Sadler in uphill battle for Senate

Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Paul Sadler, left, and Grady Yarbrough debate before their runoff matchup, Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at KERA-TV studios in Dallas. Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Paul Sadler, left, and Grady Yarbrough debate before their runoff matchup, Tuesday, June 26, 2012 at KERA-TV studios in Dallas. Photo: AP Photo: AP Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Sadler in uphill battle for Senate 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

In Victoria on a recent Saturday afternoon, the candidate for the U.S. Senate had the crowd on its feet. The shouts and applause washed over the meeting room like waves on the nearby Gulf of Mexico. As he wrapped his 15-minute jeremiad warning of the havoc his opponent would wreak on thestate and as he began making his way to the back of the room, an older woman in a red pantsuit sought to recapture the crowd's attention.

“This campaign costs money,” she shouted into the microphone several times, but only those within a few feet of her were listening. One of them eventually doffed his straw hat, which became a makeshift collection basket for a statewide campaign tossing nickels and dimes at an opponent awash in money and nationwide ardor.

The Victoria experience represents the Paul Sadler campaign in miniature. Little-known statewide and vastly underfunded, the lawyer and former state representative from Henderson is a capable campaigner, an experienced lawmaker and a credible candidate for a party desperately in need of new faces and arresting ideas.

Sadler's problem is that his GOP opponent, tea party favorite Ted Cruz, has been all but anointed the successor to retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. Cruz has money, star power and the overwhelming advantage of being a Republican in the most fervid of red states. In last month's Senate runoffs, 1.1 million Texas Republicans cast a ballot, compared with 235,000 Democrats.

Sadler survived a Democratic primary scare from an opponent with no political experience whatsoever. Records show he raised about $140,000 before the primary, while Cruz gathered about $8.8 million from across the country, which he used to vanquish early favorite Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.

“About $50,000 came in right after the primary, but I can't even get the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to return my calls,” Sadler said. In his travels around the state, he's asking 1 million Texans to donate $10 each to his campaign so he can be competitive with a candidate who is, in Sadler's words, “the most anti-American, anti-Texan candidate for the United States Senate we have seen in the history of this state.”

Sadler said he is skipping the Democratic National Convention, although he supports the ticket. He will use that time, he said, to introduce himself to Texas voters.

Like Cruz, trial lawyer Sadler is an effective debater. The two have agreed to at least one debate this fall, possibly more.

Sadler's campaign stump speech has gotten stronger and more succinct in the weeks and months since he announced his candidacy last January. He also has gotten more negative, urging Cruz to go back to Canada where he was born and questioning whether he's a true Hispanic. Cruz, who is Cuban-American, was born in Calgary, in Western Canada, but grew up in Houston.

The Cruz campaign declined to comment.

Sadler, who served as president of the Austin-based Wind Coalition before launching his Senate campaign, also insists that independent voters and moderate Republicans, including officeholders past and present, are taking a look at his candidacy because of their concerns about Cruz and his “fringe” ideas.

“They say, ‘We're going to be there on Election Day. We know him (Cruz), and he's not what we need,'” Sadler said. “All I can say publicly is that there's a movement afoot here. People know the tea party doesn't reflect them. They know the divisive nature of the tea party doesn't reflect all of Texas.”

Texas voters have come to know Cruz, regardless of whether they agree with him, but a relative few know Sadler, who would be the first Democrat to hold statewide office since 1994.

Victoria resident Jim Busby, 64, a process operator for a local chemical plant, said after Sadler's speech that he came to the forum knowing his name but not much else. “I know he's got an extremely uphill battle,” he said. “I know a lot about Cruz, and he scares me to death.”

Sadler's problem, in addition to money, is that his political accomplishments are more than a decade old. He had to remind his Victoria listeners that he was co-sponsor in the Texas Legislature of the Ratliff-Sadler Act, a comprehensive rewrite of the Texas Education Code in 1995.

“That Sadler guy happens to be me,” he explained in his East Texas twang. “One of those guys (former state Sen. Bill Ratliff) happens to be a Republican. It was passed at a time when you had a Democratic House by a small majority, a Republican Senate and you had a Republican governor and a Democratic lieutenant governor and a Democratic speaker. It was as bipartisan as you can be.”

Ratliff, an East Texas Republican and former lieutenant governor who retired from the Senate in 2004, called Sadler “extremely smart. He could manage the House floor as well as anybody I've seen. You don't work as a trial advocate without developing a lot of those skills.”

Sadler, a moderate who served as chairman of the House Public Education Committee, was on Texas Monthly's “10 Best” list in four of the six sessions he served, including 1997, when he was, in the words of the magazine, “the dominant figure in the session's dominant issue, Governor Bush's drive for significant property-tax relief.”

In 1999, Texas Monthly called him “obstinate, autocratic, sanctimonious, uncollegial, unforthcoming, infuriating.” Nevertheless, the magazine concluded, “he passed the biggest and best bill of the session,” an education bill that included a $3,000 pay raise for teachers, a $1.35 billion cut for property-tax payers and $800 million in new educational spending.

Sadler, 57, is trying to use his legislative experience against Cruz, who at 42 has never held elective office.

“I am tried, I am tested, I am a known quantity,” he told his Victoria audience. “What the Republican Party has asked you to do is to take someone who is untried, untested and unknown. We have no idea what this young man will do with the responsibilities of a United States senator, but you know exactly who I am.”

joe.holley@chron.com

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