Team Bell: Manufacturing Grassroots Support

The Chris Bell campaign has announced the endorsement of a PAC of South Asians called Desis for Texas.

Evan at Perry vs. World notes the ties between staffers of the Bell campaign and the PAC.

If your campaign can’t draw legitimate grassroots support beyond the Texas liberal “netroots,” I guess manufacturing “grassroots” endorsements is the next step. That’s politics.

I’d only suggest that the manufacturing process seems to have some flaws. Check out this interesting paragraph from the “endorsement”:

Congressman Bell’s legacy to the Houston City Council was a stronger, more efficient, more transparent and more progressive city government with property taxes. This legacy parlayed itself into his mayoral campaign, where once again, he astounded the city by backing out of a run-off race, and endorsing Lee Brown. Rather than put the city through a divisive three-way run-off, Congressman Bell decided to back out and serve elsewhere.

I left the following comment at the Burnt Orange Report:

Decision to get out of the race?

Is that what we call failing to make the runoff? 🙂

Nobody has responded to that comment yet. There’s really no response. It’s revisionist, inaccurate history to suggest that Bell backed out of “a divisive three-way run-off.” The voters left him out of the runoff, with a paltry 16% of the vote (a worse showing than George Greanias in 1997).

It’s pretty minor-league of Team Bell to manufacture an endorsement that contains such an embarrassing gaffe.

Burt Levine noted Bell’s “courage” in endorsing Lee Brown in the runoff in an earlier BOR comment:

He did not decide out of the run-off out of the goodness of heart to save the city money. That’s silly writing from whoever put that together. He would have liked to have been in the run-off w/ Lee Brown but was stuck in the middle and only endorsed Lee Brown to get the promise for Congress.

Redistricting, the marginal redistricting, added the 90 percent black precincts to what what was a marginal Republican CD-25 in 2001 making it marginally Democrat. The deal was he endorse Brown in the run-off with Sanchez and he’d get the endorsement from Brown for Congress over Carroll G. Robinson.

That’s pretty much it. I guess I can understand why Team Bell would want to spin it as an act of courage (better than admitting it was an act of political ambition/viability), but to manufacture an endorsement that suggests Bell backed out of a nonsensical “three-way runoff” goes beyond spin and into comedyland.