There is a lot of hot air filling the Parent PAC balloon right now in Austin, and it isn’t necessarily Parent PAC’s fault.

In a panel discussion last week moderated by Evan Smith, journalists rehearsed the talking point that is coming to carry more and more of the moderate messaging load in Austin. It goes something like, ”Boy, Parent PAC sure was impressive in the primaries – right guys?”

Parent PAC is being promoted because school funding leads the moderate/liberal push for more spending and Parent PAC is a political symbol of “more school funding”. Parent PAC contributed money to 11 winning legislative primary campaigns.

On the whole, the 2012 primaries were a big win for conservative in the House and Senate. There is no need to rehearse the new makeup of the Senate or our moderate Speaker’s long and impressive list of fallen/retired comrades. Conservatives have a clear mandate in the 83rd legislature.

Parent PAC’s alleged glittering success in the primary is the moderate counter-narrative, one that looks like it will be leaned on heavily in the House.

However, can Parent PAC’s eleven wins bear the weight of the moderate counter-narrative being promoted? Let’s take a look.

First of all, Parent PAC went 11-13 in the primary season. That’s 11 wins and 13 losses, nothing to write home about, especially since their losses included entrenched incumbents Sen. Jeff Wentworth and Rep. Todd Smith. Both of these men were beaten by candidates firmly supported by conservatives. Donna Campbell’s win over Jeff Wentworth was nothing short of spectacular. Parent PAC had no corresponding inspirational, severe-underdog victories.

In fact, Parent PAC targeted four strong conservative incumbents in fair fights. They were Dan Flynn, Bryan Hughes, Bill Zedler, and Debbie Riddle. Parent PAC decisively lost all four of these primaries.

Let’s look at their 11 wins.

Two were in Democratic primaries, which doesn’t  help their narrative. Anyone who would have won a Democratic primary, with or without Parent PAC help, would have been in favor of maximum school spending. Growing government is what Democrats do. Unlike moderates, they don’t hide it.

This leaves Parent PAC nine wins with which to spin a legitimate moderate counter-narrative.

The two strong conservative incumbents Parent PAC defeated were unfair fights. Wayne Christian and Jim Landtroop were redistricted out of 80% of their districts in order to make them vulnerable. No fair observer is claiming these two men weren’t gerrymandered out of their seats by Team Straus.

This leaves Parent PAC seven wins with which to spin a moderate counter-narrative.

Two of their vanquished foes, Marva Beck and Sid Miller, were abandoned by conservatives after they squarely sided with moderate Speaker Joe Straus over the conservative Ken Paxton in the 2011 speaker race. These races may have been missed opportunities for conservatives, but they do not help to prove moderates are preferred to conservatives, as Austin insiders are promoting. These two candidates were associated with Team Moderate. For political purposes these two races were moderates beating moderates.

This leaves Parent PAC five wins with which to spin a legitimate moderate counter-narrative.

Two of these Parent PAC “victories” really have no business being attributed to Parent PAC. Greg Bonnen is the first. He raised and spent over $1 million in his campaign. While Parent PAC plus Charles Butt (Butt is Parent PAC’s super-majority donor) gave him real money – $29,000 – this was a small percentage of his total fundraising and spending. In addition, Bonnen had the support of much of the conservative movement.

Parent PAC gave Ed Thompson a paltry $500, and Thompson was endorsed by the popular outgoing Representative Randy Weber, fresh off of voting against Joe Straus for Speaker. To call this a Parent PAC win is a stretch. It was a Weber win before it was a Parent PAC win.

This leaves Parent PAC three wins with which to spin a legitimate moderate counter-narrative.

In two Parent PAC candidate wins, Jason Villalba and Cecil Bell, they were blessed with an opponent who refused to do negative campaigning. Not “going negative,” while often well-intended, is also dangerous. The populous has come to expect to hear both what is right and what is wrong with a candidate from his opponent. The net result of not providing this information is that the voters think there is nothing wrong with one candidate and something wrong with the other.

Even with legitimately mitigating circumstances, these were two of the wins that best fit the moderate counter-narrative.

So, out of 24 races played in, Parent PAC has only two or three that can be credibly claimed to fit the “moderate, not conservative” counter-narrative  being pushed in Austin.

This isn’t a primary record to brag about. The moderate load that is increasingly being placed on Parent PAC’s primary involvement is not credible.

There are two kinds of education advocates in Texas – education reform advocates and anti-reform education advocates. Both groups will be active in 2013.

Anti-reform advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas recently produced a poll negatively portraying online education options.

Currently Texas spends more than $12,000 a year per student, a result of a steady and alarming non-teacher hiring inflation that has seen Texas public schools go from six teachers per non-teacher in the ’70s to a 1:1 ratio today.

Charles Butt of HEB sits on the advisory board of Raise Your Hand Texas. Butt also provides most of the money to Parent PAC, a group that actively opposed conservatives during the 2012 primary season.

In addition to its electoral efforts, Parent PAC has signaled it will work against efforts to reform our broken public education system, including opposing school vouchers, a measure that would afford parents options in educating their child.

Another anti-reform Raise Your Hand advisory board member is Kenny Jastrow. Mr. Jastrow has been very active over the last two years. In 2011 Jastrow helped mount a PR campaign to kill proposed accountability and cost savings measures for the University of Texas, where tuition inflation has become notorious.

