So where are they?

Jesse points to this initially promising but ultimately frustrating article about the race in CD17 between Rep. Chet Edwards and Arlene Wohlgemuth. What's frustrating about it?

In the campaign, Edwards is trying to position himself as a moderate Democrat who is equally ready to back his party or the president on issues.

His campaign is trying to portray Wohlgemuth as being right of Bush and the Republican Party on issues. His efforts have been helped by several leading Republicans in Wohlgemuth's home area abandoning their party in the race because they see her as being too conservative.

[...]

Edwards' campaign may get a boost from defections among Republicans. Some leading Republicans in Wohlgemuth's home of Johnson County publicly split with her during the Republican runoff campaign to find a candidate for the race to fill her State House seat, and the bitterness lingers.

In the waning days of the election, photos mysteriously appeared that showed one candidate as a cross-dresser.

The photos of candidate Sam Walls, a backbone of the Republican Party in the county and considered one of the area's greatest benefactors, in women's clothes helped give the race to a candidate favored by Wohlgemuth. Texas newspapers reported that Walls had for years been a cross dresser and said Walls in a statement called the activity a "small part" of his past.

In addition, some voters in Johnson County see Wohlgemuth as too strongly aligned with fundamentalist Christians. These voters have taken to calling hard-core religious conservatives Talibaptists, a play on the name of the fundamentalist Islamic group the Taliban.

Emphases mine. Would it kill the reporter to name any of these Republicans/voters that he keeps alluding to? Maybe furnish a quote or two? I haven't been teased this badly since my last foray into a singles bar. I want to believe, really I do. A little actual evidence would go a long way, you know?

And what does the Sam Walls thing have to do with the Wohlgemuth-Edwards race? I suppose "some voters" might hold the fact that a Wohlgemuth ally was the beneficiary of Walls' embarassment against her, but once again, who are these voters and what are they themselves saying? This feels like a big ol' red herring to me. Show me there are voters who might base their November decision on this, don't tell me.

I can already hear some of my readers proclaim that this is an example of the perniciousness of the liberal media. All I can say is that if this is the best the so-called liberal media can do, I don't know why you bother getting upset about it. How could anything this ridiculous be worrisome?

And finally, after all that basically content-free buildup, the story then shoots down its own hypotheses.

Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said despite defections in the Republican camp, Wohlgemuth will not suffer significantly for it come election day.

"Wohlgemuth does bother people as sort of being aggressively and thoughtlessly conservative," Jillson said.

"While there is plenty of time left for finger pointing among the Republicans, when push comes to shove on election day, if they turn out, I expect them to vote for Arlene Wohlgemuth," he said.

The redistricting did not greatly change the percentage of Republicans in the district, but it did erase traditional areas of support for Edwards around a military base and among some rural communities.

Political observers have said the new district lines mean that if a Democratic incumbent does well, that candidate can easily get 47 percent of the vote, but 51 percent or more may be impossible.

So now the author has trotted out an expert to say that although "some people" might not like Arlene Wohlgemuth, they'll vote for her anyway. What was the point of this article again?

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 12, 2004 to Election 2004 | TrackBack