Get Kinky

Danni and I have now been to:

Del Rio
Laredo
Kingsville
Corpus Christi
Portland
Beeville
Goliad
Victoria
Angleton
Galveston
Beaumont
Lufkin
Longview
Tyler
Texarkana
Paris
Sherman
Wichita Falls
Amarillo
Lubbock
Big Spring
Midland
Odessa
San Angelo
Abilene
Brownwood
Waco

In all of those places we’ve encountered considerable support. In all of those places we’ve talked to random people who’ve wandered over to us because the Gov Bug is pink and I radiate sex and told us that they’re voting for Kinky, that their entire office is voting for Kinky, that their hardcore Republican grandparents already voted for Kinky, etc. These are places where the Democratic organization is supposed to be ironclad, where Chris Bell stopped running commercials he was so sure he had the county locked up. This is supposedly Perry country, where a candidate like Kinky has no hope of making even the smallest inroads. But none of those suppositions are true: all of Texas is Kinky country, and is Kinky country in a way conventional polls just aren’t showing.

I write you now 48 hours away from Kinky Friedman’s election as the Governor of Texas, and if this update seems a little distracted it’s because part of me is busy writing headlines for November 8th’s Austin American-Statesman. I think it’s a given that Houston Chronicle’s going to have a 40 point “It Turns Out We’re Stupid” header on their front page.

I’ve been largely cut off from what’s being covered on the news and on the blogs regarding this race. For all I know, Kinky’s dropped to five percentage points in the last minute polls, Rick Perry’s personally promised every Texan who votes for him a pony, and Chris Bell’s sprouted a personality like a flowering peach tree in the eternal charisma desert that is his countenance. Even if all these things are true – and I imagine none of them are – let me tell you the following: Kinky Friedman is going to win this election.

One of the places you don’t – and by you I mean me and by don’t I mean didn’t until six hours ago – expect to find much support for Kinky Friedman is Midland and/or Odessa. Danni and I spent three hours or so with area volunteers talking about Kinky and handing out bumper stickers and assorted Kinkiness to Odessans and Midlanders alike this afternoon. I’m reasonably sure this was the most effective afternoon of campaigning I’ve done so far for Kinky, and I’m positive it was the most inspiring for me.

Those of y’all who were around for the petition drive (I wasn’t) will remember that the hugely successful and really pretty simple plan of attack for that was to go where people are. Now – as in Sunday, November 05, 2006 – is the ideal time to reawaken that battle plan. Go where people are tomorrow and bring yardsigns, bumper stickers, pamphlets you’ve downloaded from www.kinkyfriedman.com, whatever with you. Then: share.

There will come a point when there’s nothing we can do but hope people vote and hope Kinky gets elected. That time is 6:55pm on Tuesday. Until then we can make an enormous difference when it comes to showing the people in our home communities – not just people on our email list, but people walking by on the street – our candidate in the hopes that he’ll become their candidate as well. There’s literally no other time to do this than now.

This our earth is a beautiful place full of good feelings and memories worth holding on to. If you’re like me, most of those good feelings come from Jane Seymour, star of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. One non Jane-Seymour-smiling-alluringly-at-me feeling I’ve found I like is handing out a bunch of bumper stickers and buttons and junk to supportive Longview residents, including a cop who said he didn’t know anyone on the Highway Patrol who liked Rick Perry, then driving off from a relatively subdued-seeming crowd assembled for another candidate with people yelling “Go Kinky!” at us at every corner, passing Stella, Chris Bell’s anxious, lonely seeming bus on the way out of town, then driving to a rally that had twice as many people each of whom was four or five times as enthusiastic as the Bell supporters we had left behind and somewhere on the order of ten times as attractive. There was a moment of incalculable anxst as we passed the Chris Bell Sleepwalking To November 7th Express in which a dozen Dire Straits songs were written, performed to rapturous applause, and retired to the quiet desolation of a pair of broken hearts permanently missing vital pieces – the pieces they lost to each other.

Today Danni and I (and, por supuesto, GB and Moby) attended events in Corpus Christi, Portland, Beeville, Goliad, and Victoria. Every one of these events uniquely affirmed my belief that Kinky Friedman is going to win this election.

Here’s why, in a nutshell: I think there are more reliable means than conventional polls when it comes to assessing the chances of a candidate like Kinky. I think the unofficial polls Kinky’s walked away with consistently throughout the election mean something big is happening in Texas politics. I think, in other words, that the assumption made by every major scientific poll – that the only people who will vote in this election are people who voted in the last one – is wrong, and will be proven so in less than a week.

A less ass-originating analysis: the enthusiasm and drive of Kinky’s county coordinators has Kinky yard signs and knowledge about what he stands for out in counties that aren’t officially organized, while Chris Bell has no presence in counties Democrats have counted on generating big numbers from for decades. Kinky doesn’t need a machine to get people to the polls, he just needs the network of friends he’s been making over two years of campaigning to get as many off their likeminded friends to the polls as possible. So let’s continue to do that, and in so doing knock the idea that you need to have an enormous warchest or the support of a major party to run for office out for the count.

I’m at the end of a fourteen hour day of Kinky campaigning, a day that has taken me through much of the valley, an area the campaign hasn’t had much opportunity so far to canvas with road signs or bumper stickers. Or, at least, that’s what I thought going in – turns out some of our coordinators from neighboring counties have been hitting up towns outside of their purview with signs. The more I talk to people – and granted, I’ve only been on the road for one day – the more I become convinced that the extraordinary creativity and drive of Kinky’s volunteers and the exceptional quality of Kinky’s message are going to combine to win this election, provided we can knuckle down and get out the vote now. Thanks in large part to Rob’s research, we know how close we are to our goal. It’s just a matter of pushing it the rest of the way.

It is early, early in the morning right now and I am writing from a hotel room in Del Rio. I didn’t see much of town as we drove in, save for an enormous H.E.B. and a number of palm trees. Starting at 8am tomorrow, Danni and I are driving from Del Rio to Laredo to Kingsville to Corpus, with stops at early polling locations in each town designed to generate whatever excitement we can about Kinky, about voting, and about Texas. If early polling numbers released so far are any indication, Texans are ready for a change and are turning out in record numbers to make that change happen. This is something I am privileged to be a small part of, having already voted early and voted for Kinky. I’m very much looking forward to seeing who else is taking part in what’s going to be the most memorable election in Texas gubernatorial history. I guess what I’m looking for, personally, from this trip, is a face to put on the millions of votes that are already helping to make Kinky our next Governor. What Danni’s looking for, primarily, is a way to convince me to stop pretending I’m Eddie Vedder and patch up my damn pants already. (more)