Texas Republican Convention

Last week, I was a delegate to the Texas Republican Convention in Houston.

The following is most of a e-mails I sent my parents and Nacho.

Wednesday, June 11:

I'm in my hotel room safely. Went straight from work at lunchtime and headed out. The speed limit for most of the way to Houston is 70, but I rarely did more than 60. The engine couldn't keep up with the demands on it, and most of the time when I tried to go faster, the vacuum pump couldn't keep up, the vent valves closed, and I lost A/C. So I kept a pace where I could keep a decent A/C level, and not melt en route.

I got to the conventiton center a little after 5, and got registered. When I got there, there were people handing out flyers about a meeting some people were holding at 7, so I took the time to wander around and figure out where most important rooms were. Wen I got to the meeting, I found that it was a group that's got some major complaints about illegal proceedings by the current leadership. Things like the Credential Committee chairman unilaterally dismissing challenges without allowing a committee vote, the Rules Committee ordering that no recording devices can be used in their meetings, and the order of events set up so that the new state party officers are voted on before the Credentials (which has had above disputes thrown out) have been approved by the delegates. You can see the details at fairconvention.org. I haven't had a chance to find out the leaders' position on all this, but so far this group (lots of whom, but not all, are Ron Paul supporters) seems to have some legitimate complaints.

I expect tomorrow to be pretty ugly. . . .

I'll let you know what happens,

Thursday, June 12:

Well, I survived Day One. The first General Session wasn't as bad as I was expecting.

The session started at noon (well, a little later than that). First, we had opening greeting/prayer. Then a guy gave a very good, detailed description of the origins of the Star Spangled Banner, including a couple details I didn't know about, before it was sung. Then came the speeches. There was the State Chair(wo)man, 2 guys from the Host Committee, Governor Perry (who made prominent mention of the Mansion being torched), the Agriculture Commissioner, the Railroad Commissioner (which is a much more important job that it sounds, he deals with most environmental issues), the Candidate Resource Committee "pass the hat" collection, the Attorney General (trivia: he was jogging one day shortly after graduating college, and an oak tree fell on him, partially paralyzing him, and he's been in a wheelchair ever since), Lt. Governor Dewhurst (who I like a lot more than Perry, anyway), a taped address by the President, and the Speaker of the State House (each whom announced onto the stage all the state Senate and House members and candidates who were there). Decent speeches all, but when we were supposed to be done with the session at 3, and didn't even had the call to order until almost 4, it got to be a little too much. Then there were the speeches by the two people campaigning for the State Party Chair and Vice-Chair positions. One each was the incumbent, and the others were Ron Paul supporters (the people I talked about yesterday). Then came the call to order (Finally!). We then had the "floor fight" I was worried about, but was much more abbreviated than I expected, mostly because the major issues the Ron Paul people were complaining about yesterday didn't come up in detail, plus I got a panic call from work in the middle of it to distract me. Once that was over, and the few challenges were all resolved as the Committee recommended, we finally got to go to our Senate District caucuses.

There, we were all grouped by county, and had to elect a permanent chair, officers, and permanent members to each committee (Credentials, Organization, Nominations, Rules, and Platform). My county chair (who was just elected, but was my Fed/State/Local Govt. teacher at LeTU and has been long involved) had been appointed temporary chair, and was unconstested for the permanent chair. Then the people who had been temp. members of the Credentials, Rules, and Platform committees were also re-elected, the Organization seat was uncontested, and it was a who-cares vote between two people for Nominations (which just takes the majority vote to the committee; I voted for one guy because in his stump speech he just made a couple jokes about being qualified to take something from one room to another because he runs a transportation service). The only slow-down was the actualy voting and tallying, because the rules say that an under-represented county still gets its fullly-allocated vote count (if you are entitled to have 10 delegates, but only 8 show up, you have to multiply it up to make an even 10) and that means doing it all by secret ballot. So while we waited for votes to be tallied, we got a few more brief speeches from candidates and current state reps. Finally got done around 7, and after some more wandering about I came back to the hotel. (Clarification: "Permanent" means "for the remainder of this convention," not "forever)

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. I'll be going to a prayer meeting at 7, then our 2nd state dist. caucus session is at 9 (elect permanent chair/vice-chair), then is our 2nd General Session. The speeches should be good; Newt Gingrich is first, and Mike Huckabee is 3rd. Plus, all the good parties are tomorrow evening; I'm probably going to at least part of the time go to the Young Republicans' Karaoke party, but haven't decided which to go to for the rest.

