Speech To The Tejano Democrats State Convention
Speech To The Tejano Democrats State Convention
San Antonio, TX
June 25, 2005
Thank you Congressman Honda. Mike came to Houston and helped me get elected in 2002 and tried to help again in the wake of redistricting. He wasn't quite strong enough to stem that tide but none us were. He's exactly the kind of leader we need in order to rebuild our party - he's a great friend and a great congressman - Mike, thank you so much for being here.
And thanks to so many of my fellow Tejano Democrats that I see here today. It's great to see Giovanni Garibay, the chair of our Houston Chapter who was kind enough to lend his services to my congressional office for awhile. I'm sorry that my friend Frumencio Reyes couldn't be here this weekend. Frume has offered to serve as my hair consultant, seeing as though that seems to be one of our current governor's greatest strengths.
I come to you today with some good news. I'm not giving you my stump speech. Instead, I want to talk aboutand please forgive me if this sounds crazybut my vision for the Democratic Party here in Texas, a Democratic Party that doesn't take Hispanics for granted, a Democratic Party that has a coherent message, and a Democratic Party that wins elections for a change, not just in blue states and college towns, but right here in the blood red heart of Texas.
As I travel Texas, Democrats are telling me something that just a few years ago would have sounded like heresy to some in our party. Everywhere I go, Texas Democrats say they are looking for new leaders who aren't afraid to act like Democrats.
The young people who are joining the Democratic fold in such impressive numbers are not doing so because they are looking toward the past. They are looking toward the future because they are the future and they are looking for leaders who understand the Texas of today and who are willing to work for a brighter tomorrow.
As I travel the state, I talk about what I call the New Mainstream. People always ask, "What is that?" Well, I think the Republican Party has done an excellent job of convincing people that to be part of the mainstream in our society, you have to be part of the Republican Party. That is simply not the case. There's a New Mainstream growing across Texas, a New Mainstream that shares a much more optimistic vision of where we can take our state and realizes that if we are going to succeed, we better move away from the class warfare that seems to pick up steam every year in Austin, that we can no longer balance budgets on the backs of the least fortunate in our society, that we better move away from this us-against-them mentality or it shall be to the detriment of us all.
I went to a funeral recently and in one of the eulogies, the deceased was remembered as a special person who treated people the same regardless of their role in his business. To him, there were no big people and no little people. We could learn a lot from an individual like that because in the New Mainstream in Texas, there are no big people and no little people;
Todos estamos en esto juntos.
And if we are all in this together, it's time that we in the Democratic Party start acting like it.
Up in DC, I hear that my buddies in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have picked a fight with the leaders of the Democratic Party. You see, when George W. Bush got 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, the Democratic Party leaders wanted to spin that problem, but the Hispanic members of Congress wanted to fix it. And there's no better way to make an enemy in Washington than to tell a truth that people in power don't want to hear.
The beltway geniuses don't want to hear that Democrats can no longer take the Hispanic vote for granted. And they certainly don't want to hear that our Hispanic leaders in Congress aren't going to sit idly by and take marching orders.
When our own Hispanic congressmen can't get a seat at the grown-up table where the decisions are made and the checks are written, it's no wonder that Hispanics are voting in increasing numbers for Republicans. We Democrats will only start regaining larger and larger majorities of the Hispanic vote when we stop taking the vote for granted or assuming it can be engineered through cynical ballot architecture.
At the same time, we have a national Democratic Party that fails year after year to articulate our basic moral values and to offer a vision for the future.
The people in this room don't need a pollster to tell them the basic truth that what you put into your stomach and into your head, no one can take away from you.
But the Democratic Party needs to do a better job, a much better job, of articulating the core Hispanic message - the core Hispanic message that many of you teach your children: that education is the best economic development program ever created. Succeeding generations of Tejanos teach us over and over again that to reach the American Dream, you have to go through the front door of the schoolhouse and work hard.
Sadly, as everyone in this room knows, far too many Hispanic kids in this day and age, when going through the schoolhouse door, are heading in the wrong direction. They're going out, not in, and the drop-out rate is at a crisis level.
It is time for the Democratic Party in Texas to stand up and say these are our children. We can not stand idly by and watch generation after generation of our majority population drop out of school.
