All Politics are Local

We've got a couple of run-offs to see who gets elected to go off to Austin every other year. This means Delwin Jones gets to talk on the radio even more than usual.

For the part of the planet that is fortunate enough not to know who he is, Delwin is a down home conservative West Texan who stands up for us in the face of all those big time Austin politicians. That's what the ads say anyway. There's also the possibility that he isn't any of those things. He could be a rich kid whose hard working dad would have preferred Delwin to get an actual productive job, but supported him anyway because, hey, it's what Delwin wanted.

Anyway, since I've been old enough to pay attention, his entire strategy is to deny that he receives any funding or support from down state, accuse the other guy of secretly being from someplace else, and remind everybody that they've been voting him in for decades, so if they vote for somebody else now, all his seniority will go to waste. Every. Single. Election Cycle. This year he's also stressing that with him, you know what you're getting, but all anybody else can offer is promises. Nobody ever got a date by saying "The next guy to ask you out might be really ugly or out of work," but somehow this strategy could very well work out for Jones.

He's also introducing threats this time around. In a nutshell, his opponents may point to his voting record on one bill or another, but politics is more complicated than they understand because they've never been Austin politicians before, so they're too dumb to understand that he wasn't voting against concealed handgun permits, but instead he was voting against taxes. So by voting for somebody who isn't Delwin, you're voting for somebody with less political know how. That's seriously the gist of a radio interview I forced myself to listen to yesterday. He never claimed to be a conservative. He never really claimed anything as far as ideology. Vote for me because I'm the only experienced politician in the race, and besides, it's what you did last time.

So there you have it, my thoughts on Sate rep Delwin Jones.