Nightmare Team
By David Rushing
November 18, 2002

John Sharp's political career is dead.

It was suicide.

Sharp swallowed Hemlock and fed that same political poison to the Texas Democratic Party.

The one-time Texas Comptroller and twice Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor, John Sharp, has managed to do what Ronald Reagan, Phil Gramm, George Bush, George W. Bush and Rick Perry could not.

He has killed the Texas Democratic Party.

Of course, this is not the first declaration of death for Texas Democrats. The Democrats' 1994 Senate nominee, Richard Fisher said (when he was backing Ross Perot in 1992), "The Democratic Party is dead in Texas."

But this time the corpse, while struggling to return to life, stabbed itself repeatedly in what used to be its heart. The Democratic Party has put out a big sign saying, "Anglo voters are no longer welcome." Since Anglos consist of 52% of the population and 73% of the voters, this is fatal for the Democratic Party.

Sharp put out the sign by personally arranging the so-called "dream team" -- a tri-ethnic ticket consisting of himself, Ron Kirk and Tony Sanchez. The ticket, referred to by Texas Democratic Party convention keynoter State Representative Paul Moreno (D-El Paso), as "the quota that the good Lord established," "the quota of God," and "this quota ticket," attempted to get beyond race, but suspicions remained in the minds of Texas voters.

Those suspicions were raised to a fever pitch by the actions of Sharp's ticket-mates, Kirk and Sanchez, whose joint slogan "let's make history," was a thinly-veiled racial appeal. Kirk is black. Sanchez describes himself as "sixth generation Mexican-American."

The problem for Sharp, and the party, is that the Democratic Party has wedded itself to racial preferences, a practice that Sharp highlighted by his brazen endorsement of racial preferences for the top three seats. This iron-clad commitment to racial quotas was reinforced when Sharp and Sanchez both backed Kirk against Victor Morales in the Democratic Party run-off in order to insure a black on the top of the ticket. Morales, the Democrats' 1996 nominee against Phil Gramm, won a higher percentage of the general election vote in 1996 than Kirk did in 2002 against the less-formidable John Cornyn.

The choice of Tony Sanchez in particular killed Sharp and the Democratic Party.

There was another Hispanic available -- and running hard -- for the Democratic nomination.

And if Dan Morales (no relation to Victor), a highly qualified, experienced Hispanic with a history of opposition to racial preferences, had been the Democratic nominee, the entire fall campaign could have gone differently. The Democratic Party would have taken down the "No Anglos" sign by publicly repudiating its most divisive policy position. Instead, the Democrats amplified their allegiance to racial preferences.

In the end, not only did the Democrats lose approximately 70% of the Anglo vote while winning the Hispanic and black votes, but the Democrats lost Dan Morales, too -- who endorsed the Republican governor and campaigned fiercely for the ultimately successful Republican Lieutenant Governor hopeful.

Sharp's intervention to favor Sanchez was a mistake that cost him Dan Morales -- and with Morales, a chunk of the moderate, independent, and Hispanic votes that Sharp desperately needed to be competitive in George W. Bush's home state. (Victor Morales also ultimately abandoned Sharps' quota-driven party.)

The simple truth is that as long as Democrats adhere to race preferences -- what they call "affirmative action" -- they will lose virtually every Texas election. Sanchez, in this campaign, became a living tribute to this bad idea.

Sanchez is best known for (1) being the hand-picked (by Sharp) first Hispanic Democratic nominee for governor, (2) insisting on a Spanish-language debate in the Democratic Primary, and (3) forcefully advocating for affirmative action (which benefits him and his children, despite the fact that Sanchez is worth over a half-billion dollars). Sanchez fiercely criticized Dan Morales' handling of the lawsuit that ended race preferences in Texas' universities during the primary election campaign.

White plumbers from Dime Box are not going to vote for this guy. And they won't vote for the party or the lieutenant governor candidate (Sharp) that put him in this position, either.

Phil Gramm, a former Democrat himself, appeared to have a firm grasp of how devastating this issue would be to Democrats. At the state Republican convention this summer, Gramm said, "Democrats believe they can divide Texans based on race. That's their dream and that's their vision. This election is about rejecting that dream and that vision once and for all."