Will report tomorrow (probably late),

Saturday, June 14:

Sorry about that [not reporting in on Friday]. I didn't get back to the hotel until just past midnight, and had to be there at 8. The convention's now over, so I can finally breathe.

Yesterday, the day started early, with a prayer rally at 7. Then at 9, we went into State Senate District Caususes again, to nominate people for State Party Chairman and Vice-Chairman, and State Republican Elections Committeeman and Commiteewoman. One of the interesting things about the Chair/Vice-chair rules is that one has to be a man, and the other a woman. Once the ballots for each of the above elections has been counted, and numbers for each county in the district rounded up to give them full representation, our representative to the Permanent Nominations Committee (who we had elected Thursday) is sent off to the committee meeting while the rest of us do the SREC elections. Then while the Nominations Committee is meeting, we get to mingle around the trade show floor. Picked up decent amounts of swag, signed a bunch of mailing lists, etc. Also, Newt Gingrich showed up for a book signing (I kid you not, the line had to have been over 200 ft. long), and I got to snap a few photos; hopefully they'll turn out.

At 1, we had our 2nd General Session. First the speeches: Newt Gigrich talking about the org he's running now, American Solutions. He's pumping a new political slogan: "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less." He's also working to gather 3 million signatures to a petition to Congress to open up domestic drilling, which you can do at the website. Next up was the day's keynote by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (who I'm not a big fan of, given her abortion position). Then came Governor Huckabee, who by far got the biggest acclamation. I went down closer to the stage to get some better pictures. I'm starting to think about getting a non-compact camera, with a much better zoom. After Huckabee came the Land Commissioner, nothing special. Then came a surprise; the program said we were supposed to get into business then, but instead we got a great surprise: Senator John Cornyn, introduced by a new video (which is the headline on his website; take a look, it's good and very Texan). Cornyn is one of the conservative heroes in Texas, so having him come in unannounced made a huge uproar.

Then came business, and trouble. The Ron Paul people made the same arguments about Credentials, so getting through that took quite a while. Next was the Organization committee, which was quick and allowed the state chairman to hand off the gavel to the permanent chair. Then the Nominations committee came up, and the incumbent State Chair(wo)man was nominated for reelection. However, there's a rule that if another candidate wins at least 3 districts, that person can be nominated from the floor, which the Ron Paul people did for their candidate. That required a secret ballot...of 5800 delegates. So ballot slips had to be distributed, county chairs had to make sure they got their people's ballots, the votes had to be added up (and then multiplied up if they were an understrength delegation), numbers reported to the state district chair, and once everyone was done with that, the numbers had to be announced by each district chair to the session secretary (it's weird hearing someone announce 137.8 votes for someone, and I'm still trying to figure out how a 0.9 abstaintions is possible). Then they have to add it up, and announce the results. During all this, I was trying to pay attention to the rules and platform that had been left on every person's seat before the session started. Fortunately, after going through the rigamarole with the Chair, having the incumbent win (a woman) meant the vice-chair candidate for Ron Paul (also a woman) wasn't eligible, so we got through that part by voice acclamation. Next came the Rules Committee, which details each ammendment from the previous rules. By the 3rd ammendment report, it was moved that the report be approved in its entirety. After a fairly short debate, that was approved. Then the Platform came up, which I'd already found a couple things I wanted to try changing in the 4 pages I'd been able to read. However, the first motion was to accept the platform entirely, and was approved. So there was absolutely no debate of the Platform, which I was rather ticked about.

At that point, it was about 6, we were 2 hours late to dismiss, and we still had 4 10-minute speeches to go. 2 for candidates for the National Committeeman, and 2 for the National Committeewoman positions. A lot of people just got up and left, since there the big-deal Banquet was supposed to start at 6:30. However, afte the speeches, they announced that the banquet would open doors at 7:10, and begin at 7:30. But that was a semi-moot point, because after the general session was over, we went to Congressional District Caucuses, which are completely separate from the Senate Districts (though Gregg county is in District 1 for both) and are one-person-one-vote instead of full-strength. Fortunately, all we had to do was elect a caucus chair and a delegate to the National Nominations Committee. We went through that in near-record time. Then the people with tickets went off to the banquet, but they were sold out long before I registered. I looked through all the evening's evens, and went to the only one I knew the price on: the Young Republicans karaoke party ($5) at a hotel about 3/4 mile from the convention center. I hung around there until after 11, and did my normal party thing (not very much besides sit around the the occasional small talk). Then it was back to the parking garage, and here to the hotel. The one good thing about staying so late is that I managed to miss the traffic from the Astros/Yankees game a few blocks from the convention center.

