FreedomWorks: What I Witnessed In Austin This Weekend Shook Me To My Core

[Bucky]

29. Reality check

The mayor is a personal friend of mine. Annise is a great mayor and has a good working relationship with most communities in Houston, including the downtown business good ol' boys. She's pro-growth and pro-big business and has only a better-than-Republican labor record. By Texas standards, she's a liberal Democrat, but there are community quality of life issues where she's not all that progressive--including being fairly hands-off with the police, being relatively slow about moving traffic onto mass transit alternatives, and enacting policies that are pretty harsh on our out-of-recovery homeless population. She's a smart pol and she knows which side butters her bread.

It's not a big deal for Houston to elect a pro-business liberal Democrat as mayor. In fact, that's an accurate description of every single mayor Houston's had since--and I don't exaggerate--1963. Well, there might be a debate about Jim McConn from the late 70s, but at the time he was certainly a Democrat and not a conservative. My point is, it's no big deal that Houston elected a liberal mayor. We've always been an island (and a bigger island that the ballyhooed Austin area) in the sea of gun-toting Bible thumpers who dominate the state.

If you want a villain's lair in our state's politics, look at Dallas. They're total assholes up there.