Good news for Democratic statewide prospects.
A veteran state district judge who walked across Texas three years ago in pursuit of a seat on the state Supreme Court plans to go airborne next year for another shot at the high court.
Judge Bill Moody, of El Paso, plans to charter a blimp and make two daily stops in the state’s 70 most populated counties to grab the attention of voters. An amateur historian, Moody says no Texan has campaigned from a blimp before, although Lyndon Johnson created a buzz by using a helicopter during his 1948 U.S. Senate campaign.
The blimp idea came to Moody during a walk in the hot sun near the Johnson ranch east of Fredericksburg.
“I saw a blimp flying through the sky, and I said, ‘There might be an easier way to do this and to get out the message,’ ” he said Thursday from the state Capitol. “The blimp is important as a messaging tool.”
A Democrat, he hopes to break into the nine-member, all-Republican court.
Moody was the leading votegetter among Dems in 2006, collecting 1,877,909 tallies in a 51-45 loss to appointed Justice Don Willett. He collected a lot of newspaper endorsements along the way, which I believe helped him. Two Democratic judicial candidates from 2008 – Sam Houston and Susan Strawn – received a higher percentage of the vote than Moody did in 2006, so with his name ID and qualifications, he has a real shot next year.
Individual workers, home owners and consumers have lost nearly every case before the court when opposed by insurance and pharmaceutical companies, Moody said.
“These large political contributors have been so overpowering and loud in exercising their speech and influence before the Republican court that everyone else’s voices have been drowned out,” he said.
If you want to know who those big contributors are and who their beneficiaries were in the last election, read this report (PDF) from Texans for Public Justice.
According to Postcards (whose individual entry link is broken), Moody will run against Justice Paul Green. I don’t know yet who will run for the seat that was vacated by Justice Scott Brister, which has now been filled by Justice Eva Guzman of the 14th Texas Court of Appeals, but I’m sure someone will. For that matter, I’m sure someone will run against Guzman and whoever her appointed replacement is on the 14th Court in the Republican primary as well. And I know that whoever wins that latter primary will face Tim Riley, who ran against Tom DeLay in CD22 back in 2002, in the general election. I think that about covers it.