Anita Perry brutalizes Dave Carney

Maybe you missed it. It's being called a 'campaign shake-up'. WaPo's Right Turn:

Time’s Mark Halperin reported yesterday that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is bringing in two nationally known GOP insiders, Nelson Warfield and Curt Anderson, to help turn around his ailing campaign. Halperin writes, “In some ways, the Texan’s original, relatively small team had been overwhelmed by the demands of getting a campaign up and running.” 

Burka has the skinny.

An advisor to Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) tells [Politico's] Ben Smith that the Texas governor has reassembled the team that helped run Scott’s “unlikely, big-spending, and successful 2010 campaign.”

It’s about time. It is my understanding that Anita Perry was the driving force who insisted upon a reorganization.

She's on a mission from God, you see. After the brutalizing her man took at the hands of ... well ... everybody, something had to be done. Which gives me the opportunity to insert this barely-a-sequitur, starring Mandy Patinkin as Governor Goodhair, fresh off the farm in Paint Creek or maybe the campus of Texas A&M University.



Back to the story.

It is hardly surprising that Perry has decided to shake up his campaign staff. (For some time Right Turn has suggested a major overhaul of Perry’s campaign would be in order.) A GOP operative told me last night, “I had heard about a week ago that there was a move to get rid of Dave Carney. This was almost 100% predictable given the collapse of the Perry campaign. Plus, when Perry was deciding if he should run, Carney had made assurances to him that he could do very well in New Hampshire.” Perry is now in the low single digits there. Carney is expected to remain on the campaign but plainly has lost his perch as the top campaign guru.

Sure enough ...

Joe Allbaugh, who headed George W. Bush’s presidential campaign and served as director of FEMA in the Bush administration (pre-Katrina), will hold the title of Senior Adviser in the Perry campaign. He specifically did not want a title that suggested he was in charge of the campaign (although he is).

Allbaugh seems to have a good sense of timing: bailing out of FEMA right before Hurricane Katrina -- leaving the debacle to Heckuva Job Brownie -- and now parachuting in to a Perry campaign that may or may not be swirling the drain. If things go well he gets the credit, if they don't Rick Perry still gets the blame.

The house-cleaning comes just before Perry’s major policy rollout Tuesday, and to a large extent, will dominate political coverage. Why release the news now? Well, given a choice between being overshadowed by a staff shakeup and having the press focus on Perry’s bizarre interview on birtherism and secession, I suppose the former seems preferable. Interestingly, the shakeup follows Perry’s meetings with K Street lobbyists, an effort to staunch concern about his campaign. It may have been essential for Perry to demonstrate swiftly that he understands the campaign’s dire straits and is willing to shove aside even longtime aides to get his campaign on track.

Warfield was Bob Dole’s press secretary in his 1996 presidential campaign, and he acquired a reputation for a sharp tongue and pointed humor. Interestingly, in that capacity Warfield led the attack on Steve Forbes’s flat tax. Forbes is now a Perry adviser, and a flat tax will be part of Perry’s policy initiative unveiled Tuesday. Back in 1996, the Dole campaign criticized a flat tax as a “soak the middle class” plan that would increase the deficit. Presumably, that experience will help Warfield fend off attacks on the flat tax plan Forbes developed for Perry.

Warfield also spent time on the ill-fated Fred Thompson 2008 presidential campaign. He joined in June 2007 and jumped off the sinking ship in October. More recently, Warfield worked on Rick Scott’s successful Florida gubernatorial campaign, during which the candidate used the illegal immigration issue to savage primary opponent Bill McCullough. ...

Let's finish with Burka again.

The first thing Allbaugh ought to do is send Perry to Dallas to apologize for badmouthing W. all over the country.

Yeah, that oughta fix things right up.

Weekly Early Voting Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance provides you with all the information you need to cast your ballot early -- beginning today -- in the Houston municipal and educational elections. There are also ten Texas constitutional amendments on your ballot. Rep. Scott Hochberg provides in-depth background on each.

Here are early voting locations and hours for those voting in Houston (.pdf, 1 page).

Here's the League of Women Voters guide to all candidates on the ballot in Houston (.pdf, 51 pages).

