Truckin’
On the road with Victor Morales, the schoolteacher from Crandall who hopes to drive Phil Gramm from the U.S. Senate.
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In explaining John Bryant’s loss to Morales, the experts point to several factors. They say that Bryant was unexciting, that he was too closely linked to Ann Richards and Jim Mattox, who were, in turn, too closely linked to the politics of special interests, whether they are monied (i.e., trial lawyers) or not (i.e., minorities and women). It has also been suggested, patronizingly, that voters might have confused Victor Morales with Attorney General Dan Morales and that the turnout for the runoff, an abysmal 5 percent, indicates nothing more than the continuing decline of voter interest. It may also be that, by the time of the runoff, Bryant simply lacked the funds to compete with a Cinderella candidate. Morales explains his success another way: in terms of class. “I don’t talk down to people, I talk to them. I’m one of them,” Morales says. “I’m the same way as everybody.” In a time of shrinking opportunities and growing class divisions, voters care far less about a candidate who knows better than about one who makes them feel better.
Back on the stump, Morales shows off his ability to do both by converting the rally into a facsimile of his high school government class. Answering a question on guns, “I have a gun, and you’re not gonna take my gun away from me,” he then asks the crowd, “Who can quote the Second Amendment to me? The right to bear arms? That’s not it,” he says, searching from one mute face to another. “Educa-shun,” he chants, “Educa-shun. Know what you’re talkin’ about.” On prayer in schools: “If you know your history, you know the Puritans came to the United States, and what did they do?” A few of the students in the crowd mumble something about perpetuating religious intolerance. “Educa-shun, educa-shun. Know your situa-shun,” Morales urges, polishing his rap. “Y’all are like my first-period class.” And so it goes, with Morales gently teaching the crowd—now double in size, brown, black, yellow, and white, young and old—how to become re-enfranchised.
At the end of the rally, the hat is passed. Today’s take of $50 would instill no fear in Phil Gramm. Off to the side, however, is something that might: the cameras for the vast Spanish-language networks, Telemundo and Univision, trained on Hispanic activist-professor José Angel Gutiérrez, another recent convert to the Morales cause. “Es una cruzada,” he says, “Es una esperanza.” It is a crusade, it is a hope; Victor Morales is holding fast as a symbol.
“I’m goin’ right up from teacher!” he exclaims on the way home, clapping his hands together and then pointing through the roof of his Nissan to the sky.
I’M GONNA GIVE YOU A SCOOP,” Morales says later in the afternoon, rummaging through stacks of videos in the living room while his son, Jesse, anxiously reminds him that it is almost time for his favorite show. Morales finds what he wants—a cassette from one of the recent school dance competitions in which he performed with the drill team—and pops it into the VCR. Set to the music of Prince, the video is titled “Purple Rain/I’m a Star.” To a scratchy, distorted soundtrack, Morales, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, struts his stuff with a bevy of high school girls in an unabashedly sensual style. Morales swivels his hips and cocks his head in a way that suggests the 1996 Senate campaign was not, at that moment, a priority.
Seeing the tape in retrospect does, however, raise all kinds of questions about the nature of outsider politics. “I don’t dance for anybody” Morales is fond of saying, a phrase he repeats so often that it has become an unofficial campaign slogan for this candidate without history or obligations. It is the purity of Morales’ campaign—a reflection, ostensibly, of the purity of his character—that has raised the public’s hopes; what might once have been perceived as a lack of sophistication (dancing with the drill team, reciting the raps he uses to motivate fifteen-year-olds) is now a virtue. The bad guys are the inside-the-Beltway types, sophisticates so often portrayed as jaded self-dealing shills for special interests. That some of the best and the brightest have failed in the past has come to mean that all public servants are now suspect: In office, George Bush lacked vision; in office, Bill Clinton lacks character. Everyone is guilty, so popular reasoning goes, tainted by the political process itself. The electorate now views with disdain canny, compromise-seeking horse traders like Lyndon Johnson and Lloyd Bentsen (Bob Dole is their spiritual heir). They have been eclipsed by ideologues and symbols—Patty Murray, the homemaker senator from Washington; Paul Wellstone, the little-guy senator from Minnesota—whose ability to govern is, as yet, undetermined.
The dirty little secret is, of course, that only a portion of governing is symbolic; the rest requires knowledge, experience, shrewdness, and some additional, less-than-virtuous characteristics. Phil Gramm, regardless of his beliefs, has proven that he is willing to sacrifice purity for results; Victor Morales, untested, has not. Which is not the same as saying he will never be up to the job.
There is a story Morales tells casually, as if he has not yet found its use: When Morales was young, his father played the saxophone in dance halls around the state. Victor used to go along and, trusting the music, he taught himself the cha-cha and the cumbia. After his father left, Morales kept on taking the bus into San Antonio on weekends, dancing from two until midnight, always carrying with him several changes of clean white shirts. It isn’t the dancing but those shirts that stay in the mind—representing, even then, his awareness of public perception; of the power of appearances, of symbol over substance, of the importance of holding your own despite the pressure. “I don’t dance for anybody,” Morales insists, but his history shows how much he has longed to take the stage.
“ASK HIM THINGS HE’S GOING TO be able to answer,” a new, self-appointed volunteer whispers to a radio reporter approaching Morales. It is the day after the UT-Arlington rally, at a hastily thrown-together organization meeting upstairs at Kim Son, the cavernous Vietnamese restaurant in Houston that has become a nexus for the nonpolarized state and local political leaders. Considering the short notice, Morales has drawn a promising crowd; along with influential Hispanics (and the by now ubiquitous Univision and Telemundo cameras), he has attracted members of the Anglo, African American, and Asian communities. There are kids and older people, along with labor representatives—what used to be considered, before it became unfashionable, the makings of a powerful Democratic coalition.
Greeting people near the door is Mayor Bob Lanier’s education adviser, Leonel Castillo, a longtime Houston politico and, under Jimmy Carter, the chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “I’ve worked campaigns for a lot of years, and I’ve never seen one like this,” he says, shaking his head in admiration. “Even Henry B. Gonzalez in ’57.” It seems an appropriate comparison—Texas’ first Hispanic senatorial candidate with Texas’ first Hispanic congressman, but Castillo sees a distinction, one that speaks to the changes in American politics in the last forty years. “Henry had a passion for ideas,” he says, adding without rancor, “Victor is more about charm.”
At this moment, however, it is the candidate who is being charmed. One woman pushes her “Victory Morales” bumper stickers. Another man compliments Morales for no longer wearing his glasses in public. A Teamsters representative wants to talk PAC donations. “The only thing that stands between you and Phil Gramm,” someone else tells him, as the candidate nods glassy-eyed, “is money.” The pros are moving in—indeed, an aide to Senator Bob Kerrey will soon be lending his expertise. Surrounded by the typical players of any campaign, Morales is beginning to look more like any other candidate—that is until, alone in the crowd, he slaps himself on both sides of the face in disbelief.
By the time he steps to the podium, however, he has pulled himself together. He is ready again to embody the myth, to dance to the music. “You get knocked down. Pero te levantas! You get up,” Morales says. “Don Quixote I might have been at the start, but now I see that windmill shakin’ all over the place.”
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