ADDENDUM TO THE NRO TEXAS DEMOCRATS STORY

One of the things about deeply researching a story--any story--is that you run across facts, incidents and tales that you find interesting but ultimately don't make the cut for one reason or another. Most of the time, you just forget them or keep them in your notes, thinking that they may be useful someday. For me, in researching the Red River Run story, I remembered one such tale and came across one such fact, which to my mind are related and interesting, but didn't make it into the story for reasons of space and clarity.

Here's the tale. Back in 1992, Texas was experiencing its first election under the Martin Frost redistricting plan, the "shrewdest gerrymander" of its time as Michael Barone put it. That map put urban, high-tech and business-oriented Plano (a Dallas suburb) in the same state senate district as agrarian, rural, down-home Hunt County and some of the surrounding area, which was where I happened to work as news director for a couple of radio stations. That area had been represented in the state senate for three terms by Democrat Ted Lyon of Rockwall, and the Democrats hoped his record and ties to law enforcement would offset anything the GOP would throw at him and they would keep the seat. The Republicans ran a Plano businesswoman, Florence Shapiro, to challenge him. She was very focused and driven, very smart and articulate, in every way what you'd expect from someone who built a business from the ground up and then decided to run for office. Lyon was an old-school Texas Democrat politician, former cop turned lawyer, a conservative on most issues but basically a good old boy (and I don't mean that in a perjorative sense at all--in Texas, "good old boy" is generally a complement). The race between Shapiro and Lyon quickly became a nasty slug-fest. As a news director, I got hit from both campaigns daily throughout the summer and fall of that year--faxes from one campaign accusing the other of something, followed by a counterstrike and countercharge from the other guys, ad nauseum. It got tiresome to say the least, though I grew to personally like people in both campaigns. One of the weirder tactics that the Democrats tried was to tar Shapiro as a Jew. Now, she happened to be Jewish, but why the Democrats made an issue of it was lost on me and most voters, but it was something that the Democrats decided should be an issue so they made it one. They did it by bringing up the fact that she'd moved to Texas some years back from up north somewhere--New York, I think--and basically said words to the effect of "How can a New York Jew possibly understand rural farm life, or even life in Texas and how we do things around here?" It was a fairly ugly thing to say, given the fact that Shapiro's faith really shouldn't have been a campaign issue at all. But it was, because either the Lyon campaign or the state Democrats or both decided to make it one. So that's the tale that didn't make the cut.

Now here's the fact. Rep. Martin Frost of Fort Worth has been in Congress for thirteen terms now. He's one of the more partisan Democrats in the House, regularly accusing the Republicans of plotting to starve old people and kick little kids out of their homes--or is it starve kids and kick old people out of their homes? It's hard to keep all the canards straight these days. In researching him and his 1991 redistricting plan for the NRO story, I came across a fact that the GOP has never raised as a campaign issue--Frost is Jewish. Does it matter? Not a whit, and the Republicans have never believed that it mattered and therefore never raised it as an issue. It's not as though they've never had the chance--Frost has run and won 13 times, for a total of about 26 years in the House. And it's not as though he's an obscure Congressman and therefore off the radar--he represents the 24th District, which includes sections of Dallas, Arlington and Fort Worth as well as the mid-cities. I grew up in that area, knew of Martin Frost just about my whole life, yet never once heard that he was Jewish. It was just never an issue, nor should it have been.

So we have a tale of the Democrats running an anti-Semitic campaign strategy for a state senate seat the very first chance they got, and the Republicans never raising the Jew issue in any of 13 chances to do it, all in the same general area of the same state. I'll leave it for you to decide for yourself what, if anything, this means.

Oh, and for the record, in that state senate race I got so fed up with both campaigns that I ended up voting Libertarian that time. I had nothing in common with the Libertarian candidate--he was a hemp-promoting ex-hippie type. It was a protest vote against two campaigns that became uglier then necessary. Shapiro, the Jewish Republican, ended up winning and still holds that seat. It was a rare instance where the Frost plan didn't hold the line for the Democrats. I like to think that their anti-Semitic strategy backfired on them, though there's probably no way of knowing that for sure.