The Republicans want you to believe that we are on the right track to solving our education problems. Don't you be fooled. Let me share with you a small part of what Dr. Linda McNeil, a professor at Rice University and a recognized expert on what is actually happening in our public schools, has written:
Official education policy in the state of Texas is claimed by its advocates to be improving the overall quality of education - she writes. Its proponents also claim that under this system, the achievement gap that separates Anglo students from Latino and African American students is closing, thus making schooling more equitable. Both of these claims, sadly, are false. The irony of this education policy, based on high stakes testing, is that it is driving down the quality of public education and driving significant numbers of students out of school. Most of the students who are leaving school are Latino and African American.
That is what is really happening, my friends and it is time for us to say enough is enough. We can no longer simply accept test driven curriculums that are driving away our children in droves. We know how to improve our schools. Now we need a governor who wants to take advantage of that knowledge and make our public schools the best in the country. We need a governor who will make sure that all children in Texas have access to a high quality public education and who looks at the drop-out rate in the Hispanic community as simply unacceptable.
Estos son nuestros ninos.
If Tejano leaders ran the Democratic Party, I think we would have a coherent message of hope and prosperity focused on lifting each other up.
For too long, we have assumed that all we really need to do is wait for people to realize just how bad Republicans are before they started voting for Democrats again. With a Republican in his second term in the White House, Republican majorities in the House and Senate both in Washington and in Austin, and a Texas Republican Governor who wants to parlay six years of incompetence into yet another term in the Governor's Mansion, maybe, just maybe it's time to try something new.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for finding common ground, but when you have to choose between your conscience and compromise, you've got what I think is an easy choice. After all, Jesus didn't need a dial-tested focus group to convince him to kick the moneychangers out of the temple. And David didn't use third-party surrogates to attack Goliath. He picked up the five smooth stones and did the slinging himself.
The simple fact is that there are more of us than there are of them, so we should be winning every time out. But we haven't won a statewide office in Texas since 1994. So maybe, just maybe, we might want to try something new.
We can no longer charge into battle and assume that our armies are right behind us. We need to give Democrats something to fight for. At some point, running as a Democrat needs to lead somewhere. At some point Democrats need to stand up and fight for what Democrats believe in.
It is not enough to be right about them being wrong. We have to start defining a future not just for the Texas Democratic Party but for Texas as a whole.
Calling a 40-percent dropout rate a tragedy and an embarrassment is a good first step, but if we don't offer a way out of the mess, then what are we doing here?
Leading the country in the number of kids without insurance is morally wrong, but we need to give those kids more than sympathy and outrage. We need to be serious about finding the dollars to fully restore the Children's Health Insurance Program and offer small businesses real solutions to rising health care premiums. If the federal government isn't going to help us, let's develop programs of our own and lead by example.
We can call having the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country a moral crisis, but if we don't have the moral courage to talk about real solutions, then what in the end is the point of the Democratic Party? All of us want to see a day when abortion will be almost completely unnecessary, but if we're not moving programs forward that will help stop unwanted pregnancies, then we're merely chasing our tail and the pro-choice/anti-choice debate will rage on and on and no one will win.
In short, how can we call ourselves "progressive" if we fail to offer progress? Let's change that.
My exploratory campaign is coming to a point next month when I'm going to have to make a decision. And I'll tell you with all honesty that I'm not running unless the Democratic Party is ready to hear how a Democrat wants to tackle our challenges, and not how we'd do it just a little bit differently than the Republicans.
We've tried to out-Republican the Republicans, and all we've gotten for it is a demoralized base, demoralized donors, demoralized activists, and demoralized leaders.
The time for that is long past.
While Republicans say they're representing the mainstream, they're really talking to an increasingly narrow section of voters in Texas, leaving a huge majority of people on the outside. These are the moderate Republicans who Rick Perry is trying to kick out of his party, the Independents who are getting quite scared about what's going on, and the Democrats who knew from the start that Rick Perry couldn't lead a silent prayer.
This is the New Mainstream, my friends, and if we choose to stand together, no one can defeat us. If we work together, there's not an election we can't win. We can build a better Texas and we can build it together.
Thank you, or as Rick Perry would say, "Adios, my friends."
http://www.chrisbell.com/speeches/062505_Tejano_Dems_Convention