Kinky Friedman - Future Governor of Texas?

My friend and fellow blogger, M. Simon, has a very interesting post on his blog today, regarding our friend and candidate for Governor of Texas, Kinky Friedman. Now, I found it very interesting that a guy who doesn't even live in Texas, would be interested in the Governor's race, let alone blog about it.

The article he referenced, appears in the online edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and is written by a reporter named Matt Labash.

Mr. Labash writes:

When it comes to black, Kinky Friedman picks up where Johnny Cash left off. He wears a black bull-rider hat, black boots, and a black belt with a buckle the size of a Mini Cooper hubcap. Over his black pearl-button shirt, he mixes things up a bit. He'll either wear the black leather vest, given to him by Waylon Jennings, or the black "preachin' coat," cut by Manuel, the famed former head tailor of Nudie's in Nashville.

In the airy, pastel atrium of the Ambassador Hotel in Amarillo, Ma and Pa Frontporch do double takes at the breakfast buffet, pausing by the Froot Loop dispenser, saying, "Isn't that . . . " when they spy the dark rider with bandito facial hair hunched over his omelet, skimming the newspaper. Kinky looks less like a Texas gubernatorial candidate than a desperado fortifying himself to knock over a stagecoach.

As I join his table, he welcomes me warmly. I've read a stack of Kinky stories on the plane, so I know how it works: Kinky is a shtick-Tommy gun, so if you tape eight hours of interviews with him, but are looking for original material, you know you'll have to throw seven out right off the top. Most of it will already have traveled several times around the
world. He's pro-recycling: He calls it "rotating the crops." And so I try to peel the onion a bit, getting right down to his raw, vital essence--not political, but musical.

Kinky (so named for his "Jew-fro," as the ladies at Supercuts call it) is most famous these days for trying to become the first independent governor of Texas since Sam Houston in 1859. For two decades prior, he was known for his 17 well-reviewed comic-mystery novels, with himself cast as the protagonist ("I'm not afraid of anything, just that I may have to stop talking about myself for five minutes," he's said). But it was as head cheese-maker in Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys that he first entered public consciousness.

Before that, Kinky did a two-year Peace Corps stint in Borneo, where he introduced the locals to Frisbee while they introduced him to betel nut and hallucinogenic rice wine. Perhaps under the influence of it, he conceived the Jewboys. When Kinky got back to Texas in the early '70s, Austin had become a hothouse for outlaw country heroes who'd said adios to the slick sounds of Nashville in order to do some honest-to-God songwriting. Cosmic Cowboys and gypsy troubadours like Michael Martin Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Joe Shaver, and other guys with two first names walked the land.

Read the rest here.
It's a very well written article, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and overall I thought it was pretty informative.

It definitely talks about Kinky's strategy for winning the election. His campaign manager is the same one Jesse Ventura used for his gubernatorial run in Minnesota, and he surprised the political establishment in that state by actually winning. And the way he won was to bring out the college vote. He was spectacularly successful in getting lazy, politically apathetic college kids to actually get out of bed on election day, and go vote. Evidently, Kinky is trying to do the same thing.

Trouble is, he doesn't fit the multicultural, feel good, left wing sort of politician archetype that college kids are indoctrinated to be attracted to. He's actually fairly conservative on some things (fiscal conservation, border security) and fairly liberal on others (gay marriage). He also smokes....great big, smelly cigars! And he sprinkles his speech liberally with all the taboo words and phrases that get most people tagged by the politically correct as racist, mysoginist, and homophobic.

He freely admits that he has little political experience (he ran for JP in his home district years ago, and lost), and in a State House as contentious as the one in Austin, one wonders, even if he were to actually get himself elected by popular vote (read: Will of the People), would he have the political chops to actually accomplish what he wants to do? Will the "old guard" political establishment shut him out? Will he have the political clout to cut deals with the old guys who've been around the State House since God was a boy? I'm not so sure.

I do know this, however, that Kinky has certainly pumped some much-needed life into what is usually a dry-as-dust gubernatorial race in Texas. Mix in "One Tough Grandma," Carol Keeton Strayhorn, who, by the way, is just as much a showman as Kinky (when Kinky and Carol turned in their petitions to get on the ballot, they both had way more signatures than were needed, but Carol saw fit to trumpet her submission by delivering over 100 boxes to the Election Commission. Kinky turned in 12), the uber-liberal Chris Bell, and a beleaguered Rick Perry, and it promises to be a pretty amusing and exciting time coming down to election day in Texas.