No Kay Blog

Well, as expected by pretty much everyone who bothered expecting anything, Kay Bailey Hutchison won her latest popularity contest. I was not sitting down when I heard the race called, but that was okay - I didn't faint dead away. I knew it was going that way; you knew it was going that way; no surprise. But if Kay had turned up in a secret tax-dodging, land-for-teenage-boy real estate swap deal, funded by Jack Abramoff to build an al Qaeda training camp on the site of an orphanage and former Indian burial ground, well, we would've been ready for her.

I don't mean to be flip, and I certainly don't want to take away from Barbara Ann Radnofsky in the slightest. She's awesome. She's much, much more than an "anybody-but-Kay" candidate, she ran an admirable first-time statewide campaign and she'll hopefully still be my Senator someday.

I'll probably write a more detailed post-mortem of my NoKay.org efforts later. But for now I'll say this about my plans for this site. At the very least, I'll keep it up and available. The blog posts and new material will dwindle a great deal, but it will be here. If you have any feedback about the site or its future, or if you're interested in helping to keep it current with Kay's latest escapades, let me know.

Lastly, now that this election is over, I can reveal my true identity, and my true connection to the candidates: I'm really Karl Rove. Seriously, what I said from the start is true.

Whether it's completely accurate in every case, few would argue that popularity is a key trait in young women who are prom queens, cheerleaders and sorority girls. And in the case of a woman who was all three, like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, there's certainly a common personality thread worth examining.

Think for a moment of a fictitious young woman, just graduated from the University of Texas, who has had all three titles. She was prom queen in high school, and a cheerleader at UT, and a member of Pi Beta Phi. After graduation, she's about to start a job as a TV news reporter. Now ask yourself: is this the type of person you would envision being a U.S. Senator?

If she did become a Senator, how do you imagine she'd act? Would she be strong and independent, or would she go along with everyone else? If she had an old buddy in the White House, would she blindly support everything he wants? Can you imagine her coming up with very many bold or innovative ideas? For that matter, do you figure she'd make much of a splash at all? Or would she quietly blend in with and file behind all the smart people, trying not to make a fool of herself? Socially, on the other hand, she's no dummy - she'd make some good, powerful friends, and she'd be sure to be nice to everybody. She'd cover the whole state with little pork-barrel presents. And she'd probably even be so nice to members of the other party, to ensure her popularity, that they'd be hard-pressed to criticize her.

Of course you can picture it, because that's what we have in Kay. You can hardly read anything about her in the press that doesn't rave about how she's gotten the highest number of actual votes ever cast in Texas for one candidate (never mind that it was against that damned idiot, perennial non-candidate Gene Kelly). And no article would be complete without naming her "one of Texas' most popular statewide officeholders".

And that's my point: she's still running a popularity contest. She still wants to be crowned with a tiara, voted Most Likely To, and have the party at her house. She isn't a leader. She isn't a Senator. She's Miss Popular.

The U.S. Senate is the deliberative chamber of Congress. It doesn't decide whether to have a DJ or a band at prom; it decides whether to send American soldiers to fight, kill and die in far-off lands. It doesn't argue which cheer will get the Longhorn fans pumped; it sets federal budgets that affect every man, woman and child in this country. It doesn't debate whether two kegs will be enough for the Spring Fling; it works to protect our national interests from every threat imaginable, from hurricanes, to terrorists, to greedy corporations, to a power-hungry Executive Branch.

Here's a telling quote from a typical Hutchison love-letter article:

"I've been able to help all of our cities and counties get the help they need in whatever is their highest priority," Hutchison said. "Sometimes that's drought relief or wildfire relief or hurricane relief. Sometimes it's a major public works project that's important for their particular area."

It's all fine and good to get Texans the federal money and help they need; that's certainly part of our Congressional delegation's job. But it's only part of their job. There's a heck of a lot more to it than favors and little bribes to "all of our cities and counties".

So here we are, two days before the election. If the polls are right by half, then Kay's going to be one of Texas' Senators for another six years. I've been writing this blog and this site since April, and I'm just now getting it. This is it - this is the lens that makes Kay make sense.

