris Bell in 2006 and appears to them to be a self-promoter.
“He likes dogs more than he likes people in Kerr County,” Marguerite Jones, an Austinite who lived in Kerr County, said at a confab of local Democrats at Scholz Garten in January. “He changes with the winds. He’s a personality, but he’s not a candidate. He’s a character. He’s not serious.”
You can count me among those who still bear a grudge from 2006. Look, I’ve said this before, but I don’t buy Friedman’s conversion act. If he’d been serious, he’d have been out there visibly supporting Barack Obama in 2008. I have no idea what he was doing then, other than starting to lay the rhetorical groundwork for his eventual aborted run in the Democratic primary for Governor, but if he lifted a finger to help any other Democrat that year, it sure slipped past me. As for this year, he’s playing gigs while early voting is going on. I’m supposed to believe he’s going to take the task of campaigning seriously this time around? I don’t think so.