During the higher-ed fight last year, the Texas Tribune reported with a decidedly anti-reform bent. The Jastrow Foundation and Butts are donors to the Tribune.

The school reform fight is coming. It will feature a bloated school bureaucracy on one side, protecting their positions of privilege and power, and Texas parents on the other side, demanding common sense accountability, cost-effectiveness, and choice in education.

In a recent interview State Rep. Mike Villareal noted what is already common knowledge about the coming 83^rd Legislature – that a Straus-led House will be the moderate obstacle to an otherwise conservative state government.

Voters and Lt. Gov. Dewhurst have taken the Senate in a decidedly conservative direction. Gov. Perry is more in line with grassroots than ever, as evidenced by his Budget Compact.

This creates a situation in which a speaker vote for Joe Straus is a vote to create an obstacle to the grassroots, the conservative movement, the Governor, the Lt. Governor, the Senate, and a growing conservative House contingent in 2013.

It’s a good time to be a conservative in Texas. For the first time in any Texan’s lifetime, liberals are concerned with the care and feeding of high school football in Texas. Oh, the hilarity.

The San Marcos Mercury reported on a progressive advocacy group called “Progress Texas” running ads, not for “save the whales”, but for “save the lineman”. This progressive advocacy group has taken up the cause of the Texas high school football player.

Strange, right? Remember when progressives were freaks, conservatives were squares, and jocks were Team Square’s leading men? My how times have changed.

Progress Texas is the latest project of Texas liberal activist Matt Glazer. One of their primary projects right now is forcing the implementation of ObamaCare and promoting green energy. Green energy has the destruction of Texas’s outstanding oil and gas industry as a  necessary condition for its success. Glazer recently worked on a well-funded project to win control of the Texas House for Democrats for the 82nd Legislature so they could control redistricting. They ended up with the fewest House democrats in history.

In reality, liberals could care less about Texas high school football. This is a cynical attempt to throw red meat to conservative football-loving Texans, hoping to make them oppose the improvement of their children’s schools by scaring them about the future of Texas high school football.

These progressives also happen to be wrong in the point they are making. Not that it’s a good idea, but school vouchers open up the possibility of opening football super-schools. Talent from all over a region could pool at a new voucher-accepting private school.

Schools could also have a special emphasis on math, science, art, great books, business, or other disciplines. With vouchers,  parents get to set priorities.

School vouchers would create new schools to compete with public schools all over the state, and all schools will improve as a result. Existing private schools could elect not to take vouchers in order to avoid having any new requirements, and it is likely many would. But vouchers would open a new market for private voucher schools to spring up everywhere with parent-pleasing policy, forcing public schools to improve or shrink or both. Texas students would be the beneficiaries.

In theory, a  private voucher schools could be named Roger Staubuch High if there is a demand, attracting the best players in the area. Schools could work from a base of traditional values instead of the radical progressive paradigm Texas children are subjected to now.

The point is, parents would finally get to choose.

During the last speaker’s race there was one political play we at AgendaWise thought would be the most difficult for conservatives to deal with. Not sure how good Team Straus was, we watched and waited. They never made the play.

The play was this: recruit a conservative, let him support and vote for Ken Paxton, and keep a nice legislative voting record. While he does these things, have him spread doom and gloom among conservatives.

Why would this have been smart for Team Straus?

On an obvious level, you have someone on the inside making Team Paxton sick. That alone is worth its weight in gold, especially in the context of such a bold move.

In addition, such a move provides insurance. You now have on your team someone who can run for speaker if conservatives overwhelm moderates with sustained growth over the course of two or three or four sessions.

And a candidate like this would win easily. In fact, this situation is the most potent possible electoral combination: a very conservative campaign pleases the voters and the establishment hangs back because it understands what is happening.

In a situation like this, you’d find the media inexplicably wearing kid gloves during the run of a very conservative candidate, something that normally wouldn’t happen. Both sources of political power, voters and special interests, would be happy.

Should Straus win, the likely payoff for such service would be the surprise appointment of this Straus “opponent” to chair a decent committee and, unlike all the other conservatives, treatment by moderate and liberal peers as something other than a pariah.

This would provide a double benefit to Team Straus. They could appear magnanimous and calm by giving power to a supposed enemy and arch-conservative. It could become the symbol of Straus taking conservatives seriously. This could be useful in calming the conservative hordes.

During the first speaker race we speculated that Sid Miller might fit the bill, but nothing ever happened.

And that is the real question – do you have the right guy available?

You’d probably need one of two kinds of people. The first kind is a conservative who has a price and can admit that to himself. This happens.

In fact, moderates constantly need new conservative recruits to improve their team image since they consistently displease conservatives, and this kind of recruitment happens with activists all of the time, not just legislators.

The other type is a true believer who is too weak to handle combat and capable of convincing himself he is doing the moral thing.

The flaw with such a play this time is that the Tea Party Awakening has made the grassroots smarter.

It used to be that only legislative voting records mattered. Not anymore. Texans have discovered that the battle to get a bill to the floor is just as important as the floor vote.

Tea Party leaders are learning which legislators fight the tough fights and which ones fight against good bills, then step in front of conservative legislation that can’t be avoided in order to take the credit.

Behind-the-scenes work on bills is important, but not more than a legislator’s effect on general morale. For conviction conservatives, this is key. Conservatives constantly afraid to upset moderates and liberals are a liability.