Today started off with the 2nd Congressional District Caucus, in which we voted on National Committeeman and Committeewoman, and then selected delegates for our district to the National Convention (3 delegates, 3 alernates). Again, the Ron Paul people put candidates up for most of the slots, but lost all of them. My County Chair was elected unopposed to the 3rd Delegate slot, which he had told me on Thursday that he'd wanted to go. Then we had a break for the committee to meet, and into the final general session, where we were now arranged by Congressional District (different seating blocks for everyone). We had speeches by the Agriculture Commissioner and Chairman of Texas Victory 2008 (guess what they're doing), then presentation of the US House members and candidates who were there, then likewise for the State Supreme Court (who are all elected in Texas) and Education Board (where they just won a big fight this week, and are re-introducing old-style English requirements like grammar and phonics to the '09 curricculum). Then we had to wait because the Nominations Committee hadn't finished, which took quite a while. We were all expecting another floor fight by for at least one of the National Committee slots, but were almost astonished when the Committeewoman loser came out right after the official Nomination was announced and gave a concession speech. Then there was no opposition for the Committeeman, and were able to dive into Delegates. That was more time-consuming than difficult; the biggest thing was that there were a bunch of misspellings of people's names that people brought up, until it was announced that they could do that at the mandatory delegate meeting after dismissal. We finally adjourned at around 4, but I didn't get to I-10 to get out of downtown until 5 (mostly waiting for the flow of cars from the parking garage to abate so I could back out of my space).

Then it was back to the hotel, where I've spent the past hour writing this e-mail. So now I'm going to go find some dinner, and tomorrow I head home. I'll let you know when I get there; feel free to ask any questions.

Sunday was nothing special. Just get up in the morning (after catching up a tiny bit on sleep), pack up, load up, and head home. Made better time and higher speed with my old truck on the way back.

I'll have another major announcement in a couple days. Just getting the last bits into place.

[Ed.: tweaked quotes. All the paragraph breaks got lost]

Evangelical Support for Republicans Waning?

I saw this on the transcript of Rush Limbaugh's program today, and it really struck me. He's discussing why Huckabee (who I support) won the South.

...As far as the regional vote, what's been called the regional vote, the Southern vote for Huckabee, there are a number of things that go into this. And one of the things that I think is relevant here is, in fact, geography, the Southern component, the regionalism of Huckabee being an Arkansas governor. Second thing, of course, is the evangelical vote, and I think you heard the anger from Suzanne, and she said that she is Catholic, she's Christian, so she thinks she's Christian right, but I think there's starting to be in the Republican Party sort of an equivalence between blacks in the Democrat Party and evangelicals in the Republican Party in this sense. Now, we've looked at blacks for 50 years. They keep voting for Democrats. The Democrats do nothing but destroy their families. They do nothing to increase their economic circumstances. They do nothing to redress the grievances and yet the blacks keep voting for them on the basis of the promise and the notion that Republicans are racists, sexists, bigots, homophobes, and are going to really make 'em be bad, so they keep hanging with Democrats, and nothing changes.

Evangelicals, since 1973, have stuck with Republicans, basically on the promise, "We're going to do something about abortion. We're going to fix the cultural rot that's going on in this country. We're going to make sure there isn't any gay marriage. We're going to stop this overall lurch to depravity that's occurring in our culture," and the Republican candidates have all said, "I'm your man, we're going to do that," and they make the right speeches, but nothing's really changing on it. And so they, the evangelicals, are a little bit quicker to realize when they're being taken for granted. So their votes, "Look, we're going to go with one of ours. At least we can trust this guy, plus we do hate the IRS, you haven't heard us. You keep promising tax reform, not tax cuts, tax reform and every year it gets harder and harder for us to pay our taxes and we're paying more and more and we can't get ahead because of taxes and this guy wants to get rid of the IRS," so, bam, you've had it and they're voting for their guy. They're voting for Huckabee.

