I don’t think Republicans recognize what is happening to their party in Texas. The GOP is verging on irrelevance. The failure of Texas to land the Republican national convention should have been a wake-up call for the state party. There was a reason why the Republicans chose Cleveland over Dallas: The national Republican party likes us for our money and for our electoral votes, but they don’t really want to deal with us. The Republican platform was the final straw. No rational Republican leader would have chosen to put the convention in Dallas when the state party was calling for “reparative therapy.”
Whose fault is this? I think the answer is obvious. It’s Rick Perry’s fault. Perry had ten years to rebrand the Republican party, as it slipped deeper and deeper into craziness. But Perry didn’t care about the party or the state. He only cared about living the high life at the taxpayers’ expense. For that matter, Greg Abbott could have rebranded the Republican party as recently as the state convention. Neither Perry nor Abbott has the imagination, or the ambition, to change the party. And now the reality is that the party is dying a slow death. It is paying the price for the stupidity of fighting the federal government at every turn, and for failing to recognize that the state is so extremist that the only political issue that matters here is how much one hates Barack Obama. It’s not just Perry. It’s also Michael Quinn Sullivan, Tim Dunn, and TPPF. There is no public policy in this state. Sure, the likelihood is that the Republicans will win this election, but the window is closing. And when it closes, it won’t reopen for a long time.