A (Bill) White Christmas

What does Bill White’s candidacy mean for Texas? What does it mean for Texas Democrats?

It’s auspicious, I think, that White’s announcement is accompanied by a weather flurry of white stuff, a white run-up to Christmas (and the January filing deadline).

Here’s what I like best about Bill White:  he’s a problem solver. He fixes things. That’s his record as mayor of Houston. It’s good to have things fixed, and Republicans have over the years broken a lot of things — public schools, college tuition, health care, transportation. Texas looks more like China than China:  extraordinary income disparity, an authoritarian elite whose talk of democracy is really no more than a note to the treasury tellers to hand over the money to cronies.

I also believe White’s pragmatic, get-things-done message is just right for Texas and the times. Ever since Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act in the 60s, the field has been tilted against Texas Democrats. Politics suffers from a faulty analogy with sports. Election cycles are not neutral playing fields. The Deep South part of Texas political culture — the racist, hierarchical part — has dominated the state the last few decades.

For years, moderate business Republicans enjoyed their alliance with the yahoos. Exploited would be a better word. But they never expected the creationists and the theocrats to actually gain power. Just think about it. The oil and gas industry needs geologists. How many geologists believe the world was created 6,000 years ago?

Also, business can’t ignore the inevitability of demographics the way politicians can. Tomorrow’s Texas workforce and market will be different than yesterday’s. From a business perspective, racial and economic apartheid won’t work. I know some moderate Republicans are thinking about this because they’ve told me so. It doesn’t take a moral awakening to make them alert to the economic dangers ahead.

Bill White will appeal to these moderates. He can, in a style much different than Barack Obama’s, do in Texas what Obama did nationally in 2008. Obama managed to corner Republicans in the far right of America’s political room. White can do the same thing here.

Something called political culture theory is handy here. A fellow named Daniel Elazar examined American history and traced three distinct political cultures, pegged to the geography of immigration to and within America. They are:  1) Traditional New England-style egalitarian, participatory liberalism; 2) Southern traditionalism — it’s hierarchical, authoritarian, and, I’m afraid, racist; 3) Western individualism — it’s entrepreneurial, pragmatic. Unlike most states, Texas has all three of these cultures.

Republicans built their majority on an alliance between the Southern traditionalists and the Western individualists. Obama broke that alliance. Bill White can do the same in Texas. How? Western individualists like people who can fix things. They are skeptical about government, of course. And they are more skeptical of traditional liberals who seem to always be arrogantly telling them what to do. This arrogance has long plagued the progressive movement in America, by the way.

White can appeal to individualists with hope and, more importantly, with a friendly, entrepreneurial spirit that respects others and sees government as a practical need rather than an ideological blanket. In other words, White has the opportunity to create an alliance between the individualists and the progressives — precisely what Obama achieved, albeit with a different approach.

Texas’ future is doomed if we leave it in the hands of the secessionists and the creationists. This isn’t lost on the NASA engineers of Clear Lake, the high-tech workers of Williamson County suburbs,  the oil and gas middle managers in Houston, the pragmatic financial folk in the Metroplex. People in the emerging economies of San Antonio and South Texas are ahead of everyone else in this knowledge.

The individualist mythos isn’t confined to West Texas. It’s a mythos very much alive in the suburbs. Individualistic as they are, they care about the world around them. Unlike the Southern Traditionalists, who think that all can be made right with the world if we will just enforce natural racial and economic hierarchies, individualists know that making things right with the world will take something quite different from that.

And Bill White can talk their language. If he succeeds in 2010, he might create a Democratic alliance that will dominate Texas into the foreseeable future.