This is why she broke her own strident term-limit promises: she can't bear to walk away from a popularity contest, especially when she's expected to win easily again. This is why, even though she's a "senior Senator", she's never heard of nationally. This is why she votes so badly on all the issues: because all the other kids in her clique do. And this is why everyone likes her - because her full-time job is making everyone like her.

Well, not to get to eloquent here or anything, but that sucks. I want a Senator who knows her stuff, and is smart, and tough, and will work for the interests of all Texans. She should get along with people, sure; that's great, too. But it's not enough by itself, not for a U.S. Senator. What I want, really, is a Senator very much like Barabara Ann Radnofsky.

Semi-interesting and slightly ironic postscript: The very first post on the No Kay blog inadvertently nailed this. I even called it a "tenuous connection", but now I see it's the perfect symbol of Senator Hutchison.

There's a lot of information on NoKay.org about the job Kay Bailey Hutchison has done representing the people of Texas and the U.S. in her career. This new scorecard of scorecards shows all the averaged, career scores from all the ratings referenced on the site. See at a glance what a poor job Sen. Hutchison has done for us in the U.S. Senate.

Not all American workers are represented by a union, but they still represent the workers of this country. And according to three of the biggest and most influential, the AFL-CIO, the IBEW and the AFSCME, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is not representing the working men and women of Texas and the U.S. All three of these unions give her a career rating of 7.5% or less.

Accompanying a recent Houston Chronicle article on the Radnofsky/Hutchison race, this picture:



The Chronicle's caption reads, "Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, center, mingles with President George Bush and District 22 candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs during Bush’s visit to Sugar Land on Monday." Somehow they managed to write that without any terms such as "lickspittle", "toady", "sycophant", "brown-noser" or "doormat" - and congratulations to them on their restraint.

So if you ever wondered what the face of a U.S. Senator who rubberstamps the Bush Administration 96% of the time looks like, well, now you know. At a time when Bush is so unpopular and toxic that he practically glows in the dark, here is Texas' senior Senator, openly fawning all over him.

Truly, if you like Dubya, you'll love Kay.

Kay Bailey Hutchison is Chairman of the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee, as well as a member of the Veterans' Affairs Committee. But it seems that veterans themselves don't think much of the job she's done.

The first exhibit is an editorial by Dave Fisher, a disabled veteran in Waco, So generous, Madame Senator.

To Hutchison's claim in her debate with Radnofsky that "Bush has increased veterans spending by 20 percent since he was elected," Fisher is skeptical:

That’s hard to believe. In fiscal 2001, Bush ordered a 28 percent cut in discretionary spending. By review, that includes us veterans. If we were somehow excluded from that directive — with such things as defense and entitlements off the table — then whatever veterans were getting in additional funding was getting carved away by 3 percent inflation each year.

And then there’s the matter of the staggering numbers of veterans and disabled veterans being created by wars on two fronts in the Bush years.

Take wars and inflation out of the equation and Hutchison’s claims still don’t add up.

Fisher ends his article about Hutchison's performance on veteran issues in disgust: "I am sick and tired of twisted and manipulated Republican statements and policies that skirt the debt owed to those who have sacrificed so much."

And he isn't alone in his criticism of Madame Chairwoman. The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) just released a Congressional rating guide, covering more than 300 votes over the last six sessions of Congress "on issues that matter to America's men and women in uniform, our new veterans and our military families." Sen. Hutchison received a score of "D+".

"Every member of Congress claims to support the troops, but this guide shows us that more often than not, the rhetoric does not match the reality," said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq War veteran and the founder and executive director of IAVA: Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "A legislator's low score can be directly linked to the unnecessary hardship that US troops, Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and military families often face. There is no excuse for a low score."

"Our nationwide network of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have expressed overwhelmingly consistent positions on issues ranging from VA funding, to body armor, to TRICARE health insurance for National Guard and Reserve troops," Rieckhoff said. "IAVA used those positions to determine whether each member of Congress has been a friend, or foe, of our men and women in uniform."

While a D+ is a lot better than some of Kay's other scorecard scores, it still sounds like more of a "foe" than a "friend" to me. And given her high-ranking involvement on these committees, shouldn't she be getting an "A+"? And if she's doing this poorly representing this one particular group that she has special responsibility for, you can just guess how she's doing for everyone else.