This kind of play would be much easier to respond to this time than last time.

Lawmakers rarely let their guard down, but it happens sometimes when they are on their way out of office. There are two recent examples of this from the exiting establishment crowd.

The first is Representative Burt Solomons. This weekend the retiring lawmaker had a colorful Twitter exchange with one of his constituents. A condescending Solomons mocked her for being on “meds.”

LOL…I see where u have to have the last word. Please, please increase ur meds & get some rest!

— Burt R. Solomons (@burtrsolomons) October 21, 2012

@marisamarshall Glad the meds are working. Take care & get some rest. :-)

— Burt R. Solomons (@burtrsolomons) October 21, 2012

Solomons was one of the “Gang of 11″ Republican lawmakers who sided with Democrats in 2009 to elect Joe Straus as Speaker of the House. In 2011 Solomons chaired the roundly decried Redistricting Committee.

The other example is Senator Florence Shapiro. Normally establishment moderates don’t broadcast their affection for Texas Municipal League (TML) and Texas Association of Counties (TAC) since both groups use tax funding to lobby for higher taxes, something conservatives oppose. As a result, moderates generally support TML and TAC on the down-low.

Stakes are suddenly lower for the outgoing Senator Shapiro, though. In a hearing to consider constitutional spending limits, Shapiro chastised a citizen for saying TML and TAC were tax-funded lobbyists.

The citizen was right. Taxpayer advocate group Empower Texans pointed out the ways in which TML and TAC have worked against taxpayers.

If either one of these moderates had spoken their minds when they were seeking office, it would have been much more difficult to win. However, the guard seems to come down when they have nothing left to lose.

The vestiges of affirmative action are facing the gallows as Supreme Court Justices decide Fisher v UT, argued recently in our nation’s highest court. The court will issue its decision next year.

This case exemplifies the new chapter in the civil rights struggle in which conservatives are leading the way. In Fisher v UT, Fisher argues that the maintenance of race as an admissions factor creates a badge of inferiority for thousands of minority students who have earned admittance on an even basis.

Unvarnished affirmative action was judged by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional racial discrimination 12 years ago.

Through a little guile, the spirit of affirmative action has lived on in a new admissions regime in which “race is one of many factors taken into account”. It was thought that without an explicitly racist formula, as existed under original affirmative action, de facto affirmative action could be preserved.

It appears likely that de facto affirmative action will be ended when this decision is released, lifting the cloud that this unwanted and unnecessary policy has placed over qualified minority students.

SCOTUSblog post analyzing Fisher v UT

Earlier this year in a Sunset Commission meeting for the Texas Lottery Commission, a commissioner said that the Sunset Commission doesn’t sunset agencies. That’s not their job. Their job is to make sure agencies are “operating effectively.”

Actually, he was wrong. In 2009 the Texas Residential Construction Commission was sunsetted by the sunset commission. So, the Sunset Commission can sunset after all.

The running joke in Austin is that the Sunset Commission was sold as a way to end unnecessary or problem agencies, but has become a mechanism to grow them. That is, Sunset examines how “effectively” the agencies are being run and shockingly discovers that agencies need things like “wider missions”, “more resources,” and “the (increased) authority to be effective”.

Not only that, but all kinds of goodies that have nothing to do with the agency under review get put into sunset bills. This Grade A corruption would be impossible if Texas passed a constitutional amendment requiring any contents of any bill to be germane to the title of the bill. Currently the Senate may treat any bill as Christmas tree to hang goodies on. The GOP platform supports a germaneness rule for both legislative chambers.

The conventional wisdom, that the sunset process often makes things worse, certainly appeared to be on display as the commissioner grilled a witness who was advocating for sunsetting the Texas Lottery. The witness was making excellent points that the commissioner raised his voice to try to counteract.

One of those points was that the lottery is a tax on the poor.

Actually, the commissioner seemed to agree with the point, arguing a way to fix the optics of the problem but not the problem itself.

The problem is that it makes no sense to specially tax people who have very little money, much or all of which is provided by the taxpayer.

What was the commissioner’s proposed solution to the problem of poor people buying lottery tickets they can’t afford? Entice rich people to buy them too so we won’t all look so bad. It was an aesthetic-only fix. The suggested “solution” leaves the existence of this poor tax completely untouched.

The witness then smartly pointed out that the Lottery Commission already tried to attract players who can afford to play via the introduction of the $50 ticket. The scheme failed. It turns out that people who can afford to play the lottery just aren’t going to play.

Furthermore, the Texas Lottery has a pattern of bad behavior, helping racetrack owners circumvent the legislature to get slot machines legalized.

In Texas, if one of the gambling oligopolies gets a new privilege, the other ones get it too. The Texas Lottery keeps trying schemes to help racetrack owners legalize the components needed to get slot machines for racetrack owners. Racetrack owners call slot machines “VLTs”.

The Sunset Commission was set up to sunset unnecessary and problem agencies, and many are saying the Texas Lottery Commission fits the bill to a tee.

–To watch the Sunset Commission exchange, go to this website and click on the “audio” link for April 10, 2012 and jump to 7:26:30

With nothing to do, Texas liberals are reduced to dreamy forecasts about the future of Texas politics. They’ve gone from “hope and change” to “hope and pray,” except that they don’t generally pray.

The clung-to hope among Texas liberals, and it is their only hope, is that as Hispanics become a bigger percentage of the population, Texas will swing back to the Democratic Party. At the very least, Texas will become a swing state, or so the incantation goes.

