The following is from a series of guest posts that I will be presenting over the next few weeks.
Paul Sadler
For $25 million you could buy a seriously luxurious private jet – in fact, you could buy a small fleet of them. You could travel the world many times or you could put over 100 young people through four years of college including room and board and spending money. As a state, we could hire almost 800 new teachers for our classrooms. We could purchase over 4 million laptops – one for almost every student in kindergarten through twelfth grade in Texas. It is really all about priorities, I guess.
What would you do? Well, if you are one of the Republican candidates for the United States Senate in Texas, combined you have spent over $25 million on your campaigns. If you ask most Texans, they can tell you that one of the candidates is a lawyer involved in a lawsuit involving tires and China, while the other is described as weak, timid and not a real conservative – whatever that means.
I think we have all been ripped off. Surely, if you had $25 million to spend on the United States Senate race you would have more to talk about than this nonsense.
So far they have spent approximately $18 for every vote cast in the primary. I think if I were a Republican voter I would rather have my twenty bucks.
But, the skeptics would say the Democratic candidates would run the same kind of campaign – you know, talk about stuff that just does not matter. One thing is for sure – as of right now, we will never know. As some have suggested maybe, in this state today, the other side doesn’t matter.
There is an old baseball saying that goes like this – you can’t lose if the other side never gets to bat. Maybe that is the new Texas.
Of course there are the issues that matter, like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, health care, women’s health care, education, immigration, the Dream Act, the national debt, foreign affairs, jobs, but they just aren’t as interesting as the negative name calling, I guess.
Good thing they are “conservative.” Lord knows how a “democrat” would waste those contributions. If a million of you would donate that same twenty bucks each, we might be able to find out.
Paul Sadler is a former five-term member of the Texas House who is in the runoff for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate.
you forget the $25mm that governor good hair spent
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-11/texas-spends-millions-to-fix-mansion-after-shorting-schoo.html
$2300/sf in renovations. I would have loved to have been the contractor on that job. I bet they made a fortune on the state
On Sadler’s complaint about being outspent, in the near future (and in Texas it’s ever been thus), statewide election spending will be dominated by factions of plutocrats representing competing corporate interests. Many of those same interests swung radically Democratic back when they (and Sadler) were in power and basically give to incumbents. Complaining about the influence of money in American politics is like complaining about the sun rising in the East instead of the South. So in the near term as a friggin Senate candidate, go find a million small donors who agree with you, or a few wealthy plutocrats, or else concede and don’t waste everybody’s time. But don’t whine, just Bill Steger didn’t whine when he got his butt kicked back in 1960 (which is about how far afield Texas Democrats are today). Sadler may be factually a loser, but he needn’t SOUND like a loser.
whoops, should say “just LIKE Bill Steger didn’t whine” after losing the 1960 governor’s race as the GOP nominee. (Looking at the commet I noticed not just the grammatical error but also that it may be an obscure reference.)
It’s important for a candidate to understand their role when a party is lost so far out in the wilderness. Republicans wouldn’t have had John Tower if it weren’t for Judge Steger. So yes, Sadler will likely lose and be heavily outspent. But the question becomes, what foundation will he construct that someone later on can build on, or will his legacy be that of the child who didn’t make the sports team complaining “it’s just not fair”? As with Obama in ’08, Dems don’t complain, typically, when big money flows their way.
Oh, dear GOD.
Given an opportunity to discuss urgent, meaningful issues facing our country, Sadler uses his guest spot… to whine that the Republicans are outspending him by about a hundred to one. Does he propose a solution? A political program for voters to get behind? No. He just says, “Isn’t it sad?”
I was going to sit the runoff out, since I regard Sadler as an empty suit and Yarborough as completely unqualified. I didn’t really care which got the nomination. But after seeing this performance? Sadler, and the state Democratic Party machine, think voters are supposed to be inspired by, “Isn’t it sad?”
The hell with that. Yarborough, for all his faults, at least has some fire in his belly and a geniune interest in fighting for the non-rich in Texas. Apparently all Sadler can do is say, “I guess that’s the way things are.”
With Democrats like Sadler, who needs Republicans?
Someone needs to go back to math class unless any of you know a source to buy 4 million laptops for $25 million (6 bucks each).