[Reporting for News Team One: Southwestern Region]
Demetra Jefferson-Wysinger, an Independent Party candidate for the 2014 Texas Gubernatorial campaign, is making waves in the “Big-Hatted State.” (They call it the “Lone Star.”)
That’s a lofty goal, especially for a state that houses as citizens two men, a father and son, who were once called “the President of the United States,” and who also have a son and brother once called the “Governor of the State of Florida.”
True enough, a win for Jefferson-Wysinger will make history on two counts: She will be the first Independent candidate to become governor of Texas since Sam Houston was elected in 1827; and she will be the first African-American female candidate to get her name on the electoral ballot for a Governor’s election, but she isn’t running just to make history.
Jefferson-Wysinger, a self-proclaimed Liberal Conservative [more left-leaning], would like to see the state of Texas returned to its citizens in the core democratic traditional principles on which America and the state was originally founded.
“It’s all about you, your life, and your liberty” is her main campaign slogan.
She is currently about 20,000 signatures from the ballot box on November 4, and there is no doubt that there are more than enough people in the state who can help put her there.
But what are the demographics of Texas that would make Jefferson-Wysinger the best candidate, particularly since the mainstream media has made this a definitive “Abbott -v- Davis” election.
Several different mainstream polls have Greg Abbott (R) ahead of Wendy Davis (D) by a little more than 12.5 percentage points as of this writing. Polls, which only tell us who is answering them, not who is actually going to show up on that certain Tuesday, show that the Republican candidate Abbott is as good as elected.
However, Jefferson-Wysinger is unswayed by this news. She has an all-business no-nonsense approach to gainful state politics, in which she insists that the corporate buy-off in all elections should be removed expediently from her home state.
‘Big Bank Hank’ and ‘Big Money Honey’ in politics has been a painful lesson learned the hard way by all of America, but most especially by Texas – which was a self-contained nation in the mid-1800s before it became a state. It is also no big-hatted secret that many Red-leaning politicians have talked up possible secession for the state’s future.
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, University of Texas, said in October 2013 “There is just a different political culture here. There is a strain of independent self-reliance and self-identity that political leaders can draw upon.” Rep. John Culberson (R-Houston) said in the same year that “The Texas Republican delegation is united in our determination to cut federal spending and stop the rapid expansion of our national debt. The rest of the country has a lot to learn from Texas.”
Indeed, Jefferson-Wysinger says she agrees that Texas is not having the tremendous fiscal problems that have plagued most of the nation for the past ten to twelve years; but she disagrees that it is due to the Republican Party having the best manners and methods of governance.
Texas’ biggest issue, like most, she says, is education.
Jefferson-Wysinger describes the problems as three-fold: (1) Teaching children for the purpose of passing tests rather than learning, thus leaving children behind who aren’t supposed to be “left behind”; (2) ineffective legislation that props up the system in a manner that is an easily-toppled house of cards; and (3) the over-medication of low-income children who are less in need of medication and more in need of enterprising ways for them to learn and grow into effective citizens. (As a matter of note: H.B. 462 prohibited the adoption or use of Common Core standards in Texas, but they don’t seem to be very popular anywhere in the nation at the moment. Like anything else, however, it depends on whom you ask.)
Like Democratic front-runner Wendy Davis, Jefferson-Wysinger was a single mother who has used public assistance in the past to help raise her children, whom she says excelled in grade school. She also worked and continued to pursue her college degree while raising her children. Now a proud grandmother herself, she is especially equipped to connect with Texas’ single-parent and low-income families in a way that even Davis doesn’t have the experience to reach.
The National Center for Children in Poverty reports that in 2012, there were more than 1.5 Million people living below the federal poverty rate, with more than 2.2 Million of them young children.
That number is about four-percent higher than the national average, and out of those, 74-percent have at least one parent who is full-time or part-time/part-year employed. Twenty-seven percent of those in poverty in Texas have parents who are not employed at all.
Texas, with such bragging rights as to its economic standings and Red-leaning stance in America, should not have that many children with working parents who are living in poverty. It is a state that also has enough money in its budget not to have so many children in that demographic failing in school, but it does.
Those are the issues Jefferson-Wysinger is most passionate about, and which she knows she is qualified to address. For her, those are not just numbers and statistics, but it is the life she herself has lived.
She is so determined to set Texas straight forward again that she declares she has “nothing to hide that she is unwilling to talk about in public.”
No matter what happens in the end, she contends, the State cannot just conveniently sweep under the rug and ignore the millions of Texas citizens who make the state’s positives a very unattractive deficit when it comes to the true inner workings of the political system. Having it all ‘figured out’ on the surface while refusing to factor in the state’s low-income assets that are circumstantially rigged into auto-default is not a winning combination for the future.
“Who doesn’t value freedom?” she asks. “Our values are based on our ability to exercise our freedoms in whatever manner we choose.”
Though she treads water carefully when it comes to critiquing the top contenders, she does not believe Davis has the state’s best interests at heart and was only leveraged to give Greg Abbott a run for the money. Greg Abbott, she says, is the ‘usual and expected’ Republican; and most assuredly, we all have learned that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.
Jefferson-Wysinger is a clear-eyed realist about her chances of winning as the “late horse in the race,” but she is willing to take that chance for the opportunity to make Texas a better state, simply because she believes it can be better.
It should be better.
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