Gramm blasted Democrats for trying "to sever the bonds that bind us together" by caving to Sanchez' ill-conceived demands to hold half of their televised primary debates in Spanish. "We are first, last, always and forever Texans and Americans - and we're damn proud of it," Gramm said.

"Let me give the Democrats a message," Gramm said. "We look different. Some of us talk different. Our skins are not the same color. Our ethnic origins are not the same. But what's important as a Texan and American is not the color of your skin and not where your grandfather came from but what is in your heart."

And in Dime Box, Lubbock, Houston, Waco, Dallas, San Antonio and Garland, Texans heard Gramm loud and clear.

The Democrats, deaf and blind on the issue of race preferences, expressed outrage and surprise at Gramm's words.

Sanchez press aide Mark Sanders said, "This is outrageously insulting. If this is an effort by Rick Perry and Phil Gramm to play the race card, they should be ashamed of themselves. This is a shameful political tactic to divide this state."

But the division had already been accomplished by thirty-five years of Democratic support for race preferences, which John Sharp's "dream team" brought into a spotlight so bright that Anglo voters who might otherwise have voted for a moderate like Sharp could not ignore it.

Perry's share of the Hispanic vote was only 60% of George W. Bush's 1998 vote, and Perry's share of the black vote was a third of Bush's. But Perry beat Sanchez with an Anglo vote that was less than ten percentage points lower than Bush achieved in his record-beating 70% 1998 landslide.

Those Anglo voters who clung to the Republican ticket were voters John Sharp desperately needed. And John Sharp, who had achieved over 49% of the vote in 1998 against Perry, gained just barely more than 46% this time.

Gramm was not by any means the only Republican to recognize the foolishness of the Sharp strategy. Texas GOP spokesman Dave Beckwith, commented that "This dream ticket is cynical. It is based on a racial quota system. In the end, it will not work because most people vote on issues and philosophy, not on race."

Beckwith, however, missed the crucial Gramm insight -- that by deliberately crafting a ticket in ethnic terms, the Democrats had made race an issue -- and had highlighted the Achilles' heel of Democratic philosophy -- that certain races should be favored and others disfavored. Not surprisingly, the disfavored voted in droves for the Republican party.

The Democratic "dream team" delivered in heavily Hispanic South Texas, but were routed in every other region of the state, particularly in largely Anglo suburban counties, where margins for Republicans far exceeded the margins for the Democrats in heavy minority areas.

Now, there are those who will argue that Sharp lost because he was buried under an avalanche of David Dewhurst's money -- Dewhurst outspent Sharp roughly 3-to-1.

The simple response to this is to ask Governor Sanchez how his 3-to-1 spending advantage helped him defeat Rick Perry.

Ron Kirk, the black quota partner, downplayed the factor of race in the election.

"Texas may not be ready to elect a black," Kirk said, ignoring the fact that Republicans elected three blacks on the state-wide ticket --- two to the state Supreme Court and one to the oil-and-gas regulating Texas Railroad Commission.

Kirk could have been the winner in the Senate race. He presented himself as a moderate, pro-business former mayor of Texas' most conservative big city, Dallas. But like Sanchez, he made race an issue, claiming that his opponent, John Cornyn, favored war in Iraq because most of the fighting would be done by blacks and browns. (The fact the combat forces are disproportionately Anglo did not stop Kirk from injecting the charge of racial bigotry into the campaign.)

Kirk made race an issue -- and that reminded Anglo and Asian voters that the Democratic Party has spent more than a quarter-century giving them the short end of the stick -- and told them that Kirk's claim of "moderation" would give way to Democratic radicalism on race matters. The uneasiness they might have felt was aggravated when Kirk endorsed a study on reparations payments to blacks for slavery, which ended nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.

Kirk added, "This year America didn't like any Democrats - didn't like them black, didn't like them white. We did not lose this race because of racism."

Kirk's implication is that the Democratic Party's race preferences are not a form of racism.

One thing is certain -- Democrats will not win Texas as long as they highlight their contempt for the majority of voters.

Democrats must choose between advocating race preferences and winning elections. It looks like they've made their choice.

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David Rushing is a first year law student at Southern Methodist University.