I heard formerly young/rising-star Dem Ben BARNES in a radio interview plugging his recent book. He drew parallels in the Joementum battle to 1960 when the Liberal wing of TX Dems sat out the primary because the Dem was a Conservative Dem, the thinking going that they could allow John TOWER to win then beat him in the next election. Wrong. He made the point that the Joementum scenario is shaping up the same way.
This is the same Ben BARNES who, as the youngest LT Governor, got Shrub his coveted National Guard slot, as a bipartisan favor. Before I read Howard ZINN, I would have thought of BARNES as just another good Dem. ZINN made the point that Dems from Grover CLEVELAND to CARTER and CLINTON have succeeded by reassuring Big Business that there would be NO CHANGE in the government's intervention in the business climate, that is, NO CHANGE from the Repuke's policies. At the end of the interview, BARNES delivered a peroration on how the Democratic Party can come back from the dead, which was, he said with no-ZINN-consciousness, to reach out to the business community and assure them of friendly intentions.
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http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/06/21/001022.phpCo-authored with Lisa Dickey, Ben Barnes’ Barn Burning, Barn Building is a tale of the
fall of the Texas Democrats from almost complete control of the state to the status of a minor party and links that to the fall of the national party. "Where once the names Johnson, Rayburn, and Connally were synonymous with political power, the 21st century brought us Bush, Rove, and DeLay."
Democrats are still asking, "How did we get to this point?" ....
But by 1960, when there was no external enemy against whom to rally the troops, the internal dissention flared. The two factions - liberals versus moderate/conservatives - had maintained an uneasy alliance, "but absolute power is a dangerous thing."
A major rift occurred in 1952 when conservative Texas Democrats suddenly found themselves more in alignment with Republicans than their own party. Then Texas Governor Allan Shivers, furious over the Truman’s administration’s position on mineral rights issues in the Gulf Of Mexico, started "Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952 and '56." The state twice voted for a Republican president. ....
"This was
the essential mistake the Texas Democratic party made during these years... They’d start to devour each other in fits of spite, allowing the Republicans to gain vital footholds in the state," such as the election of Republican John Tower as a Texas Senator and the beginning of the exodus of Texas conservative Democrats to the enemy. ....
Connally became a Republican, partially to run for president but also because of his disgust with the ’72 convention that nominated George McGovern. ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_YarboroughRalph Webster Yarborough (June 8, 1903 – January 27, 1996) was a Texas Democratic politician who served in the United States Senate (1957 until 1971) and was a leader of the progressive or liberal wing of the Democratic Party in Texas in his many races for statewide office. As a U.S. Senator, he was a staunch supporter and author of "Great Society" legislation that encompassed Medicare and Medicaid, the War on Poverty, federal support for higher education and veterans. He co-wrote the Endangered Species Act and was the only southern senator to vote for all civil rights bills from 1957 to 1970 (including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act). Yarborough was known as "Smilin' Ralph" Yarborough and used the slogan "Let's put the jam on the lower shelf so the little people can reach it" in his campaigns. ....
Running for governor
Ralph Yarborough was urged to run again for state attorney general in 1952, and he planned to do so until he received a personal affront by Governor Allan Shivers who told him not to run. Out of spite, Ralph Yarborough then ran in the primaries for governor in 1952 and 1954 against the conservative Shivers, drawing support from labor unions and liberals. Yarborough denounced the corrupt "Shivercrats" for veterans' fraud in the General Land Office and for endorsing the Republican Eisenhower/Nixon ticket for President instead of Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952. Shivers portrayed Yarborough as an integrationist supported by communist labor unions. The 1954 election was particularly nasty in its race-baiting by Shivers as it was the year that Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and Shivers made the most of the court decision in order to play on voters' racism. In one particularly odious episode, a black man was hired to drive around East Texas in a Cadillac full of Yarborough stickers and to be obnoxious and insult gas station attendants as slow. The man would say he was busy and had to hurry "to work for Mr. Yarborough." Yarborough made it to the primary runoff and came surprisingly close to beating Shivers despite receiving almost no newspaper endorsements, being out-fundraised, and being the target of nasty attacks. ....
Losing the position
In 1970, South Texan businessman and former congressman Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr.. won an upset victory against Yarborough in the Democratic primary when Yarborough was focusing on the general election. Bentsen played on voters' fears of societal breakdown and urban riots and made an issue of Yarborough's opposition to the Vietnam War. Yarborough was an antique out of place in the modern era he claimed. Said Bentsen, "It would be nice if Ralph Yarborough would vote for his state every once in a while." Bentsen went on to win the general election against George H.W. Bush.
In 1972, Ralph Yarborough made a comeback effort to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator as a challenger of Republican Sen. John Tower. Yarborough won the first round of the primary, coming short 526 votes of a full victory. Again,
Yarborough suspected vote fraud from the conservative wing. He
lost in the primary runoff to Barefoot Sanders in an anti-incumbent sweep after the Sharpstown Bank-stock Scandal despite neither being an incumbent nor involved at all with the scandal. It was Yarborough's last run for office.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_TowerJohnson became Vice President for John F. Kennedy, and Governor Price Daniel, Sr., appointed fellow Democrat William A. Blakley of Dallas to the seat, pending a special election to be held in May 1961. Blakley, a conservative Democrat, had also been appointed by Daniel in 1957 to succeed Daniel in the Senate when Daniel became governor.
Considerable numbers of liberal Texas Democrats opposed the conservative (DEMOCRATIC) Blakely and did not turn out to the polls. The conservative vote was divided. Texas conservatives, traditionally
"Yellow Dog Democrats," had already voted for Republicans in the 1950s, when Democrat Governor Allan Shivers had aligned with Dwight Eisenhower over the national Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson.In his second Senate campaign in a matter of months, Tower charged that the national Democratic Party, represented by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, was far to the left of typical Texas Democrats. The initial round of voting in the special election gave Tower 327,308 votes (30.9 percent) to Blakely's 191,818 (18.1 percent). ... ....
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