Word: houston
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...news that a lesbian had been elected mayor of Houston, deep in the heart of the conservative South, was greeted with surprise this week. After defeats on gay marriage in places deemed far more gay-friendly than Texas, like Maine and New York, the victory of Annise Parker, who is in a committed relationship with two children, was a welcome, if puzzling, achievement for advocates of gay rights. The mayor-elect's photograph, showing her smiling sweetly and looking like Barbara Bush, was plastered everywhere from the Drudge Report to China's Xinhua news service, shattering all manner of clich...
Despite the worldwide headlines, Parker's victory will have little resonance on a statewide scale. Houston is a place where Republicans like Governor Rick Perry and his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, go for fundraisers, not votes. Indeed, the moderate GOP votes that Parker won may come at a price for Republicans in primary races. Candidates endorsed by Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP gay-rights lobby, have come under fire from noted anti-gay campaigners, including Houston physician Steven Hotze, whose political action committee sent out a last-minute anti-Parker flyer. Hotze is also reported to have pressured...
...terms of geography, Houston may be a city in the Old South, but its personality is a mix of Western frontier and Third World boomtown: dynamic, diverse, a place to make a fortune and lose one. Only 40% of greater Houston area residents live inside the Loop, the freeway that defines Houston's city limits, and only 1 million of the city's 2.2 million residents are registered voters. Many are immigrants who cannot vote. The key to winning any Houston mayoral race is coalition-building, and Parker's political career has been deliberate, "low risk" and "canny," according...
Indeed, Parker's victory may come down to that old adage: all politics is local. The 53-year-old former bookshop owner and energy-sector professional was well known to Houston voters. This was her seventh successful citywide election (she had won three times for an at-large city council seat and three times to serve as the city's controller). Parker did not make her personal life an issue, running on a platform of fiscal conservatism, budget discipline and a promise to hire a new police chief who would translate some of the large police-budget increases into actual...
Parker's opponent in the runoff was a fellow Democrat, Gene Locke, who was also familiar to voters. A lawyer and lobbyist for the city of Houston, he won the backing of Houston's business leadership. An African American, Locke could have pulled key support from the black community but ran a "pretty bad campaign," according to Murray. The late revelation that two members of his finance committee had supported Hotze's anti-gay PAC did not help Locke with moderate Republican voters, who saw the issue as not central to the vote. The business establishment, which originally felt that...