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Mamie Bush Johnson: 'Why spend money when the statistics and hard work have shown that you can't win?'

"Art Brender is a great advocate for civil rights, but he has a lot of things on his plate," Reyes said. "You pretty much have to approach Art; he is not going to approach you. He has to surround himself better with people who have an ear to the ground. I've been after him for two years now. I got 23 percent of the vote in Arlington, and I think I could be a good candidate for state rep. I keep asking him, 'Where do you need me? Where can I run?' He puts me off some time. He's not an investigator."

Given the staffing shortages within the TCDP, the problem of finding new candidates has been put on the back burner. One distraction: Brender has spent a lot of time and energy fighting redistricting cases in court. Former U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright chaired a recruitment committee a few years back, but the committee is no longer formally meeting. And without an executive director -- former executive director Russell Langley left in November to pursue a legal career in Montgomery County and hasn't been replaced -- the planning for this election cycle has been left to Congressman Martin Frost, Moncrief, and Brender. Many local Dems think Brender should be spending more time recruiting candidates at the bottom level, rather than spending most of the party resources on supporting Kirk and Sanchez, who have sizable war chests.

"Candidate recruitment and development just isn't done anymore," said one local Dem who is working for one of the governor's candidates. He asked that his name not be used so that his candidate wouldn't look bad for the primary.

"Langley did some recruitment and was there if you needed help, but he was real frustrated by what he couldn't do. Right now, the party is about individual candidates and solely about candidates at the top of the ticket. Each candidate has to run their race without any plan from the party as a whole. Art's a good attorney and has done some good work on civil rights. But he doesn't raise any money for the party as a whole. He'll go out and get money for Martin Frost, and he'll get money for Sanchez, but if you're running for JP or state rep, you're on your own.

"The worst mistake the Democrats have made is not courting the Latino vote," said the Democratic operative, who has run for office in Tarrant County. "When I ran for office, I got zero response from the Democrats, but multiple offers of help from the Republicans. And their offers weren't just money. They offered expertise and databases and people to work on the campaign. I had to tell them I couldn't run with them because I'm a Democrat. But I really wonder where I'd be personally if I had taken them up on their offer.

"I really think Art is interested in growing the Hispanic vote. But the party has some pretty bad economic problems right now, and when the money is scarce, those heavy hitters at the top of the scale are first in line. Recruiting candidates or growing minority participation doesn't seem to be a priority."

Brender bristles at the criticism that the Dems have been unresponsive on his watch. "Anybody who tells you they have not heard from me personally who has run or is interested in running as a Democrat is lying," he said. "I know the Republicans are doing some recruiting. But we do our share of recruiting, and we try to locate good people to run. We have filled every county race other than the judges' races and are proud of that. Don't let people tell you we don't do a lot of recruiting. We talk to thousands of people."

But when you ask for examples, Brender can't offer many. Watauga Mayor Hector Garcia was recruited to run for the statehouse, but his health precluded the attempt. Kim Campbell, a Fort Worth lawyer, is running for judge in Criminal Court 4. And Fort Worth lawyer Rick Disney is running for County Court-at-Law 2. Other than that, there isn't much evidence of a recruiting effort. Candidates are welcome to run, but when it comes to help from the county party, they are pretty much on their own

"We don't have to do much recruiting," said Stephanie Klick, vice chairwoman of the Tarrant County Republican Party. "If you want to win in this county, you have to run as a Republican. We have a 3-to-1 advantage. That's tough to overcome."

That's the type of arrogance with which the Republican Party views its opposition. Tarrant County District Clerk Tom Wilder remembers when the Republicans were at the mercy of the Democrats, and the arrogance was reversed. "They are in the same position we were 20 years ago, so I know what they are going through. It's not much fun."

Wilder said the Republicans began to change the tide through a candidate-recruiting effort in the mid-1980s. "We would target people who we thought would be good candidates. I remember sitting in the office waiting for people to see us. We would present our case, why we thought they could win as Republicans. Some of them thought we were crazy. Back then it was a real crapshoot to get people to run on our ticket. But we made every effort to get good candidates on the ballot. We kept an ear to the ground, and it paid off."

Those efforts enabled local Republicans to see the forward wave of a sea change in politics moving across Texas and the rest of the country. "The Democrats got caught in the meat grinder of the Republican Party," said University of Texas at Arlington professor Alan Saxe. "The Democratic Party suffered from hubris. When they were riding high, they had no use for anyone. They became too liberal and lost the center of their party. As Reagan came along, and the more moderate suburban Democrats left the party, the Democrats were left with the very liberal wing of the party. And that doesn't work out very well in Tarrant County."

By the late '80s and early '90s, many local politicians could see the writing on the wall. County Judge Tom Vandergriff switched to the GOP in 1985. He was joined in the mid-1990s by District Attorney Tim Curry and County Commissioner J.D. Johnson. Then a whole group of judges defected. The reasons were twofold: Elected Democratic officials could see the numbers moving; and as moderates or conservatives they also saw the party leadership changing. When Johnson was asked in 1996 why he switched parties, he replied: "There is only one organized party, and that's the Republican Party. There was pitifully little organization ... the only time I heard from them [the Democrats] was when they asked for money."

In the early 1990s, the Democratic Party was run by Hugh and Evelyn Parmer. According to many involved in the party at that time, the Parmers were so stung by the moderate Democratic defections that they moved the party further to the left. And in so doing, they isolated themselves even more. The effect was that the Tarrant County Democrats, in the face of losing their moderate and conservative middle, became a party of ideologues, rather than of practical political pros whose sole goal was to win races. Every political party needs to strike a balance between the ideologues and those who realize that consensus-building and horse-trading are needed to win elections. The Republicans have fought this battle with the religious right, often clamping down on the religious conservatives when they gained too strong a voice. But by the time Brender came in 1996, bringing with him his civil rights background, the balance was lost.

"If a moderate or conservative Democrat would run, the party leadership would ditch their materials," said Ben Boothe, who operates a real estate appraisal firm and ran for Congress and for Fort Worth mayor as a Democrat in the 1990s. "They would rather have control than have success. And where many of us saw opportunities to grow the party, with a populist message in the suburbs, well, we were shot down.

"There is no doubt that the future of the Democratic party in Tarrant County and statewide lies within the Hispanic community," Boothe said. "And at the statewide level they get it. You would think that the current [local] party leadership would recognize this and hitch their future to them. But if you give the Hispanics power, the party hierarchy will lose a lot of their control. And they would rather lose elections than lose control of their party."

Boothe is undeniably biased against the current leadership, and one has to take his criticisms with a grain of salt. As the type of candidate who was certainly pushed to the side by local Democrats, he is still bitter about his experiences, but his point is well taken. The debate over which party is the party of inclusion does not show a clear winner. And that certainly does not bode well for Democrats.NEXT »

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