Unfortunately for liberals, a brand new Baselice poll in Texas reveals that Hispanics favor the Republican Cruz to the Democratic Sadler by 9 points and Obama’s edge on Romney is a paltry 9 points. Texas Hispanics are becoming Republican, and doing so faster than Hispanics in other states. This is par for the course. Texas leads.

Texas liberals will surely rack their brains and come up with an excuse for why Cruz/Sadler is a one-time-thing for Hispanics. That way  they can go back to expecting a growing Hispanic population to someday save them from irrelevancy.

There are problems with this expectation, though.

Texas has been getting more and more Hispanic for decades. In that same period, however, Texas has gotten more and more Republican.

To be sure, there is a major mitigating factor here. During the same time period conservative Texas Democrats have been switching parties. So, while Hispanic Texans have been adding Democratic votes, other Texans have been shedding them even faster. This is basically true.

The problem with this phenomenon offering long term hope to liberals is twofold.

First, rural Texas hasn’t fully switched parties yet.

Liberals can count this process as over, much as they’ve counted out the oil and gas industry with authoritative pronouncements about alternative energy. In truth, oil and gas probably doesn’t have much more than a century, century-and-a-half of growth and expansion left before it starts to contract. So, in a way the liberals are right, if a bit premature. Mostly they are wrong.

They aren’t as badly wrong about the Texas party switch being finished, but they are wrong. Anyone with family in east Texas hears someone new every cycle saying they just voted Republican for the first time in their life. The Democratic Party long ago forsook these people in order to triple-deliver the Manhattan/San Francisco style vote, and it will be the party’s undoing.

Secondly, and more importantly, Hispanics are becoming Republican.

Let’s back up. Hispanics are conservative and always have been; virtually nobody argues with this.

Hispanics were Democrats for various reasons. First, Democrats were the immigrant party in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries because they were the labor party. Working conditions were pretty poor in some places and the Democrats took up their cause. Secondly, the Democratic Party took up the cause of the poor, a feature that appealed to the Catholic sensibilities of Hispanics. Finally, the Democratic Party made room for Catholic immigrants in the face of nativism.

The Democratic Party has managed to strategically give away two of these hills, and the other has succumbed to the forces of time. In fact, the Democratic Party no longer truly owns any of these advantages, and their old constituencies are coming to understand this.

How has the Democratic Party given away all three advantages with Hispanics?

First, the Democrats’ old moves are hurting average union members in a new world. You think not? Then why card check? If unions still served member interests, they wouldn’t have to intimidate members into voting with them. The situation has ripened for a counter-revolution in how the rank-and-file behave politically. If not a counter-revolution, the slow bleed has already begun.

In truth, the labor movement’s legitimate gains happened a long time ago, and is now engaged in fattening labor leaders and politicians to the detriment of members. They are endangering employers ability to employ people.

Secondly, the Democratic Party has taken to spending the vast political capital they accumulated building the social safety net, and they have nearly drained it.

By force of habit they push for more freebies, but these freebies are different.  Instead of reinforcing the dignity of people, these freebies damage it by stealing initiative and self-reliance. They are always packaged with a ready-made victim narrative to reinforce self-doubt, hopelessness, and dependency on a paternalistic party.

It is a deep historical irony that Republicans like Paul Ryan are protecting the social safety net against its parent party, who, like rats who’ve stayed too long in the presence of their offspring, have decided to eat them.

What else can be said about a party that decided to take the better part of a trillion dollars out of Medicaid to pay for the unwanted, unsolicited monstrosity called ObamaCare? Or a stubborn refusal to admit that age demographics require a restructuring of social security if it is to survive at all?

Finally, faithful Protestants and Catholics have found each other politically. A couple dozen decades getting to know one another can have that effect on people who, while perhaps different in some flashy ways, are almost identical where it counts politically. Time has built this relationship, and we are in a new American era of cooperation among the faithful.

The political partnership of Tony Perkins, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee is a nice symbol of this, but it isn’t driving it. It is the other way around. Realities on the ground drove this partnership, and others like it all over the land.

Losing or taking for granted these major factors that wed Hispanics to the Democratic Party for decades has created another problem. It has opened up the Democratic Party to latent weaknesses they’ve had for some time, but that were suppressed by strengths now gone.

Roe vs. Wade was a time bomb for the Democratic Party. It drove the parties to realign on ideological lines. We used to have a party of northern conservatives and liberals plus southern inroads (GOP) and a party of southern conservatives and liberals plus northern immigrants who had less stake in the Civil War (Democratic Party).

The New Deal, Great Society caused significant realignment, but Roe vs. Wade cemented them into the American liberal and the American conservative parties. Americans are conservative in label by a strong plurality. Americans are conservative on the issues overwhelmingly, including Hispanics.

Our country’s elite helped a left wing snob become President and the Democratic Party’s mask was put in a drawer for a while. Government takeover of health care? Forcing Christian businesses to pay for abortions? The only American President ever to publicly support redefining marriage? A rhetorical campaign to help switch our expansive “freedom of religion” into a cramped and oppressive “freedom of worship” from the President himself? The Democratic Party may have overestimated the number of Sean Penns in the country by a 10 or 20 million.

