In 2004, I challenged US Representative Sam Johnson for the Republican nomination in the third Texas congressional district. I had voted for Sam Johnson every election since the special election of 1991 and consider him to have been an authentic American hero and a solid conservative. Nevertheless, I campaigned against him for three reasons:
First, Representative Johnson said during his first campaign in 1991 that "twelve years was long enough for anyone to be in Washington", and he signed onto the Republican Contract with America—and its call for term limits--during the wave election of 1994 that swept Republicans into control of congress for the first time in decades. I agreed with him when he adopted that stance. Yet, in 2004, he was running for his fourteenth and fifteenth year in the House of Representatives. Some Republicans kept their term limits campaign pledge and declined to seek reelection after six or twelve years in the House, but too many didn’t. I believed I owed it to the district and to my congressman to keep my fellow Republicans honest. Besides, Sam Johnson was showing signs of no longer being physically and mentally up to the job. It was time. I believe that we have come to see the price that is paid by the country when a party’s elected leadership fails to keep its word to the electorate, and when people who are too old to serve their constituents with excellence hang onto the job for too long.
Second, while I have always believed in the myriad benefits of free trade, the trend of off-shoring American high-tech jobs at the time was dangerous. Technology jobs were the high-paying jobs the country was promised because of free trade, but they were being sent overseas along with manufacturing jobs. This risked social upheaval and reflexive opposition towards trade and immigration. Furthermore, America’s hegemony, and the penumbra of protection that offers to democracies around the world, would be threatened over time if other nations surpassed our technical advantage through off-shoring and intellection property theft. This, too, seems prescient as the failure of leadership to articulate the benefits and costs of free trade, and to prevent the worst excesses of corporate flight to lower short term costs led to widespread displacement of workers in the rust belt and Midwest, the financial crisis, the collapse of any hope of immigration reform, and a populist revolt across the political landscape.
Third, I wanted to show that it was possible to reach a sufficiently broad audience using new media and technology without having to raise a lot of money—leveling the playing field between lifelong politicians and people who wanted to serve their communities without becoming beholden to financial backers. I had the right idea, but the inchoate social media of 2004 was insufficient to overcome large financial deficits. The bigger problem, though, was that I was wrong about this being a good idea. I’ll refer the reader to Yuval Levin’s work on mediating institutions and Jonah Goldberg’s, among others, writing about the problems with the weakening of the parties—making them easier for outsiders to hijack. Whatever you think of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—they weren’t a Democrat and Republican, respectively, when they made their assaults on the parties’ establishments.
History will look favorably on my first two points, but perhaps not as much on my last one. There were other issues that mattered to me then, and that matter to me now, but those were the motivating factors for my seeking the GOP nomination for congress back then. Although I am not planning to run for Congress in 2022, this site will remain active. Please return to this site in the future, as links to insights and analysis of the upcoming election can be found here.
If you missed my 2004 campaign, follow the links below to catch up on the Dallas Morning News' coverage of the race:
e-mail Brian Rubarts