Martin Frost campaign post-mortem

[derby378]

A veteran Democrat who wrote the Amber Hagerman bill into law, negotiated an end to a crippling American Airlines labor dispute, and helped bring new jobs into the North Texas area. How could Martin Frost, with so much experience, lose so badly to Pete Sessions?

You could consider this an open letter to the Martin Frost campaign. Here's my feedback to Frost and his campaign workers:

(1) Don't try to outconserve a conservative, especially if you call yourself a Democrat. But there Frost was, comparing himself to * and Kay Bailey Hutchison in some of his TV and print ads. Not smart at all.

(2) Learn from Al Gore's mistakes - don't emulate them. Frost tried too hard to do the "Me too" routine that plagued Gore's 2000 bid for the White House. In reference to (1), we see Frost standing with * on the Department of Homeland Security and the War on Terror. And by the time he got around to publicizing Session's vote to support a 30% national sales tax, conservatives in North Texas were probably saying, "Yeah, Sessions will raise our taxes, but so will you. So why do we need an old fart like you when we've already got a Republican in office who says he'll do everything you said you would?"

(3) Service THIS, dude... Frost got Comcast to open a new customer service hub in Irving. Good for him. But we need manufacturing jobs instead of more service jobs. We need the old garment district that DeLay shunted off to Saipan brought back to Dallas. If we're going to wear clothes, we might as well make them, too. As it is, Frost is unwittingly encouraging us to remain a nation of consumers, guiltily browsing Wal-Mart for the latest deals sewn by the hands of impoverished Latin American mothers and children.

Martin Frost is a nice guy, warm and friendly up close. He has the track record in Congress to prove he deserved to return to Capitol Hill. But when it came to tailoring his message for Congressional District 32 in Texas, Rene Belloq's words to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark come to mind: "You chose the wrong friends. This time it will cost you."

[crispini]

1. Yeah, hindsight's always 20/20,

but what's the old saying... you can vote for a Democrat who acts like a Republican"-lite" or you can vote for a Republican.

[derby378]

3. Don't get me wrong

Frost would have served 32 much better than Sessions now does, because Frost actually knows how to get things done instead of turning lassez-faire on his constituents.

One thing Frost championed was high-tech jobs, even if they were still in the service industry. I learned this back in spring of 2004 from talking with Frost myself. But it would have been nice to see a more broad-spectrum approach to job creation from Frost.

Now we're stuck with Sessions, who doesn't appear to have any job creation program. Here come da pain...

[carpetbagger]

2. Uh, he lost because he got gerrymandered.

He got dumped into a massively republican district.

The post-mortem of this is that democrats need to play absolute hardball in the states they control, so that they too can have lopsided delegations.

[derby378]

4. I thought about the redistricting deal...

...but blaming Frost's loss solely on that would have been too easy.

And we wouldn't have had redistricting if one Democrat in the state legislature hadn't chickened out and voted with the Republicans to form a quorum.

[carpetbagger]

5. If I remember, we dealt with that "democrat".

In the end, the drawing of TX-32 made it a district in which Frost could not have beaten a sitting republican without a juicy scandal.

[drfemoe]

6. The only Frost ad

I heard was in reference to the "Amber Alert" bill!
Yet, EVERYONE I spoke with planned to vote for Frost.
Sessions was everywhere. When a guy tried to hand me a Sessions handout at the polling place, and I declined, he said I was "rude"!

I've been trying to calculate how many of the R gains were the result of gerrymandering. Unfortunately, my brain is still numb.

[derby378]

7. Check this thread out, though

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=180x6341