In addition, there is the promotion of Julian Castro as the Democratic anti-Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz largely embodies the Hispanic future in the Republican Party. The choice of Castro as Hispanic Democrat standard bearer in Texas might even hasten a manly Hispanic realization of how unappealing the Democratic Party has become.

Finally, one of the most important factor of all – lots of Texas Hispanics are making money now.  Building small businesses turns people into fiscal conservatives. It teaches people how hard it is to create wealth and jobs, and reveals the recklessness of the government class in presuming upon the health and growth of businesses.

By finding themselves on the wrong side of everything that gave them dominance among Hispanics, the Texas Democratic Party has opened itself up to their latent weaknesses with the same group.

Historical inertia is the only friend the Texas Democratic Party has left with Texas Hispanics. In truth, the party no longer has much business receiving their vote.

Parent PAC is a save-the-status-quo-in-education special interest group who played heavily in the past primary. A recently published Liberty Institute voter guide shows just how hollow supposed PPAC victories in the primary were, despite considerable bluster to the contrary.

This year, Liberty Institute asked candidates if they supported competition for K-12 education dollars. Competition for education dollars is what Parent PAC exists to protect against. Thirty-five GOP candidates indicated they agree to strongly agree with the statement.

Embarrassingly, several of them were endorsed by Parent PAC. They are Bennett Ratliff of HD-112, Ed Thompson of HD-29, Greg Bonnen of HD-24, and JD Sheffield of HD-59. Bonnen’s position was previously unclear, having been backed by groups on both sides of the issue. Parent PAC has thus far counted him among their victories.

We previously discussed how Parent PAC’s results have been overhyped. This is more evidence in that vein.

Even worse, none of Parent PAC’s supposed candidates voiced strong opposition, or any opposition at all, to systemic reform in education. It seems the best Parent PAC’s could do in primaries was to help elect a few candidates willing to straddle the issue in public.

The group’s activities were hyped by Austin based publications including Mike Hailey, writing for Capitol Inside.

Parent PAC GOP primary endorsees who straddled the fence on the Liberty Institute K-12 reform question include Chris Paddie, Ken King, Trent Ashby, Jason Villalba and Cecil Bell, Jr.

A weakened Speaker’s team must now do something they had hoped would be unnecessary: hustle speaker votes.

In Straus’ perfect world, it would be unnecessary for Team Straus to make a single phone call or have a single meeting. The speaker vote would be a foregone conclusion.

That is not the world we are in, though Team Straus still projects this perception, even while acting out of accord with it.

Pressure from his team on previously unpressured legislators can be expected to increase after election day. Establishment capital media will spin in his favor, too.

Mike Hailey of Capitol Inside gave us an early look at the quality of spin available to them. Hailey strongly insinuated that incoming freshman Giovanni Capriglione was leaning toward Straus. This was naked, reaching  speculation. Hailey never spoke to Gio, and incoming freshmen had a good laugh at the notion.

In the end, Straus’ best political friend is his veneer of inevitability.

In fact, Straus has a poor relationship with many of the most powerful people in his state and his state party. There are even rumors that the captains of the legislative crew Straus represents are shopping for a replacement.

His crew are the liberal Republicans. They are closer to the Democrats than the rest of their own party. They inflate the importance of the Democrats and deflate the importance of the rest of their own party in order to get to their desired destination – “forced” to contend much more heavily than necessary with the party Texas voters keep thinking they’ve voted into irrelevancy.

This is not the crew that should be in charge of this political cycle in Texas, and their hold on power is increasingly tenuous.

Over the weekend RedState released offensive emails, showing the Speaker’s team was working against conservatives in redistricting, that they have disdain for the tea party, and that they have filthy mouths.

The Texas GOP platform has a plank calling for the Republican House members, after the November election and leading up to the Legislative session, to hold public town hall meetings in which the voters can express their wishes and thoughts about the leadership for the 83^rd Session.

No doubt the Speaker’s team won’t respect this plank of the Republican platform any more than they respect Republican voters.

The problem for them is, the grassroots is much more aware than before, and are promising to recruit against Representatives who vote wrong in the Speaker’s race. Recruitment against Straus supporters last time was extremely successful, though not widespread. If needed, such activity is poised to be greater next cycle.

Former establishment Republican State Rep. Burt Solomons, still marinating in his own political failure, tweeted this morning on the re-election of Obama. His conclusion? Obama’s victory over Romney means America didn’t want to follow the “tea party loons”.

Trying to slip nonsense of this caliber into the Texas water supply takes gumption. Solomons gets credit for that. And his timing was good. He tried it while conservatives, our state and nation’s biggest electoral group, is low, mourning the re-election of the worst President in American history.

Otherwise, his analysis befits his place on the ash heap of Texas political history.

Conservatives didn’t get to be “for” anyone in this election. They only got to be against somebody.

Remember how the GOP nominated the most liberal guy in the field? Remember – it was the guy who invented ObamaCare, and who only became pro-life and pro-gun when he needed to win a nationwide primary? Remember how the GOP establishment bought the primary for him one two week-long shock-and-awe state ad campaign at a time?

The tea party did not lose this election. One of the weakest Presidential incumbents in a generation won because the wing of the party Solomons belongs to walked away from the GOP primary happy.

The GOP nominated an uber-disciplined, mild-mannered, across-the-board moderate who pleased the lobby but left everyone else totally unsatisfied.

In fact, the GOP nominee reminded you a  lot of Solomon’s old leader, Speaker Joe Straus, who was an early endorser of Romney’s.

