I’m okay with this.
Ahmad Hassan
Democrat Ahmad Hassan has ended his campaign for Harris County judge, saying incumbent Republican Ed Emmett should be given another four-year term to finish projects vital to the community.
Hassan, owner of the Katy-based Alexandria Realty and Mortgage, said he decided to withdraw after a recent meeting with Emmett, the county’s top administrator since 2007.
“It was not an easy decision,” Hassan said. “I am a leader. I’ve never withdrawn from anything.”
[…]
With Hassan’s withdrawal, Emmett will run unopposed in November.
Emmett said he met with Hassan earlier this week.
“I do have things I’m trying to accomplish – the mental health pilot program at the jail, regional governance, the Astrodome,” Emmett said. “I thanked him. I thought it was an honorable thing to do. He is a successful person, and he truly wants to give back. I can appreciate that.”
I agree that Ahmad Hassan is a well-meaning person who wants to do good. Having interviewed him in 2010, however, he is not qualified for the office of County Judge. He had no grasp of the issues and no idea what he would do if he were elected. This would have been his third run for County Judge – he lost in the Democratic primary in 2008 to David Mincberg and in 2010 to Gordon Quan – and he has also run for Congress in 2006 as a Republican, and for Commissioners Court in 2012, again losing in the Democratic primary. I appreciate how difficult it is to run for office and what a huge burden it can be on a candidate and his or her family. I believe it’s best for all candidates to have to earn the job they seek by defeating one or more qualified opponents, and as a Democrat I hate seeing Republicans go unchallenged. But Ahmad Hassan was nothing more than a name on a ballot. He’d raised no money this year, which was typical for him, he had no campaign website or Facebook page that I could find, and the only campaign activity I can recall him engaging in was some emails plus reaching out to me for an interview in 2010. There are candidates like him all over the ballot, but he actually had a non-zero chance of winning, given the partisan splits in Harris County. Remember when Dallas accidentally elected a candidate like that to be their County Judge in 2006? However unlikely that would have been here, I didn’t want it to happen. Someone has to be a counterweight to the rest of Commissioners Court, and whether you like him or planned to vote for him or not, Judge Emmett does that. Ahmad Hassan would not have been able to do that.
Ideally, there would have been a much stronger candidate on the ballot to oppose Emmett, someone like Mincberg or Quan, but it’s not hard to understand why no one of that caliber stepped in. Even in a good Democratic year, you’d be an underdog against Emmett, who has a sizable campaign treasury and demonstrated crossover appeal. He’s also made it clear that this will be his final term, so why risk going down in flames when you can take a shot an an open seat in 2018? Finally, not to put too fine a point on it, but Emmett’s been a pretty good County Judge, and unlike a few other Republicans I could name he’s put the job ahead of partisan interests – he supports Medicaid expansion, he has been a big advocate for mental health treatment over incarceration, and so on. I have plenty of policy disagreements with him and would rather have someone closer to my own perspective in that office, but we could do an awful lot worse than Ed Emmett.
It should be noted that Emmett is not actually unopposed, despite what the story says. There is a Green Party candidate on the ballot – David Collins, who was the GP candidate for US Senate in 2012 – so if you really can’t stand the idea of voting for Ed Emmett, you do still have a choice. PDiddie and Texpatriate have more.