Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Rick Noriega is the Democratic Nominee for US Senate

Finishing with a bare majority in a 4-way race, Rick Noriega is now the Democratic nominee to take on junior senator John Cornyn of Texas in November. This means that there is a lot of work to do between now and November. It also means that Team Noriega did a more than excellent job of getting over a million statewide votes for a guy who is locally known in the Houston area. They are getting his name out in a big way.

Compare this to the 2006 primary when Clean Gene Kelly, danced with Barbara Ann Radnofsky into a runoff race that year. That was a typical low-turnout primary, and Kelly won a place in the runoff just by signing his famous name on the election filing form. That fame, however, did not belong to him, but to a corpse.

The Noriega campaign had some concern that the huge turnout would bring many voters to the booth who did not know Rick, or any of the other candidates for that matter. That concern was not unfounded, and Gene Kelly did poll the second highest numbers statewide, at 26.89%. Coming in third was Ray McMurrey, the Corpus Christi private school teacher.

That must be pretty humiliating coming in third place after a corpse.

But, hey, who knows? Maybe McMurrey will take a lesson from this experience and set his sights a little lower next time. Who knows, maybe some day McMurrey will run a strong race in a house district or something.

And I am bound to remember his name when that some day happens.

All the newspapers are saying that Rick faces an uphill battle in his run up against Republican John Cornyn. That Cornyn’s campaign has lots of money, you can count on. At last count he had some $7 million to spend to retain his seat. All I can say is that he better start getting that checkbook out. Once it gets out statewide and nationally that Texas has a strong candidate with an unbeatable Story to run against George Bush’s rubber stamp, to run against a senator who voted against our troops and veterans in several key funding bills that were set before the Senate, it is going to be like Christmas in July.

And I am ready for that snowball fight.

Why not help to start the old snowball rolling? I have a Rick Noriega donation icon in my lefthand sidebar, click on it and drop off an early Christmas present for John Cornyn. Or click on the snowball.

Or just click here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, a "bare majority" is 50% + 1 vote to avoid a Runoff, so Rick got that with extra to spare. Didn't Gene Kelly WIN the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination in 2000 because the Texas Democratic Party was too wussy to put up anyone against Kay Bailey Hutchison, so they wound up with the dead hoofer against their will? That's gotta hurt!

Lee said...

The only people who piss me off more than Gene Kelly are the dumbasses who vote for him.