It’s OK to Dream of a Blue Texas

The Lone Star State has drifted rightward since the heyday of Ann Richards and Lloyd Bentsen. But every once in a while, you’re allowed to get your hopes up.

Whenever my friends and family despair about the GOP’s decades-long stranglehold on Texas, I remind them—wistfully—that it hasn’t always been this way. If you’re wincing, I get it. Such optimism in the face of electoral reality is insufferable, especially since I’m frequently bringing this cheerful message from highfalutin New York City, where I moved in 1996, two years after Democratic Governor Ann Richards lost to Republican George W. Bush.

Whenever I make a pilgrimage to the Lone Star State, which I do a couple of times a year, to visit loved ones and emotionally eat enchiladas, I cherish any opportunity to remind liberal Texans that I have faith. All is not lost. I dream of a blue Texas. It is my birthright. Texas hasn’t always been red, I’ll remind them.

I know this because my old man worked for the last duly elected Democratic senator from the great state of Texas.

He was a press secretary, a job I did not understand. I knew he had a small office in the Senate Hart building that he would fill with cigar smoke. I once asked him why people ran for office and became politicians, and he told me some people get into it because they want to help other people—and sometimes the game changes them for the worse—and then he told me other people run for office because someone else corners them at a cocktail party and says, “You know, you should run for office,” and that person says, “Yeah, I should.”

Which of these was the senator that my dad served? The man he was doggedly loyal to for decades? Politics is no place for romantics, but I want to believe the former.

The first time I ever became aware of politics as a force, a kind of social energy rather than the family business, was during Ann Richards’s epic barn burner of a keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. She was the Texas state treasurer then—the first woman elected to that office—and later, in 1991, sworn in as the state’s second woman governor.

Her pugnacious speech electrified me as I watched it in the basement of my house in Northern Virgina with my mother. I was not born in Texas. I was raised inside the Beltway. This is my shame. I didn’t see much of my dad that year, but I knew he was there, somewhere in that roaring convention center.

Her performance was perfectly Texan; polite, spicy, principled. She smirked, but she was not fucking around. The Democrats had suffered a long winter during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in office. The party was hungry, and the Texans, especially, were scraping for a fight.

Richards, with her silver hair and confident swagger, mocked Vice President George H.W. Bush, a political aristocrat from Connecticut who had reinvented himself as a Houston oilman. At one point, she had fun with the Bushes’ penchant for gaffes: “Poor George,” she purred. “He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” I didn’t even really understand the joke, but I hooted and hollered. Here, glowing from my television screen, was a truly great Texan.

It was during this convention that my dad’s boss, Lloyd Bentsen, was chosen as Michael Dukakis’s running mate, an attempt to recreate the fabled Kennedy-LBJ “Austin-to-Boston” axis. My dad spent most of the........

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