I wonder what the Burt Solomons of the world were saying at this stage back in 1980. The truth of their electoral theory was put to the test. The guy who was supposedly “all base, no crossover appeal” won by an electoral margin of 489 to 49.

Burt’s mood is understandable. He was replaced by a Tea Party guy.

But his logic is tortured.You don’t get to disavow your own guy. This loss is on the doorstep of the people the Tea Party came to replace.

When we have a conservative at the top of the ticket we’ll all remember what a Tea Party election feels like.

Republicans will look back at Mark Shelton’s campaign as a squandered opportunity. Like a specter, the incompetence arrived early and hovered.

Right off the bat, the Shelton campaign allowed the Wendy Davis campaign to get a hold of the script for their first anti-Davis TV ad. The Davis campaign rebutted the ad before anyone saw it. More importantly, they established a sense of being in command.

And, in a year with precious little oxygen for state races on account of an engrossing Presidential race, the Shelton campaign chose a complicated conspiracy narrative against Davis, instead of wielding the national energy by driving home Wendy Davis’s biggest, simplest weakness – that she is an Obama Democrat.

Finally, incompetency book-ended the campaign, when the Shelton campaign lodged a complaint with the Texas Ethics Commission that was tossed out for being wrongly filed. It was a fitting end to a dismal campaign.

Bryan Eppstein, the most expensive consultant in Texas, ran this shambles of a campaign, as he did the campaign of the Republican incumbent who originally lost the seat to Wendy Davis.

This Senate District (SD 10) includes all, or portions of, 5 Republican House Districts and 2 Democrat House Districts. Mitt Romney carried SD 10.

Eppstein is struggling to retain his slick self-presentation in the face of poor results, paid for at a premium.

In a new letter to the Democrat caucus pushed by Quorum Report, Trey Martinez-Fisher turned up the heat on Joe Straus.

Conservatives can agree with Martinez-Fisher that Straus is a serious problem.

Conservatives cannot agree with Martinez-Fisher that Straus is Texans for Lawsuit Reform’s best friend. He is not. From a legislative perspective, Straus was made speaker by, and inflates the influence of, the party that opposes tort reform.

Before the 82^nd Legislature, when the horse racing interests that Straus belongs to still had some hope of passing slot machine legislation, Democrat Megadonor Steve Mostyn became an owner of the Lone Star Park racing license. Straus also opposed TLR in several 2012 primaries.

Straus is less a friend of TLR than he pretends to be.

However, Straus angered Democrats with his disregard for the rules, and the consequences his behavior had on redistricting. Straus punished conservatives in redistricting, too.  Disregard for rules is a legitimate problem that weakens the state of Texas, and Straus should be held to account for it.

But the Trey Martinez-Fisher saga would obscure reality if it repaired well-earned cracks in Straus’ relationship with TLR and falsely painted conservatives as enemies of TLR.

Bill pre-filing for the 2013 session has begun. Yesterday, Senator Rodney Ellis D-Houston filed a casino gambling bill. According to several news articles Ellis is pushing the measure under the false promise of additional revenue.

Delusions of massive windfalls from expanded gambling are unsupported. Gambling economies in fact have to spend $3 for every $1 they collect.

Last month Ellis and John Montford appeared at a 2013 legislative preview at Rice University. Montford, a former Democrat lawmaker from West Texas and most recently an Obama handyman at GM, is the front man for the latest effort to increase gambling in Texas.

Similar measures have failed to pass the legislature, but a racing industry on life support has kept the threat alive for the last decade.

Reporting on the bill this morning, WOAI of San Antonio speculated that Joe Struas would be freed to weigh in on the matter in the upcoming session.

Straus remained silent on the issue last year because of his family’s interest in Retama Park in Selma. the Straus family has since sold its interest in Retama.

Unfortunately for Straus that dog won’t hunt. Straus and his family, while they may have divested from Retama, still have stakes in several other horse tracks around the state leaving Straus’ conflict of interest intact.

The Texas Tribune, effectively acting as Team Straus’ press secretary right now, did a speaker vote count by phone last week.

Thirty-one. That’s how many Representatives are willing to go on record as solid Straus votes right now. That means there are 129 votes somewhere on the wide spectrum of “maybe Straus, maybe Hughes”.

This is an embarrassment for a Straus Team that is rumored to have called members last week, puffing that they were releasing a list on Wednesday, and that everyone else was already on it. Wednesday came and went. This is next Wednesday. Oops.

The Tribune was quick to point out that they counted only one Hughes vote, Hughes himself, as if this restores order.

Even if this is true, a non-commital posture to the Boss and a non-committal posture to a rebel General are well beyond apples and oranges – they are apples and tire irons.

Today the Tribune ran Straus messaging about Bryan Hughes being a trial lawyer. AgendaWise wrote about that several weeks ago.

The fact is, Hughes voted in favor for every major piece of tort reform, and Texans for Lawsuit Reform isn’t trying to get rid of the right to a jury trial in Texas.

Rather, TLR has successfully fought the abuse of our court system. Only in a world in which TLR wants to abolish the right to a jury trial would they have any reason to oppose a Representative who has supported ending court system abuse, and who happens to also be a trial lawyer.

Straus, on the other hand, has as his speaker vote base the party of lawsuit abuse and open season on business. He even shared gambling interests with Steve Mostyn at the start of the 82^nd legislature, when Mostyn had been let into the ultra-exclusive racetrack license-holding club.

