BurkaBlather

The US Senate is a fascinating place. It is full of people who have been governors, people who want to be president. And yet the Texas Legislature seems like a model of efficiency by comparison. In Washington, so much of the senator's day is taken up with TV appearances, videoconferences, and other efforts to be heard above the din. The procedure is arcane, the pace glacial, the sense of urgency nonexistent. It has been said of the "world's greatest deliberative body" that it is neither great nor deliberative nor a body. I heard a lot of similar comments about the Senate while I was in Washington, such as, "Half the people want to destroy everything you're doing; the other half want to take credit for it." sometimes it seems as if the art of messaging is more highly valued than the art of legislating. "The essence of the two-party system," a Cornyn staffer told me, "is that you can't let the other side define you, and you have to define the other side." Cornyn's greatest talent, the staffer said, is that he "delivers the message without being a prick about it."

There you go ... a few golden oldie quotes about the nature of the Senate that any High School civics teacher in Mexia could have offered up, a brown-nosing Cornyn staffer inserting quotes for Burka to parrot, and we're left to marvel over this "Burka Goes to Washington" drivel.

To be fair, Burka is certainly a serviceable writer who can string together a decent analysis. It's the inserted self-serving pap that he cuts and pastes from GOP consultants to his medium of choice that is troubling. Yes, his sense of history in Texas politics is up there with anyone else's. Yes, he does a magnificent job of earning the trust of his subjects (perhaps in no small part due to the high probability that he'll drop their names and quote them as if they were the smartest people on the planet). That alone doesn't make him the "premiere Texas political writer" ... unless you're being sarcastic about what it takes to qualify for that.

Among the items not covered by Burka? Cornyn's salability for the VP spot. That seems like a big whiff for such a lengthy column. The very qualities that Burka goes to great length to describe certainly seem to paint a guy who could be a great attack dog, albeit with a gentle demeanor. Were there seriously zero questions asked about the possibility? Where there seriously zero phone calls to national folk asking about his chances for same? How very un-premier-like of Burka to miss that.

Read the article while it's up ... it's not that it's bad. It's just that it's a bit more vapid than normal. That's Burka's trademark, however - the ability to say a lot without saying anything new or enlightening.