In Texas, the party of Jefferson Davis wins

Texas is a red state on the road to becoming a purple state. The question is whether Gov. Rick Perry’s easy victory in Tuesday’s Republican primary will accelerate that trend.

The remarkable thing about the Texas primary is that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whom Perry trounced, came to be seen as some kind of liberal by Texas Republican primary voters. Hutchison was endorsed by, among others, Vice President Dick Cheney, hardly a friend of the squishy soft left. Her record is solidly conservative.

But Perry, knowing that voters perceived him as a lackluster governor, knew his only hope was to blast through by using ideological dynamite. So a man who has been in office for nearly a decade cast himself as an anti-Washington hero and even once suggested that secession was a reasonable course given the policies that President Obama was pushing in Washington.

Not only did Perry do well, but Debra Medina, an extreme right-wing Tea Partier, racked up close to a fifth of the vote. Perry avoided a runoff with just over half the vote, leaving Hutchison -- well-liked and once the favorite -- with a paltry 30 percent.

How far right can the Republican Party go before it starts losing the more moderate sorts conservatives? These are voters who may not like taxes but also don’t like talk of secession and expect their government to accomplish a few practical things.

That’s what will be tested this fall. The Democrats nominated moderate Bill White, the former Mayor of Houston who is perfectly positioned to win votes from non-ideologues in all parties.

Over time, Texas is destined to become less solidly Republican. The state’s Latino vote will continue to grow, and newcomers will change the state’s political character, as they have changed Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, the three southern states carried by Obama in 2008. It may still be too early in that transition process for Democrats to expect victory in Texas, but a Perry-White faceoff is about the best matchup Democrats could have hoped for.



It’s also worth noting an interesting pattern. Twice now, Bush presidencies have been followed by a reaction on the right. The first President Bush, a genuinely moderate sort of conservative, raised taxes to balance the budget -- a courageous act -- and alienated the right end of his party. Republicans became more conservative under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and swept to their 1994 midterm victory.

George W. Bush hoped to learn from his father’s problems. He cut taxes and cut them again and tried not to get crosswise with the party’s right wing. But now conservatives view even the second Bush as a sellout, and so they move, inexorably it seems, ever farther to the right. Perry owes his career to W., who worked hard to make sure Perry was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1998. Now, Perry is happily moving beyond his patron and occupying ground on the right end of the Texas GOP that W. himself found uninviting.

And, yes, there remains that matter of secession. How many Republicans can be happy that a wing of the party of Abraham Lincoln seems so eager to turn the GOP into the party of Jefferson Davis?