Lunch with Veselka

So Kuff and I had the pleasure of lunching with Larry Veselka yesterday. And I have to admit that doing the Q&A routine with Larry was a different experience, and I say that in all the best ways. Larry's as unassuming a guy as you could meet. Yet he's a successful lawyer and just earned the biggest pile of kudos among local Dems this past election go-round. To the unitiated (or out of towners) all Larry did was pull our coals out of a massive fire by representing State Rep. Hubert Vo in the challenge to his victory over longtime incumbent Republican Talmadge Heflin. Having watched a good portion of the proceedings, I think it goes without saying that Veselka did a masterful job of keeping the proceedings sensible and reasonable to the degree of putting us in a position to eventually succeed. While the victory was in a partisan environment, it was not a victory attained by sabre-rattling and name calling. That doesn't mean Veselka isn't a man of strong opinion, however. He is, after all, one of our few Yale-educated Polish Czech rednecks that we can lay claim to.

Starting with the biggest of topics, Kuff and I delved into a few lingering issues from the Vo contest. The biggest issue from the contest that still gets an emphatic reaction from Larry is the concept of Team Taylor "discovering" the voter fraud connected to the Bernard Amadi primary campaign when, in fact, the investigation had been going on prior to the general election. The most mind-boggling concept, however, was the fact that a voter could be illegally registered outside of Vo's district, then Andy Taylor could claim that the illegal voter registration should be the official registration of record ... AND THEN claim to have found voter fraud in the form of this already-underway investigation. Forget duplicity ... enter triplicity. Add that to Andy Taylor's request that a military voter have his vote stricken from the record despite the oft-heard refrain that the GOP is always playing watchdog for military votes (Jerry Patterson, whereforart thou?). Add to that the appraisal district maps showing property in Harris County that Andy wanted counted as Ft. Bend voters. This was, after all, the most massive case of voter fraud we've seen. Unfortunately, the fraud was perpetuated by one Andy Taylor and aided by one Talmadge Heflin.

One point that I'll hypothesize over and let the world have at it is this: was part of Taylor's plan to emphasize "massive voter fraud" really aimed at winning over votes for a hoped-for election - either a revote on the 2004 results, or (had the House seated Heflin) beyond? Hard to say conclusively from our side, but there's not many more theories that make sense.

I'll save some of the more Vo-centric issues for Kuff to hit on later (he's covered it better than I have), but some of the issues I wanted to pick Larry's brain over was his sense of history for county politics overall. My "time" in Harris County politics pretty much began as Larry's ended. What I didn't know was that when Larry ran the first time, he was suspected of being a "Hart plant." Larry had worked for the Hart campaign in 1984, so when he ran for County Party Chair in 1986 he had 5 opponents: one being the Larouchite who would off him in 1988 (he got about 5% in the 86 go-round), another being the only female on the ballot - who also happened to be backed by Billie Carr. While there was some "suspectness" of him in 1986, his handling of the 1988 early campaign season won him enough respect to only have one candidate by the time his term was up in 1988. Enter a heavily contested primary campaign, the first with the vote affecting delegate counts, and one of the rarities with 3 active remaining campaigns headed into Texas and an unsettled race (coincidentally, I voted for Hart - who did not have an active campaign at the time). The plethora of new voters meant a lot of voters not being able to tell a Larry Veselka from whoever the more generically named Larouchite was. I asked Larry what four letter word came to mind first when he saw the results. By his accounting, he'd pretty much internalized the way it would end up when he saw the results headed south from the early release in the mid-50s. By the time his lead was in the low-50s, the predictable "four and five letter words" came to mind.

Beyond that, the $64,000 question (neither Kuff nor I actually have this kinda stash) was what Larry saw as a difference between then and now in terms of what we have to do to win countywide. One very poignant thought that he made, I thought, was the shift in candidate-focused activism from his day towards more issue-focused activism today. It may or may not not strike one as significant at first hearing, but there's definitely something to that.

And that goes back to the idea that Kuff and I have batted around for a while: the need to field a full slate of candidates. If nothing else, by putting more living, breathing candidates out in the hustings, you give more options to the locals for a campaign to either see and talk to ... or maybe even a campaign to identify with and take part in. Shifting back to another point that Larry raised as a need for success in the future, this makes it easier to build local organizations, ala the growing list of Democratic clubs and organizations.

With all that (as well as the Buffalo Grille's great chili) settled in, I'm grateful to Larry for his valuable time. It was invaluable to both us amateur bloggers. In some ways, the rules of the game change in terms of how we fight to get back to majority status, but connecting that "sense of the new" with the "truisms of the past" is necessary in putting together whatever it is that'll work from this point forward.

SIDENOTE, TRIVIA VERSION: Unrelated to anything else, I learned that Larry went to Jr. High at Jane Long. Precinct 430 (my soon-to-be old precinct) votes there and I had the pleasure of running the election there in 2004.

SIDENOTE, EVEN MORE TRIVIAL: Also even more unrelated to anything. But if anyone knows any athletic types at Episcopal High School, have them try out for the lacross team for goaltender. Seems they have something akin to a Blair Witch doll in one of the nets and it was sorta creepy.