As previously posted here, your progressive voter's guide for Houston municipal candidates is here (Jolanda Jones ... or Bob Ryan, but only if you just have to vote for a Republican), here (Annise Parker, Don Cook, and Karen Derr), here (Kristi Thibaut or Jenifer Rene Pool, and Amy Price and Larry Green), here (Melissa Noriega, Bob Schoellkopf, Wanda Adams, Peter Rene'), and here (Ronald Green, Ed Gonzalez, James Rodriguez, and Mike Laster).

Here is more on the status of the mayor's race, and more on the developments in District C.

And here is the roundup of TPA blog posts, the best from last week.

Off the Kuff has information about the interim redistricting maps that the federal court in San Antonio will be considering.

Letters From Texas discusses Republicans not understanding basic biology, which is why some candidates might not even realize that they're advocating banning birth control. Much worse, others do understand it.

Several Houston city council candidates earned the coveted PDiddie endorsement. Pick up your progressive voting guide at Brains and Eggs.

As early voting for the November constitutional amendment election gets started, WCNews at Eye On Williamson says Vote No on Prop 4 - the latest transportation scheme.

Libby Shaw says it best in Rick Perry: A Right Wing Wrecking Machine . She compares the degrees of diaster that separate Perry from Romney. The result is a "how low can you go" contest that America can't afford, not when one of these mean-spirited clowns could be the next American President. See her post at TexasKaos.

Neil at Texas Liberal continues to blog about and to support Occupy Houston and Occupy Wall Street.

Early Voting Sunday Funnies

The spotlight on Mayor Parker's prospects

Again, as many have already pointed out, not so much for 2011 as for 2013.

Political analysts predict Mayor Annise Parker has a virtual lock on a second term, but she still has a lot at stake in next month's election.

Winning isn't enough, the experts say. She needs to win big to head off a challenge in 2013 and to give her a stronger hand with the City Council. [...]

(P)oll numbers released last week suggest the mayor faces a dissatisfied electorate. Less than a month before the election, more than half of respondents said they were undecided. Thirty-seven percent said they would vote for Parker.

"Had she had a serious opponent she would have been at least in a runoff, and possibly defeated," said Rice University political scientist Bob Stein, who ran the poll for radio station KUHF and KHOU-TV.

Parker's approval rating was just 47 percent.

"It's the lowest job approval I've seen of a (Houston) mayor, ever," said Stein, who has been polling for decades.

Too slim a majority in November, some observers say, could encourage a stronger challenge two years from now.

Clue: The mayor's low approval numbers do NOT have anything to do with the national economy.

Parker and political analysts say most of the damage to her approval ratings is due to the sputtering national economy.

"If you look at what's on the minds of Americans all over the country, it's jobs and the economy," Parker said.

The "jobs" part, yes. But the mayor's jobs plan, as you can find in the article yourself and at her website,  appears to consist of 'instructing city departments to hire local firms and hoping that spurs job creation'. In the wake of the city's budget cuts that saw thousands of municipal employees lose their jobs, I have to say that is a pretty sad plan.

Aside from that, the mayor has been slammed by events mostly outside of her control that are well beyond the national economy: the red-light camera issue -- yes, mostly outside her control, and that includes poorly-worded vendor contracts and a ballot referendum voided by a judge and all the rest of the mess -- the Rebuild Houston emerging scandal, the George Greanias affair.

And while she has consistently earned low marks for style, it's also fair to suggest that she merited a bit of arrogance in besting her political opponents in the last cycle, and in grappling with the city's many challenges.

Annise Parker gets my (albeit tepid) support for re-election. Just like President Obama, in fact. In many ways she has done a good job, and in many others she has done the best she could with what she has had to work with. And yes, in some ways she's done a lousy job. She's still far and away the best -- indeed, the only -- choice for mayor in this cycle.

I hope, based on her forthcoming performance in office and a little better luck outside of it, that I can say the same two years from now.