I think there's genuine support for Huckabee. I think the IRS factors a big deal in his support. I've gotten enough e-mail to know this. There are a whole host of reasons that make up this vote, but you also have, in certain evangelicals, just no stomach whatsoever for Mormons. All of these things, it's not just one thing, it's all these things combined that I think explain the regionalism, Huckabee being from Arkansas, being one of them, dissatisfaction with all the false promises that have come from Republicans, just the lip service, opportunity to vote for one of their own finally who will not take 'em for granted because he is one of them. Getting rid of the IRS is huge. I'm telling you, it is. Then of course the Mormon factor. So you throw all these things together, and it explains why McCain is not ...

I personally consider myself a social/fiscal conservative, in that order. I passionately care about a balanced budget and reducing the debt. However, I care about permanently ending abortion more, and that narrows my choices dramatically. Romney is/was way too iffy and recent on his pro-life support, and McCain supports embryonic stem cell research. On the fiscal side, McCain does well, but Romney seems too ready to bail out struggling industries (like the $20 billion he promised Michigan).

Limbaugh's comments above sum up a lot of my reasons for supporting Huckabee. He's the only candidate who supports a Human Life Amendment. He wants to get rid of the IRS, and replace it with a reasonable national sales tax. He supports the basic Republican foreign policy. I'll admit I'm a bit more wary of his education and health policies (namely whether he would just use the bully pulpit, or if he would push new federal legislation in violation of the Tenth Amendment). So my support for Huckabee isn't unreserved. He's simply the best of an iffy crowd.

P.S.
I don't agree with Limbaugh's anti-Mormon line about why people are voting for Huckabee. No doubt there are people out there for whom that was their primary reason, but I don't think that they are nearly as numerous as the pundits do. However, I disagree with the opinion that a candidate's religion should have no relevance to deciding one's vote. I'm not embarrassed to say that my initial hesitation on Romney was related to being a Mormon (if one buys wholesale into a cult, even if raised on it, what does that say for your judgement?). However, his conduct since, with tons of negative adds, trying to buy the presidency by unfaily (but admittedly, unfortunately legal) spending tens of millions of his own money, and his repeatedly saying all kinds of crazy thinks to win local votes (case-in-point is again his promise of Michigan money) showing how dangerous he would be to elect, with is drastic changes on social issues during his governorship being the icing on the cake.

8 Days of Hope V

I spent New Year's week in Mississippi, working with a reconstruction organization called 8 Days of Hope. It's a bit of a blur, because of all the work we did there, but I'll try to sum things up.

We left the Friday morning before New Year's in the church van with a trailer full of tools, and drove to Bay St. Louis, MS, a town between New Orleans and Gulfport. 8 Days of Hope V was based out of a retreat center run by a Catholic church there, St. Rose de Lima. A couple of the ladies for our group left a few hours ahead of us, and got our lodging set up. We were assigned a couple cabins with bunk beds and foam mattresses at a Baptist church about 15 minutes away from St. Rose. This was a pleasant surprise, because we had expected to just be in some gym. Also nice was that a Baptist church from Alabama had brought a couple of full-length trailers that were outfitted with 3 full bathrooms each, and hooked them into the church's water and sewer. So we had nice facilities compared to what I was expecting.

Friday evening was a brief orientation, just enough so we knew what to do the next day to get work assignments. The guy leading our team from here was one of the project managers, so he chose a project that our entire team (our leader, his wife, and two of their grandchildren; a family of four; a family of six; two teenage girls who came without their parents; and myself and two other single guys) could work on.

The original "job" was at a house just a couple blocks from St. Rose, and the sheet said that we were supposed to move his personal items out, remove the kitchen counters, and tear out the ceiling in 2 bathrooms and 1 bedroom. However, it was planned that once a team did that part, other teams would come in to star fixing up the insides. They like to set the jobs so that specialists can just do their thing, or unskilled people can do simple stuff so the specialists don't have to. Instead, we just took the whole house on.

The home owner, Tal Raboteau, works at the Stennis Space Center, and is a reserve police officer as a second job. He's lived in Bay St. Louis most of his life. When the Storm came, he was at Stennis, where he's an emegency shelter manager. His house came off the foundation and floated around his lot for about an hour. A previous relief group had gotten his house back on the foundations a few months after the storm, another had raised the house 2 feet above ground level on concrete pylons, while a third had repaired several leaks in the roof that had damaged the ceilings. He's been living in a FEMA trailer next to the house with his son since the Storm.

