Bad Hair or Badass?

Perhaps I’m naïve, but it makes no sense to me that Bill White is opting to sit out of the upcoming senate race. White has spent a great deal of time and money building statewide name recognition, and attracted a decent number of voters while running for governor. A race he actually entered after originally starting to run for the senate. So why quit now?

I’m disappointed, and find it incredibly demoralizing that we may go one more election cycle without an electable Democrat running for this seat.

My preference would be for Bill White to run. He’d make one hell of a senator, regardless of how bad his hair is.

[Bill wearing Willie Nelson’s hair, arguably not a great look. I should add that I don’t think he actually has bad hair, but that seemed to be a trope in his campaign, and my headline writers seized upon it, so there it is.]

To run, I do think he’d need to take the advice so many have offered, unsolicited, to shake up his campaign strategy and bring in some proven statewide campaign staff.

But just run, dude, and I promise not to micromanage. You will never again have the same level of momentum or statewide name recognition. Don’t squander it.

But if he does, if he squanders it, who else is there?

I heard an intriguing suggestion on Partisan Gridlock today.

Tommy Lee Jones should run for the open seat.

1. He’s a Texan who lives in Texas.
2. He’s bilingual, speaking both English and Spanish.
3. He has seen life from both sides of the tracks. He’s the son of an oil field worker and a teacher/salon owner/police officer (a.k.a. your average badass Texas mom) who grew up in Midland but went to Harvard. On scholarship. He roomed with Al Gore, and/but (choose your own conjunction depending upon where you stand on Gore) he also played football on a winning varsity team.
4. He plays total badasses in movies. He’s been a marshal so many times he practically already represents the government.
5. He’s a good ol’ Texas progressive, as far as I can tell, and that’s a species worth preserving.

Why not Tommy Lee Jones? Plenty of actors and cowboys go to Washington and do just fine, and TLJ is both. Plus a football star. I mean come on, we’re talking about Texas, people! If we can’t elect this, then we need to hang it up and just slap Baja Oklahoma on our license plates.

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