Ted Cruz, the self-promoting Tea Party darling, is the new Texas standard bearer in the U.S. senate. Is he representative of Texas values? The fact that he beat a favored conservative, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, the establishment candidate in the primary, and easily won the general election shows that he does have widespread support in Texas and that his values probably represent those of a majority of Texans and not just the Tea Party.
Texas can probably be considered the reddest of the red states, not having elected a Democrat to a statewide office in over twenty years. George W. Bush of Texas was president before Obama and
was labeled a “cowboy” for some of his actions by foreign and domestic pundits. He invaded Iraq with claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and supported Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. Bush’s rational for the war was subsequently proven false, so one might say that he shot from the hip in getting us involved in Iraq. He also cut taxes while America was involved in two wars, got Medicare Part D passed, and greatly increased the budget deficits and national debt. Guess he could be called a cowboy. But Texas is proud of its cowboy heritage and support of “rugged individualism.” (However, Bush, the “compassionate conservative” and big spender is not a favorite of the Tea Party.)
Texas values include a conservative approach to everything. Smaller government and lower taxes are lauded and guns are extolled. Abortion is a dirty word with state government doing whatever it
can to make abortion more difficult to obtain. Separation of church and state is an alien concept with creationists and intelligent design believers on the panel in charge of approving biology textbooks. These people do not accept evolution or climate change as valid. Thinking Texans (obviously in the minority) are concerned that ideologues and partisans on the textbook review
panels and school boards will erode science education in the state.
But it’s not only science that’s at risk. Education overall is of questionable importance, with Texas ranking among the lowest states on what it spends per pupil on education and it remains in the bottom half of the states in terms of pupil performance. Of course, this might be expected with a governor, Rick Perry, who brags about his poor record scholastically at Texas A and M where he was on academic probation and earned mostly Cs and Ds. He has said that the university helped shape who he is as a person. Yet this Texas icon earned a C in U.S. history and a D in the principles of economics. (After being elected to three terms as governor, Perry received considerable support in Texas when he ran for president which emphasizes that intelligence is not a prerequisite for high office in this state.)
On the other hand, while spending on education suffers, spending on athletics booms. High school football stadiums have been built costing tens of millions of dollars, though teacher salariesremain low. Similar patterns occur at Texas’s institutions of higher learning where the football coaches earn ten to forty times more than the tenured professors and spending on the football programs exceed anything else on the campuses.
Another interesting aspect of Texas values is that talk of secession from the United States has actually received considerable publicity and has a number of adherents in the state. One must
admit that there are extremists and crazies in all the states, but a disproportionate number of them seem to reside in Texas. The three most important politicians to emerge from Texas in the last two decades are Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and George W. Bush. Doesn’t that give all of us a clue as to
Texas values?
One interesting sidebar is that within the next ten years, Texas is going to flip from being a secure red state to a blue state as Hispanics and other minorities become the majority. Whatever Texas values are now, they’re due for a change!
Resurrecting Democracy
www.robertlevinebooks.com
Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020