Team Straus was also puffing several weeks ago when a panel confidently declared that Straus had the votes, then began stuttering when an audience member asked if he had enough Republican votes.

Forget the Republicans. Straus doesn’t even have his Democratic base.

After the election a group of political observers gathered in Austin to debrief. Musing about the Senate District 10 race one journalist said there was no one happier that Wendy Davis had retained control of the seat than Speaker Joe Straus. Add Shelton’s consultant Bryan Eppstein to the list, since he lobbies for Texas Medical Association (TMA). TMA strongly supports ObamaCare, and supported Wendy Davis.

Why was Wendy Davis important? Had Mark Shelton been successful in taking out Davis the GOP would have two thirds control of the Senate. This would make the “two-thirds rule”, a Senate tradition that empowers the minority party, obsolete. A Shelton win would have benefitted Lt. Governor Dewhurst who has signaled a shift to the right after an electoral defeat this spring.

Unlike Dewhurst, Straus has been more outspoken than ever about his aversion to leading Texas conservatively.

The Shelton race was squandered via incompetence, as AgendaWise wrote last week. Shortly after posting our article we received additional reports on how ineptly the campaign was run, including volunteers offering services not being utilized and requested signs not being distributed. These are the basics.

Reports of Eppstein failing to take advantage of easy support were bolstered by insight from The Young Conservatives of Texas.

The group wrote that Eppstein often “refuses to work with the conservative grassroots to support their [conservative candidates] election.” YCT also performed an analysis of the election and revealed that Romney voters crossed over en masse to vote for Davis. Another strike against messaging that did not take advantage of Obama being at the top of the ticket.

In our post primary analysis Eppstein was the second worst major consultant in competitive race performance, winning 3 out of 9 races.

The Texas Tribune carried Straus propaganda in a guest column from Rep. Lyle Larson last week. In it, Larson used the tired line about how conservative the 82^nd Legislature was.

As an aside, it is notable that Straus has to run PR on the Tribune to bolster his conservative credibility. Weren’t we told Straus was so comfortable atop a mountain of pledges he promised to release several Wednesdays ago?

Correction: they weren’t pledges. It was supposed to be a list. Straus squandered the pledge system. They have yet to release a list. Empty threats and claims are a sign of the level the Straus regime has sunk to.

Several weeks ago, Straus’ buddies at The Texas Tribune made phone calls to legislators on their own, seemingly tired of Straus’ cavalier attitude to proving his invincibility. Straus’ invincibility is a reality the Tribune has been trading on.

The move backfired. Making the calls committed them to running the story. If they sat on the story after finding out Straus wasn’t as strong as he’s been claiming he is, their claim to journalistic integrity would have taken another hard hit.

So, the Tribune published the story about Straus only having 31 votes, some of whom have told Bryan Hughes to keep doing what he’s doing. Then, they buried the story and released a different one trying to weaken Bryan Hughes.

This is the context into which Larson wrote, and Smith published, this propaganda.

Larson’s appraised Straus a conservative due to the results of the 82^nd Legislature. He wants conservatives to be satisfied. This a dead talking point that the Straus crew seems unable to operate without.

Straus’ leadership was only conservative if it is judged out of context, as Straus lackeys unanimously recommend.

Given the makeup of the 82^nd Legislature, Vladimir Lenin would have presided over a “conservative” session. Tea Partiers changed the Republican/Democrat count from 76-74 to 101-49, remember? Voters ensured a conservative session.

The question is not about whether the most conservative House in Texas history had a conservative session. The question is, did Texas conservatives deliver in our up-cycle at least as much as liberals deliver in their up-cycles?

After all, government growth is cumulative. If conservatives don’t do at least as well in up-cycles as liberals do in theirs, the government grows, liberals win.

And, if Texans settle for mediocrity, the country is in trouble.

And just how do liberals do in their up-cycles? We have a prominent contemporary example to compare it to: our liberal post-2008 federal government.

After gaining the White House, holding one chamber of the legislature, and narrowly achieving a supermajority in the other, the federal government gave us liberalism on the march. America got bailouts, auto industry takeover, assault on religious liberty, and, drum roll please: ObamaCare. In a shock and awe campaign, liberals used their control of the federal government to serve up a revolution of sorts.

In the 82^nd Texas Legislature, conservatives had the Governor’s mansion, control of one chamber, and a super-majority in the other. It was the Lone Star State’s chance to set the tone for conservative results. What did we get?

We got a knock-down, drag out fight from the Straus-led moderates and liberals against Governor Perry and conservatives about using our savings account for recurring expenses we can’t afford. What was the expense we were fighting over? It was a budge hole left by the 81^st Legislature, a common tactic used to make a budget look more responsible than it is.

We also got a draft budget that didn’t lift a finger to find savings via reform – of any kind. Instead, it put all of the pressure on K-12 education, a move designed to break Texans’ will not to raise new revenues.

We also got the same old tricks used to kill conservative legislation – bills weren’t passed until the latest possible date so that conservative legislation our moderate House leadership didn’t like could be put off until next time. Again.

Straus didn’t give spending limits any oxygen. Zero-based budgeting was never discussed. The TSA bill was killed with parliamentary tricks. Sanctuary city bills were stuffed. School choice was ignored.