The one thing that I had to get used to for the trip is the schedule. We were up at 5:30 every morning, working 7:30-5, and lights out at 9:30 PM. Sleeping with 7 other men in a bunkroom was rather interesting, especially when several of them snore.

We started work on Saturday, and it took about half the day to complete our "official" job of removing all his stuff and tearing down those ceilings. Then we started into the real work: restoring his home.

I spent the rest of Saturday working with the other single guys and one of the dads on hanging new sheetrock ceilings in one of the bedrooms. Given all the moves the house had been through, we quickly learned that the word "square" was not going to be in our project vocabulary. It slowed the work down a whole lot for us, and the fact that none of us had hung sheetrock before didn't help. However, we figured out what was up, and started making better progress around the end of the day. Other groups from our team started working on taking out old flooring and doors, as well as priming the walls and remaining ceilings.

On Sunday we had the morning off, so we went for a drive along the coastline to see what it looks like now. Some people have rebuilt their houses, but a lot are still living in trailers, and a lot more have either been abandoned or demolished and cleared. Insurance rates went through the roof, so it's not worth it for a lot of people, and they those who've left are trying to sell their property and failing miserably due to the prices.

Sunday afternoon we were able to almost finish the bedroom we'd been working on, and started looking at the second to plan strategy for it. Monday we finished the first bedroom ceiling, and got about halfway through the second. That night, they had a New Year's Eve worship service out on the beach, but we still ended way earlier than midnight. First time in about ten years that I haven't been awake for the new year.

Tuesday the last family arrived, so we split into two groups for sheetrocking, and did both the second bedroom and the bathroom in one day. Once we got the bedroom done, I started bouncing from here to there as needed. I did some caulking, some "mudding" (filling in the gaps between sheetrock panels and any cracks in the walls with goop to seal them), a little painting, and helping with the new flooring (we were putting hardwood paneling down everywhere except the kitchen and bathrooms).

On Wednesday, we had a major cold snap. It was 20 degrees when we got up that morning. Fortunately, we weren't going to be doing any major exterior work, and the house's heater worked well. I did some more odd job work, and helped hang a couple new prefab doors in the morning. The doors gave us major trouble for the entire week, as many of them didn't even fit the frames they came in. For the afternoon, I assisted with laying down the tiling in the kitchen. It took all afternoon, but we just barely made it before we had to quit for the day, and were able to let the cement harden overnight. By the end of the day, they'd also been able to start painting on the outside of the house.

Thursday was cold again, only a few degrees warmer than the previous night. It progressed pretty much like the previous day, doing odd jobs for part of the day, mostly hanging additional doors. It went slower, because there we had spread out a little more and I had less help with it. Then I was assisting with grouting the kitchen tiles in the afternoon, and cleaning off the excess grout took the rest of the day. However, we also lost about half our group, as they had to head back, so the next day was going to be the race to the finish.

On Friday, it was a little bit warmer, but still too cold for much outside work. It was just as well, because we had plenty for the rest of us to do indoors. We had almost finished the master bathroom, but had to get the fixtures back in before we could take down the main bathroom to tile it. So first I helped get the fixtures in, then I went charging into the main bath, got its fixtures out, and seated the cement board for the tile to attach to. Then we got the cement mixed and tiled the entire room before lunch. While the cement mixed, I helped get the kitchen cabinets back in and fastened down. It hardened enough that by early afternoon we were able to grout the tiles and hang the remaining doors. Meanwhile, the other groups had finished painting, and we'd gotten another small team in that finished painting the exterior of the house. After the grout was done in the bathroom and the doors hung, we were in cleanup mode. We managed to get the entire place swept and mopped, and moved a few key items back in (we'd put everything into the attached garage, so it was protected from the weather all week). Tal was extremely grateful for everything we'd done, even though there was still a lot of minor work yet to finish. We didn't get some of the lighting replaced, and some electrical work still needed completion. However, it was livable again, and he planned to move in that night, even if it meant just using a sleeping bag.

Friday night was our wrap-up meeting, where they told us that there had been over 1100 volunteers, and had finished about 330 jobs. This was almost double the job total from the previous trip a year before. Saturday, we left as soon as we'd packed and cleaned up our cabins. We drove through New Orleans on I-10 to come back. I'm told that it looks much better, but there are still large sections that have either been abandoned or not completely rebuilt. It's sobering to realize that even 2+ years after the Storms, there is still so much work that needs to be done throughout the region. At the rate things have gone, it may take a decade for things to return to normal.