OK, Texas, what was all that about?
Steve Stockman, the Lone Star state’s weirdest lawmaker, crashed and burned spectacularly in the Republican Senate primary this week, losing to incumbent John Cornyn by 41 percentage points in one of the strangest campaigns I’ve ever covered. He’ll soon be gone for good, having given up his relatively safe East Texas seat under the state’s campaign rules.
And I couldn’t be happier. I hope to hell I’m done writing about Steve Stockman.
When I last wrote about him for Politico Magazine, the Texas congressman had just declared he would challenge Cornyn, and people here were struggling to figure out why. Stockman, who submitted his papers to run about 15 minutes before the filing deadline, was a known quantity in Texas for his below-the-belt politicking and his vituperative, paranoid political style. Now he was in the process of reintroducing himself to a national audience, which no doubt saw Stockman’s mere presence in Texas public life a sign of deep statewide dysfunction. Whether that’s true or not, he was crushed on Tuesday, winning only 19 percent of the vote to John Cornyn’s 60 percent. It was, in the end, a non-event.
A lot of people I talked to issued unvarnished opinions about Stockman’s chances (none) and his persona (nuts.) But they’d hedge their words when it came to a much more difficult question: Does he really believe what he says? Is he serious?
“There’s a tendency among insiders [in Texas] to give Tea Party people credit for not really believing what they say,” Jason Stanford, an Austin-based Democratic political consultant, told me at the time. “Stockman’s candidacy will test the proposition.”
Some, like Stanford, saw an ideologue who was deranged but essentially earnest in the major points of his worldview. Others, like one senior political reporter in Austin, thought you couldn’t say much of anything about Stockman’s motivations.
He’d seen Stockman’s first term in Congress, from 1994 to 1996, and he’d watched how desperately Stockman had tried to get back into public office before he won a congressional seat again in 2012. He figured Stockman would stay in that seat as long as he could. But now he was essentially throwing it away. “You can’t talk about ‘reasons’ with a guy like that,” he said.
Republicans I talked to—none would take up for Stockman, even in private—struck a different tone when asked, given the certainty of his humiliation at the hands of Cornyn’s political machine, why he would run. The common assumption was that he had to something to gain—in other words, that he was, on some level, not a fool but a slick operator.
Some thought it was a simple debt retirement operation—his past campaigns had left him deep in the red—or that he was collecting statewide email addresses and voter information to sell or rent for his life after Congress. One congressional aide who got to know Stockman’s staff during his second term said they used to talk about how lucrative that particular line of business was. Stockman, after all, ran his first elections supported almost solely by a direct mail-order firm with a grudge against his opponent. He knows a good racket when he sees one.
Now that Stockman’s been predictably crushed, what can we say about that question—was Stockman serious? It’s a question worth asking in light of the other candidates who’ve invaded our airwaves recently—are they serious? Is Herman Cain serious? Is Donald Trump?
***
Stockman’s “seriousness” can be assessed in two stages. First, did he run a serious campaign? The answer, of course, is no. I don’t just mean that he spent his time hawking Obama barf bags. Stockman never made the slightest attempt to win. It couldn’t be called ineptitude or incompetence, because there was no effort. It was an un-campaign, an anti-campaign. It was the negative space where a campaign could have been. It may have been the worst political campaign ever conducted in the state of Texas.
Setting money aside, here’s the first thing to do if you want to run as a conservative in Texas: talk to Tea Party groups. Stockman, whose politics tend towards the idiosyncratic “liberty wing” fringe, never had any real connection to these groups, but that shouldn’t have been a problem. Tea Partiers in Texas value charmingly old-school retail politics. If you come correct, they’ll listen. It’s how Ted Cruz first gained traction. Stockman didn’t do this. I don’t just mean that he reached out to too few Tea Party groups—I mean he never went to any, as far as I’m aware. It’s possible that Stockman never attended a single public event in his three-month campaign. No one can really say for sure because his campaign would never talk about it—at all.
In January he was scheduled to address the Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, a particularly feisty group—the kind that would love to see an establishment, inside-game political player like Cornyn challenged. They accommodated Stockman’s request to hold a special meeting before the regular meeting, closed to the press, so that he could talk freely. He didn’t show. He had just been in Cairo, a surrogate said—one of a number of strange international absences—and he had been delayed by traffic on the drive from Houston to Fort Worth. It was seemingly the last attempt Stockman made to show his face—anywhere.
Online, though, it was a different story. Stockman’s social media accounts told frequent and grandiose lies, including many, many variations of the refrain “Cornyn voted for Obamacare.” His Twitter account, long a bedrock of his appeal (to journalists, anyway) shifted into even-higher gear. Run by his spokesman Donny Ferguson, it became a constant stream of invective. Another constant feature: He would tout months-old tepid statements from activists as full-throated endorsements. His website featured a list of past or implied endorsements, many from groups that didn’t back his Senate run.
Christopher Hooks is a politics writer for the Texas Observer based in Austin.