In short, liberals got bold leadership in Washington. Conservatives got moderate management of a conservative cycle in Texas. It wasn’t nearly good enough.

It is wearying to even have to argue that the GOP status quo is tepid and weak. It should go without saying. The GOP just lost a Presidential election with the most moderate candidate in the GOP field, afraid of every issue but the economy, while the President ran a culture war campaign with every gun firing.

The Tea Party Awakening was about conservatives demanding strong leadership, instead of the crony moderate agenda and tactics that ensure America is weakened every decade.

Texas needs to show other states, and the nation, a way out of this losing cycle.

A conservative is most vulnerable to being recruited by the establishment after finding his or her political ceiling. It is then that a conservative realizes that something besides conviction is now needed in order to turn a political profit. The only thing a conservative possesses of value on the political market is his or her conservative reputation, and it is of value to the GOP establishment.

Establishment Republicans need a steady flow of conviction conservative recruits in order to have credibility in their claim to be conservatives themselves. Between the time the conservative sells out and the time when their reputation has fully spoiled, the establishment brandishes them as proof they are conservative, while a willing establishment media happily carries the message.

After all, conservative reputations are the one thing the Republican establishment needs but doesn’t traditionally produce in-house.

It is also at this point that a conviction conservative confronts his own motives. Did he or she really do this “public service” thing for the greater good? Or does a conviction conservative painfully learn that the truth of the prophet Jeremiah’s words about the deceitfulness of the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9)?

One thing the conviction conservative never knows until it is too late is just how different they are from the people they have joined, but the new crew knows this way in advance. After all, they’ve been lying the whole time and know it.

It is for this reason also that dreams of being respected and provided access by the new crew are of the saddest kinds of fantasy.

There is self-discovery in the time when conviction quits propelling one’s career. Was I a true believer, or an opportunist who, unlike the establishment guys, lacked the guts to admit it to myself?

It seems King has finally divorced his first political wife and married his long-time political mistress.

A Dallas Morning News article this morning said, “Rep. Phil King, who opposed Straus last session, said that the speaker has widespread support, and that Simpson is too inexperienced to close the sale.”

With this line, together with a King quote questioning Simpson’s “strength” as a candidate, the public is introduced to Phil King, the power-chaser.

Notice King’s disqualification of Simpson has only to do with power, not quality, principle, or competency.

Sadly, his is the decision of an institutionalized Austin politician, not a stalwart conviction conservative.

Speaker Straus’ historical ties to Planned Parenthood and Austin rumors that he will not allow pro-life bills this session did not carry the decision. Straus’ opposition to Governor Perry and Lt. Gov. Dewhurst’s support of the Budget Compact, Governor Perry’s path to responsible spending in the 83^rd Legislature, did not carry the decision. Speaker Straus’ gerrymandering of stalwart conservatives out of their districts did not carry the decision. The fact that Straus’ speaker-vote base is the Democratic Party didn’t carry the decision.

What seems to have carried the decision for King was Straus’ perceived power and Simpson’s perceived lack of power.

This may clash with King’s public image, but it does not clash with his reputation in Austin.

For many years King has done a balancing act: vote very well and play a martyr-quality conservative in-district, while quietly being the establishment’s favorite conservative in Austin.

A reliable information source, King has long moved among the establishment with more ease than any other conservative. If a bold conservative move is hated by the establishment, Rep. King is probably spreading fear and anxiety over it among the conservatives.

In turn, the ruling class has pushed King to the front of the conservative line in Austin.

This is a standard establishment move. The GOP establishment can’t choose conservatives, but they can give their favorites special access to information and the “kid-gloves” treatment, effectively making them the go-to conservative front-bencher. The establishment will cultivate an image of this conservative as reasonable, professional, and competent. The main qualification for a conservative to receive the establishment’s golden treatment is reliable weakness.

(As an aside, the reverse is also true. To neutralize them, the establishment does everything they can to paint true threats as insane weirdoes. This is precisely the strategy employed for years against conservative warriors like Bill Zedler and Wayne Christian.)

With King’s sad decision, conservatives have shed an agent for weakness from within their ranks.

The other good news is that King’s support is some of the best evidence that Joe Straus is going to lose his bid for re-election.

This is said straightly; with no humor or invective. It is also said with respect for the position Rep. King has occupied during his legislative career – he has voted well and been one of the men who has kept a candle burning for conviction conservatism.

The reason Rep. King’s support is a bad omen for Straus is simple: he’s made for losing, and gravitates to it.

What does that mean?

Well, Rep. King served an important purpose during a time when the conservative movement needed legislators content to lose. His special talent for losing is why the establishment has promoted him through the years.

However, the Tea Party Awakening has created a path to victory for conviction conservatives, and many veteran conservatives have been able to change gears.

Rep. King has not. In fact, rumors have circulated in the grassroots that Rep. King is only given conservative bills that can’t win, which keeps him from being involved in conservative bills that can win.

Rep. King undoubtedly believes in conservatism. There are people who join the enemy because they want what the enemy wants, and then there are people who join the enemy because they have run out of the will to fight.

The conservative spirit was always willing in Rep. King, but the flesh was always weak. Now, it seems the flesh has overtaken the spirit completely, and the balancing act is over.

King has chosen power over conviction, the system over fixing the system.

This is ultimately good for the conservative movement in Texas.

On a human level, however, Texas conservatives today have good reason to be sad.