How Democrats Could Turn Texas Into the Blue Star State
By Bob Moser

"Did I mention that it's fun to be a Democrat in Texas?" asks Matt Glazer, editor in chief of the Burnt Orange Report, the state's leading progressive blog. He has, in fact, mentioned it a couple of times over beers at Scholz Garten, a legendary liberal hangout in Austin, and always with the same glimmer of happy bemusement behind his black-frame blogger specs. I'd been seeing that look in Democrats' eyes all over Texas in early June--at their raucous, record-breaking state convention, at local Democratic shindigs, in giddily overburdened Obama HQs. "It's like everyone who toiled on that Democratic death march for years, when it was so difficult, is now seeing daylight," says Josh Berthume of the Dallas suburb Denton, editor in chief of TheTexasBlue.com and another key player in a vigorous blogosphere that has helped ignite the startling Democratic flare-up here, in the bright red heart of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove's "permanent" Republican majority.

The very notion of Texas Democrats glimpsing daylight--of America's biggest chunk of Republican real estate being shaded pink on the '08 election map--seems almost absurd, a contradiction in terms, even to those who are making it happen. Like many of the nuevo pols, bloggers and progressive activists who are constructing a state-of-the-art Democratic machine in Texas, Glazer and Berthume are too young to remember the last time skies were blue for the party that ruled Texas politics from Reconstruction clear through to Reagan/Bush. So is Burnt Orange publisher Karl-Thomas Musselman, who's 23. "The last time Democrats won my hometown"--a small outpost in the central Hill Country--"was 1964," he says. "And that was only because President Johnson brought the chancellor of Germany to Fredericksburg for a visit."

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