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Dewhurst burned by a fire he could no longer control

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The standard line is the U.S. Senate race in Texas was Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst’s to lose and lose it he did. His loss to Ted Cruz in Tuesday’s Republican primary runoff will rank among the biggest upsets in Texas political history. And it wasn’t even a close loss; Cruz cruised to a decisive, 14-point win.

There are many reasons why Dewhurst lost. His own presumption of victory - his political arrogance, if you prefer - kept him aloof from voters. For months he refused to participate in candidate forums. His absence from these forums allowed his opponents, chiefly Cruz, to define him as a moderate, which apparently is the worst thing a Republican can be these days. Dewhurst is moderate only if you’re striding toward the rightmost edge of the political spectrum, but by the time he began to engage the other candidates, enough damage had been done to defy him, by four percentage points, an outright victory in the May primary.

Dewhurst also is a dull speaker and a sluggish campaigner. Cruz is neither.

There’s a bit of poetic justice in Dewhurst’s defeat. The flawed redistricting map produced by the 2011 Legislature over which Dewhurst was a chief presiding officer generated a court battle that delayed the state’s primary by nearly three months, from March 6 to May 29. The delay gave Cruz the precious time he needed to build enough momentum to force a runoff - he just barely forced a runoff, but just barely was good enough. Once in a runoff, victory went from impossible for Cruz to possible to probable to expected. By Monday, the last day of the campaign before Tuesday’s vote, Dewhurst was so desperate to prove that he’s a true conservative (and truly, he is, not that it matters now) that he showed up at a Chick-fil-A in South Austin to buy a sandwich from the fast-food restaurant whose president, Dan Cathy, forthrightly opposes gay marriage.

Dewhurst, like Gov. Rick Perry and countless other Texas and national Republicans, has made a career out of bashing Washington and taking electoral advantage of anti-Washington sentiment. The trouble is, you can’t always control fire when you play with it. Anti-Washington is also anti-government, and Dewhurst, the sitting lieutenant governor, is government. He was beaten by a force he was unable to exploit. Perry, whose flirtation with tea partyers so far has been masterful, may find himself similarly burned if he decides to run for re-election in 2014.

So now a lieutenant governor, overwhelmingly rejected by Republican voters, will return to Austin in January to preside over a legislative session that will feature an even more radically conservative Legislature operating without the guidance of several key leaders because those leaders didn’t win their elections either. (Incumbents were definitely out of favor in this year’s Republican primary.) It’ll be an interesting session, to say the least. Fingers crossed it’s not also downright damaging.

Meanwhile, Cruz is the political celebrity of the moment - look for him to be given a prime speaking spot at this month’s Republican convention in Tampa, Fla. Barring some unforeseen circumstance, he will easily beat former state Rep. Paul Sadler in November’s general election and will become the state’s first Hispanic U.S. senator when he takes office in January. It’s assumed he’ll ally himself with Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and other tea party-affiliated Republicans. If this is where he chooses to reside, don’t be surprised if Cruz quickly emerges as the group’s intellectual and policy leader.

As so many Republican candidates have this election season, Cruz repeatedly defines himself as a “constitutional conservative.” When he met with the American-Statesman’s editorial board a few months ago, seeking and winning the board’s endorsement, I asked him near the end of his visit if it was possible to be a constitutional liberal. Sure, he answered.

He’s right, of course. Not that it’s anything he’ll ever bring up on his own. For one thing, he has his own fire to control now.


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