Molly Ivins April 14NORFOLK, Va. — Oh, you Texas voters, you are so sly. My, my, my, my, my. What fun. Ron Paul and Victor Morales in one swell foop. Establishments confounded! Rank outsiders upset favorites! Money irrelevant! Ugly ads don't work! You wily coyotes have just overturned almost every truism of politics; I'm so proud. Fluke me no flukes, luck me no luck-outs ... there are Lessons here. I grant you, Victor Morales — he of the beautiful smile and the pickup truck — did benefit from several million dollars' worth of the best publicity there is: free. After a Texas Poll two weeks out showed Morales leading in the Democratic runoff for the Senate race, the media descended and just, well, sort of fell in love with him. Which it's easy to do. Morales became the Cinderella candidate, the giant-killer, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The papers did him, the nets did him, CNN did him, NPR did him twice. And Rep. Johnny Bryant's people were reduced to snivelling that a statewide poll with a sample of 270 people is not exactly accurate — which is true, but by then, who cared? Bryant's being an unlikely candidate for the role of Goliath — brave, faithful, true and altogether an NPR kind of guy himself — got lost in the story line. Poop upon those who claim it was Morales' last name and a set of runoffs in Hispanic districts that got him the nomination. As Johnny B. himself points out, you might just as well assume that all his own votes came from Anglos who liked the name Bryant. Now we face the titillating prospect of Sweet Victor Morales the Giant-Killer up against (dum de dum dum) Sen. Phil Gramm. Hey, a year like this and you want to put money on Gramm now? Don't be silly. True, Dicky Flatt, Mama, the kitchen table and gettin'-out-of-the-wagon-to-help-pull will be back to haunt us all. Gramm's famous imitation of a man of the people — backed by millions of dollars of corporate special-interest money — is a long-running hit in Texas.
In the Ron Paul-Greg Laughlin brawl for the GOP slot in the 14th Congressional District race, I claim a real victory for the people. Paul may be a formerly Libertarian weirdo (take no offense, Libertarians, that is not a redundancy), but Laughlin was surely the Establishment Goliath. The R's threw everything, including the kitchen sink, into that one: money, endorsements, money, national party support, money, Gov. Shrub, money, Gov. Shrub's daddy and money. We might conclude that people prefer a conviction-politician — however peculiar his convictions might be — to a politician who clearly has none. But a more salutary lesson for politicians all over America is that people just hated those ghastly negative campaign commercials. At last — at long, long last — living proof that negative ads do not work. Don't you love it? Hours of ads proclaiming that Ron Paul wants to sell cocaine to schoolchildren and eats babies for breakfast only caused us to conclude that the guy running against him was complete sludge. Take note, you schlockmeisters around the nation: Take down your negative ads and get right with Jesus before it's too late. National notes: A sign outside Missoula, Mont., reads, "Well, at least our cows are sane." A mad-cow joke: First Cow to Second Cow: "Are you worried about mad-cow disease?" Second Cow: "No. Why should I be? I'm a penguin." And to my fellow procrastinators, now wasting the beautiful days of spring as we wrestle with our W-2s, subtracting line 21A from line 337B and attempting to find our gross taxable on the chart: Meditate on the splendid results we are getting for our money. If anyone suggests that we could have done this back in February, we can just pull out our soon-to-be re-legalized assault weapons and kill them. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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