The New Yorker has a profile of Ron Kirk, mayor of Dallas and Texas' best hope in many years for a non-Republican U.S. Senator. The Senate race is is also a referendum on whether white Texans will support a highly qualified and eminently moderate black candidate.
The piece portrays Kirk as a consensus-builder who was able to use charm and political savvy to end the fractiousness which had stalled city government in Dallas. In doing so he also built a dual power base of blacks and downtown business interests which gave him overwhelming victories in two Dallas mayoral races. The strange bedfellows he's accumulated in this process lead to some memorable bits in the article:
[Kirk supporter Carol] Reed has been a political director for John Tower and then Phil Gramm, and the walls of her uptown office are a visual réumé, filled with photographs of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, both George Bushes, and, conspicuous among them, Ron Kirk. "It's like the Republican hall of fame," Kirk says, "and then there's this fly in the buttermilk, so to speak." ...For fringe Greenies like me, this race is a test of our loyalty to the Tweedledum-Tweedledummer theory of the two-party system. Do I really believe that a moderate Democrat is insufficiently different from a Republican to vote for Kirk? The answer for me is, hell no -- replacing Phil Gramm in the Senate with anything short of a Dixiecrat would be a terrific improvement. I'm quite excited about Ron Kirk, especially since the New Yorker article failed to uncover any real conservo-bombs in his positions. His biggest negatives are a bit of pandering to tax reduction and a record of local pork-barrel wheeling and dealing which is de rigeur for Texas big-city pols. As one Dallas wag put it:[Black activist and Kirk critic Rufus Shaw] says, "Ron Kirk could sell slavery. And there'd be a few who'd volunteer weekly... This is our Colin Powell. This is as close as a black politician can come to being inoffensive to the Anglo community, without becoming a Republican. If Texas doesn't vote for him, it's going to say something about Texas, and it will not be very good."
"As a black man Ron Kirk has exactly the same right as any white S.O.B. to con voters and sell them down the river like fools."I guess the dealmaking is why both of my parents, moderate Dallas Democrats themselves, are unhappy about his candidacy. To me he smells like a breath of fresh air. I'll save my Green protest votes for races the Republicans are guaranteed to win and my grumbling for Republicans-in-Democratic-clothing like Tony Sanchez.