A Heartening Visit to Texas, Home of the Original Bush Whoppers

BuzzFlash/Scoop Guest Column By Bernard Weiner about visiting Houston -- The Democrats I met here on my brief, three-day stay are quite aware of the forces they're up against. They realize things have changed muchly since the heady days when Democrat Ann Richards -- she of the brilliant fresh mouth -- was governor. The Democrats now definitely are in the minority, and are treated roughly by their Republican opponents.

But the glorious thing is that the Dems, including those I ran into, are still kicking and fighting -- with fellow Texans Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower as wonderful role models -- even though it's often a losing battle. They're battling on issues ranging from the Iraq war to school textbooks (denuded of references to geologic evolution: "millions of years ago" becomes "many years ago"), from redistricting proposals to pollution-control. I stand in admiration and awe for their courage and tenacity.

Though a good many in the packed ROADwomen audience had heard of the neo-conservative movement and PNAC, many had not -- and, besides, I was filling in a lot of the blanks by quoting directly from PNAC documents. [To read the full speech, click here: Speech to ROADwomen

The audience seemed to be truly interested in the heavy material I was laying on them -- as well as in the final, more hopeful part of my talk, about the things we all could do to ensure Bush's defeat in 2004 -- and the Q&A session that followed was filled with intelligent queries and commentary. I left heartened by the possibility that even in Texas, Bush was vulnerable. (At dinner later, I was told about the Republican couple at a recent precinct polling place who announced out of the blue as they were exiting that they had voted for the GOP presidential candidate for the past 21 years but would not be voting for Bush in 2004.)