SmashMouth

At TPPF conference, Golden State surpasses Washington as object of Lone Star animus

To listen to the talk at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Policy Orientation for the Texas Legislature, the battles between Democrats and Republicans, between right and left, in America are really proxies for the ultimate showdown between America’s two, majority-minority mega-states - Texas and California.

America must choose which state to follow, and the verdict at the Hilton Austin was clear.

Bill Bennett set the tone.

“California is the Lindsay Lohan of states. It just can’t get it right. Texas seem to be getting it right almost all the time.”

Bennett noted that people say that for all the good things going on Texas, it is still no place to be poor. Wrong, said Bennett.

“It’s also better for poor people than the state of California,” he said. He said that with similar demographics, “You have a 23-percent poverty rate in California and a 16.5 percent rate in Texas.”

Why. It’s the Texas “ethos” he said, explaining that ethos is a Greek word meaning “the habits of the creatures in a place.”

Bennett was introducing Gov. Rick Perry, who began by saying that listening to Bennett, he was “trying to think of a Greek word I even knew, outside of gyro,” before launching into a Texas-touting speech in which he said that, whether they will admit it or not, the governor of every other state “wants to be Texas.”

That afternoon, at a panel discussion on immigration policy moderated by Steve Moore, a member of the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, Moore said, “at the Wall Street Journal, we call California the Greece of North America.”

Brian Kennedy, president of the Claremont Institute in California, referred to Peter Skerry’s 1993 book, “Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority,” which compared the Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles and San Antonio.

Skerry wrote: “In the relatively benign context of Los Angeles, Mexican-Americans have pursued racial minority politics; while in the harsher context of San Antonio, their politics has been more akin to immigrant ethnic politics.”

As Kennedy explained it: “The Hispanics in San Antonio have come here because they wanted to become Texans. They were fans of the cowboys and the pickup trucks, they wore cowboy boots, they had gun racks. They liked what was Texas … whereas in California people were surfing, they were eating granola and it’s all this craziness, and so the Hispanics looked at all those people and thought, do we really want to be these kind of people? No. So they retained more or less many of their folkways” and “kept more thinking in terms of their Mexican-ness or Latin-ness or Hispanic-ness, if that’s even a word, rather than thinking of themselves as Americans.”

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Danno

I'm just curious... who didn't already know this?

SmashMouth

Well... you know .... with the quality public government education system that exists in many states, it is not entirely preposterous that somewhere someone did not realize this.

Danno

Thats true. I often over-estimate the average American's intelligence.

WhoDat!656

Or to put it in easier terms...