A Fight for the Texas Democrats

By David Von Drehle

If the battle of Obama vs. Clinton were being told by a Hollywood filmmaker instead of by the muse of history, the opening scene would be set beneath the spreading pecan trees of the Scholz Garten in Austin, Texas. Of all the beer joints in all the world, this venerable watering hole near the state capitol may come closest to the heart of Texas' Democratic Party. Liberals have been hatching plans here since Lyndon Johnson was a big-eared kid, and for a few months in 1972, it was the venue of choice for the young organizers of George McGovern's quixotic Texas presidential campaign -- including Hillary Rodham and her future husband Bill Clinton. But on the night of Feb. 19, the place was a hive of Texans for Barack Obama.

The camera picks up Pete Fredriksen, 56 and still dressing in t-shirts. Tonight's is black and printed with an image borrowed from the Beatles: four giants of Democratic charisma crossing a road -- Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Obama. Fredriksen is talking about the energy and optimism of Obama's young supporters. "They remind me of myself years ago." Then cut to Bruce Elfant, 49, a more practical sort. He's the Travis County constable and a lifelong soldier in the beleaguered ranks of Texas Democrats. You hear him talking about his hope that a jolt of Obamamania at the top of the ticket in November might be enough to wake the dormant roots of the state party.

And then this scene would fade into a picture of the same Scholz Garten 36 years ago. The hair is shaggier, the eyeglasses bigger, but the buzz is the same. It's all about insurgency and outsiders and change and down with Establishments. McGovern, Gary Hart, Howard Dean, Obama -- at Scholz's, fresh candidates' faces are always on tap. The only difference is that Hillary Clinton was hip to it 36 years ago and she's a victim of it today. This film is about coming full circle, and like all such tales, it is thick with poignancy. After 10 straight losses in caucuses and primaries from Maryland to Hawaii -- including the Feb. 19 whupping in Wisconsin -- Clinton returns to Texas to make a last stand. If she can't win on March 4 in a place where she has been organizing for 36 years, she'll have to think about folding.

But the terrain is not what it was back then. Clinton is an organization Democrat where Democratic organization is a shambles. Nearly 2 million people turned out to vote in the 1988 Democratic primary in Texas; four years ago, the number was less than a million. It's almost impossible for a Democrat to be elected statewide.

Oh, how they've fallen! It's tempting to say that back in the old days, you never saw a Republican in the Texas legislature, but there's no need to exaggerate. From 1939 to 1960, there was one -- but he was gone after a single term. When the young Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton labored here, the Texas G.O.P. had grown to an asterisk. A person needed a sharp eye to see that the cracks in the Democratic monolith would topple it within a generation. The reasons could fill a book. And the fact that it started with Texans' abandoning the old "solid South" to vote for a gray warhorse, Dwight Eisenhower, should boost the spirits of John McCain. But as Hillary Clinton searches the wreckage for a way to rescue her campaign, these are the pieces she has to work with:

First, minority voters. As David Maraniss recalled in his biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, the 1972 campaign was the first time minority communities in Texas demanded a seat at the table. In the years since, Latinos and African Americans have come to make up roughly half of the Lone Star Democratic electorate -- and a majority of the state party's power brokers. Democrats control 13 of Texas' 32 congressional districts, and nine of those seats are occupied by minority lawmakers. Obama can count on strong support from African Americans in cities like Dallas and Houston, and that support will be amplified by the baroque rules under which Texas Democrats award delegates. To offset his advantage, Clinton must do extremely well with the Latino voters who dominate large parts of South Texas from El Paso to Brownsville.

She made a good start last year by collecting endorsements from most of the South Texas bosses. But stances that might help Clinton elsewhere may be hurtful along the Rio Grande. For example, bashing international trade agreements is a vote winner among factory workers in Ohio, which also votes on March 4. But South Texas Democrats love free trade: the impoverished region pins its economic future on commerce with Mexico. Same with denouncing the oil industry, which employs a lot of Democratic voters in South Texas. Ditto for scorn heaped on the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind legislation. That plays well with teachers' unions, but many Texas Latinos have supported the program since its inception in the days when George W. Bush was governor.

And there are signs of a generation gap opening up among Texas Latinos. Consider the Lucio family of Brownsville. Eddie Lucio Jr., an advertising executive and state senator, is backing Clinton, but his son and namesake, a newly minted state representative, has endorsed Obama. In some Hispanic communities, half the electorate is under 30, so Obama sees an opportunity. Both he and his star surrogate Senator Edward Kennedy are campaigning in South Texas.

The third piece of the Democratic coalition, after blacks and Latinos, is white liberals, concentrated in Travis County, home to the state capital and the gigantic University of Texas. Of the 254 counties in Texas, Travis was one of only two with a white majority that voted for John Kerry in the 2004 election. Its mix of college students, high-tech entrepreneurs clustered around Dell headquarters, and connoisseurs of a hot art scene makes this fertile territory for Obama's staple crops, namely the young and the wealthy.

"The bad news for Hillary is that the middle-class working people who were the heart of the party in the days of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson have gone to the Republicans," says Paul Begala, a Texas Democrat who helped Bill Clinton reach the White House in 1992. "We still have the latte drinkers, but the cuppa-joe drinkers are mostly gone, and the Democrats have to find a way to bring them back."

How does the movie end? Possibly with a long shot of Bill Clinton -- his once shaggy hair now an aura of white -- driving down a lonely East Texas road. He was born not far from there, across the state line in Arkansas, and from 1972 onward, he has nursed the belief that he might somehow reconnect the working-class whites of that region to the Democratic Party. Scant luck so far. But he was still at it in advance of the Texas vote, stumping through places like Tyler and Lufkin and Texarkana and Nacogdoches -- proving that the Clintons still believe in a place called Hope.

With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin