Forget the professional elite, grassroots Dems are taking over at last [View All]

The Jan. 9 Dallas Morning News article, "Minorities don't feel top-ticket excitement," quoting a couple of South Texas professional operatives in claiming our statewide ticket reflects no "outreach," and trumpeting the so-called "dream team" of 2002 as a model for "outreach," is unadulterated baloney from a wannabe pundit of the embedded corporate media and wannabe political influence peddlers who are worried about their brokerage clout.

The Texas Democratic Party doesn't have the money to recruit anybody. No insider kingmakers recruited me, and the Party hasn't given me a nickel, nor did it in either of my two previous runs, nor will it this year. Nobody recruited our outstanding Hispanic candidate J.R. Molina (interesting that the wannabe "minority" influence peddlers don't mention him - could it be he's not in their patronage chains and won't kiss their rings?) to run for the high office of Presiding Judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals; nor has the Party ever given him a nickel in his two previous spirited runs. J.R. and I have both kept going, and will keep going no matter the odds, because we are both passionate and committed to the cause of kicking the totalitarian Radical Republican Right out of their repressive control of Texas.

We don't wait around for somebody to give us permission or bless us. And we help each other. J.R. and Judge Bill Moody made it over the hump with their signature petitions to file for statewide judicial office in one of their toughest areas because I drove there and enlisted the help of my 80-year-old parents who live there to get the signatures - the TDP gave verbal encouragement but didn't and doesn't have the resources to do anything else.

Every Democrat has the power and the responsibility as an individual citizen to make his or her own way into the political process and we've all got to stop sitting around waiting for some glamorous celebrity or a financially strapped Party to give us permission or pat us on the head or give us a royal red carpet. The 2002 ticket wasn't a "dream team," it was a nightmare comprised of top-down selections from, by and for the business, political and financial elite. It was a measure of how far out of touch the wannabe kingmakers were, that they actually thought a jillionaire banker, a high-rise corporate lawyer, and a former office-holder who takes every opportunity to run away from his own party would inspire the working class Democratic base to swarm to the polls. It couldn't and it didn't.

What is really going on is that the grassroots people are at last asserting their rightful power within the Texas Democratic Party and many of the inhabitants of the self-assured professional political elite and professional journalist elite can't stand it. The decibel level of their cynicism is a true barometer of their vanishing influence.

David Van Os
Democratic Candidate for Texas Attorney General
Help me out at www.vanosfortexasag.com