The Cohen kerfuffle

The quarrel surrounding Ellen Cohen's $10,000 contribution from Bob Perry moves into a higher gear:

If the abOUT editorial had simply been a question of how to interpret facts (namely that Cohen accepted a contribution from Perry and did not author LGBT-specific legislation while in the Texas House) it would have been unlikely to generate controversy, but two statements in the original editorial unrelated to Cohen’s record have created a backlash against abOUT and its editor, Cade Michals. The editorial originally stated that Cohen’s office had not responded to a request for comment (abOUT has since added a comment from Cohen), and that the Houston GLBT Political Caucus (which has endorsed Cohen) had been “silent” on the matter. Caucus president Noel Freeman says that, in fact, Cohen had made a statement to abOUT before they published the editorial and that, as president of the Caucus, Freeman had already granted an interview to the Houston Chronicle on the matter and would have happily done the same for abOUT had they bothered to contact the Caucus before publishing their article. Freeman contacted Michals requesting a retraction of the editorial in light of these inaccuracies. Freeman says he told Michals that if abOUT did not retract or issue a correction that the Caucus would contact the magazine’s advertisers and request that they pull their ads. “That’s a standard tool in the political activist’s tool belt: boycotts,” said Freeman.

In response, Michals contacted the Houston Police Department and filed a complaint against Freeman. According to Freeman, Michals also threatened to contact a “multi-millionaire investor with a lawyer from Baker Botts who was going to file a lawsuit against me for slander and harassment. He then told me to ‘bring it on’ several times and I ended the call.” Freeman is emphatic that he made no threats against Michals.

And then there is District C candidate Josh Verde's involvement.

According to phone records provided by Freeman, Josh Verde, another City Council District C candidate and the only out LGBT candidate in the race, contacted him less than five minutes after he ended the phone call with Michals. Freeman says Verde called, at the bequest of Michals, to dissuade Freeman of pursuing his request for a retraction. Verde claims he called Freeman to accuse him of stealing a rack of abOUT issues and that his attempts to persuade Freeman to drop his request for a retraction were based on a fear that the situation would damage the Caucus’ reputation. Verde refused to answer whether he made the call at the request of Michals.

Commenters on the Press article have been quick to connect Verde with Michals and abOUT. Verde and Michals are former co-workers. Michals previously worked as general manager of Vue Nightclub. His tenure overlaps that of Verde’s work as a bartender at Guava Lamp, a trendy gay bar. Both bars are owned by Elwood Gould Jr. and housed in the same building. Verde held his campaign launch party at Vue with Michals in attendance.

The reporter for the Voice, Daniel Williams, discloses that he both worked on Cohen's campaign in 2010 (as did I) and was a member of the HGLBT caucus (I am not, have never been).

For Cohen, the abOUT editorial is a distraction from her long record of LGBT advocacy. “I have dedicated my life to equality for all people. I have always been supportive of the GLBT community and will continue to be so on City Council. As executive director of the Houston chapter of the American Jewish Committee, and CEO of the Houston Area Women’s Center, I took a leadership role in advocating for same-sex partner benefits at the city, and encouraged other non-profits to do the same. In the Legislature, I worked on legislation that addressed health care rights of domestic partners, bullying in Texas schools, and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

For Verde, his connections to abOUT, Michals and the pseudonymously authored editorial by “Jack H,” are quickly becoming an albatross of negative campaigning weighing down his candidacy, from which he is working hard to distance himself.

However you may happen to feel about this matter ... this is why I am supporting Karen Derr in this race. Not because I don't like Ellen and don't think she wouldn't make a fine council member (I do, and she would). And not because I think the same of Verde. Because we have to get the money out of our politics.

We must stop evaluating the viability of our political candidates on the basis of how much money they can raise. We must stop feeding a political consultant class that gets paid for advice, direct mail lists, and their network of associated vendors who provide absolutely nothing to our republican democracy except for a compromised product (the politico himself or herself). Particularly for Democratic consultants from Bob Schrum all the way down to Marc Campos, here's a question: how comfortable would your lifestyle be if you got paid on the basis of whether you won or lost?

I'm not talking about unilateral disarmament by the left. The fact is that the Money Race is over and the Republicans have already won. (See Rove, Karl and Brothers, Koch. I picked those links so that you can cry first and then laugh. A little.)

My humble O, as you already know, is to handle this by constitutional amendment. But that is a 15 to 20-year process by this movement's own standards. I'll probably be dead by then. So I have to do what I can while I can, and that means not supporting candidates based on their fundraising -- indeed, to leave money totals out of the consideration -- especially from questionable sources.

Oh yeah, and we absolutely have to stop voting for politicians as if they were American Idol contestants.

Update: Juanita Jean has a similar perspective.