The governor had appeared at a tea party rally in his state at which some audience members reportedly shouted “Secede!” The subject came up again when he spoke to reporters afterwards. “Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” Perry said. “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”

The story that Texas has the power to leave the U.S. if it decides to do so is a common one in the state, but, according to the Associated Press, which checked with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, it’s not true.

Perry is up for reelection in 2010, and he faces the prospect of a tough primary challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, which could explain the direction he’s gone on these issues lately.

Last week, Perry announced his support for a non-binding resolution currently under consideration in the Texas House that says the federal government has overstepped the authority granted to it under the Constitution, and is trampling on the powers reserved for the states, especially as enumerated in the 10th Amendment.

“Millions of Texans… are tired of Washington, D.C. trying to come down here and tell us how to run Texas,” Perry said at a press conference about his decision. “The 10th Amendment was enacted by folks who remembered what it was like to have a very oppressive government, to be under the thumb of tyrants in an all-powerful government. Unfortunately, the protections it guarantees have melted away over the course of the years… I believe the federal government has become oppressive. I believe it’s become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state.”

On Tuesday, the governor got what he wanted — and probably more — from his announcement, as a big link from the Drudge Report took the story national. But what he’s also accomplished is to link himself to the fringe “state sovereignty” movement that’s now advocating for resolutions like this in 20 states. Illustrating where on the political spectrum this falls, the push is being heavily promoted by World Net Daily, the Web site that brought you the Birthers.

Ultimately, the resolution, if passed, will mean little. At both the state and federal level, these sorts of symbolic things come up all the time, on all kinds of issues. They’re usually little more than a chance for politicians to tell their constituents they took a stand. This one’s no different. If the resolution passes, Texas won’t be obligated to return federal money or ignore conditions imposed upon it by Congresst; it’ll just tell the feds they should stop doing things Texas lawmakers believe are unconstitutional.

As for whether those things actually are unconstitutional, well, at least some of them aren’t, as the legislators who drafted the resolution managed to get their facts about the 10th Amendment wrong. One provision, for example, reads, “RESOLVED, That all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.”

What this section describes has now become commonplace — it’s the way Congress effectively mandated a federal drinking age — and, in cases like South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court has declared the practice Constitutional. Louis R. Cohen, a former U.S. deputy solicitor general, successfully argued that case on behalf of the federal government. He told Salon, “Insofar as Congress is spending federal money, Congress has very wide authority to state the conditions under which it will spend federal money. If that means that the state has to do certain things in order to qualify for the federal money, that’s perfectly Constitutional.”

Update: The original headline on this post, “Rick Perry secedes from the U.S.,” was intended to be a joke, but that wasn’t made clear enough. To clarify, what Perry endorsed was not secession but a non-binding resolution saying the federal government should stop what some Texas legislators believe is an unconstitutional abuse of power. My apologies for the confusion.

“I feel pretty good about it, actually,” Friedman insisted last Tuesday, a week before Election Day. He had just arrived back in Texas from New York. While his opponents had been spending millions on ad blitzes and crisscrossing the state in the race’s final days, he had scored yet another major free media coup by taping an appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman” that would air Friday, Nov. 3, just four days before polls open.

“My chances depend totally on the turnout being as big as the early voting is, which has been record breaking,” Friedman said Tuesday. “If the turnout is that big, I’m the governor. It’s very simple. If it’s not, [incumbent Rick] Perry’s the governor. That’s it.”

Yet one is hard-pressed to find any seasoned political observers in the Lone Star State who feel that the 61-year-old writer and musician, first known for his 1970s country band the Texas Jewboys, can overtake the rest of the field. They still see Friedman as the errant court jester of Texas politics who focused national media attention on the race but only briefly seemed to be a viable candidate. A top staffer for Democratic candidate Chris Bell, who in the last few weeks has broken in the polls from the other two major challengers to lock up second place, says that internal Democratic polls show Bell as the homestretch comer. They claim he has closed within 5 points of Perry, the Republican incumbent who has never topped 40 percent in any poll.

But all along, Friedman has insisted that the race is, as he calls it, “Kinky versus apathy.” It’s not the poll numbers that matter, he says: “It’s the turnout, stupid.”

Texas Monthly rightly declared the contest “The Weirdest Governor’s Race Ever” on the cover of its July issue, which also featured a photo of Friedman, a columnist for the magazine until he declared his candidacy, in full Uncle Sam regalia. Friedman seemed to have a shot, especially since he faced a big field of weak candidates: an unpopular incumbent, an unknown Democrat, a marginal Libertarian, and a Democrat turned Republican turned independent. All he needed to win was a plurality of the vote, and stranger things had happened before. Like pro wrestler turned governor Jesse Ventura in 1998, he had become the poster boy for the burgeoning throw-the-bums-out sentiment of a particularly restive political year.

Friedman based his campaign on the Bulworthian appeal of saying what he feels and believes, polls and triangulation be damned. “A guy who will tell you what he really thinks trumps any single issue,” he insists. “That’s what Texans want, and by God, that’s what I’m going to give them.”

In spite of much initial Texas political wisdom to the contrary, the sometimes foul-mouthed, trash-talking mutant meld of Will Rogers, Lenny Bruce and Shel Silverstein managed to gather three times the needed 45,540 voter signatures to get on the ballot as an independent. And at the very least his delivery, if not his message, was resonating across the Lone Star State and even hitting home in some varied and even surprising places.

But all that was five months ago, when Kinky was a quirky outsider, before he fumbled through a televised debate, and before a closer look at the man who would be governor exposed to the public at large the politically incorrect edge to his persona that was already familiar to his long-time fans. Friedman’s own version of George Allen’s macaca outbreak seems inevitable in retrospect, and there were hints of what was to come in the earliest days of his campaign.

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“It would be nice for Texas to be No. 1 in something other than toll roads, executions, property taxes and dropouts,” Friedman tells the 60 or so folks gathered at the Read All About It Bookstore in Boerne, a small town south of Austin. It’s early summer, and the line has already become all but boilerplate in his stump.

The assembled applaud heartily. Friedman is ostensibly in the store to sign copies of his latest book, “Cowboy Logic: The Wit and Wisdom of Kinky Friedman,” but the event can’t help but become a campaign whistle stop. The crowd’s response to Friedman’s sardonic yet pointed one-liner about the state of affairs in the Lone Star State indicates that they, like Friedman, also feel that something is rotten in the proud Republic of Texas. And that he could even be the man to fix the mess.

Friedman turns his wit on the incumbent. “I’m not against Rick Perry,” he says. “Personally, we’re friends. We’ve taken a few cooking classes together. We’ve seen a few Broadway musicals together. We’ve gone on one cruise together. We’ve gone antiquing a few times together … tandem bike rides…”

The gathered chuckle knowingly at Friedman’s sly allusion to the long-circulating rumors that the governor might not be altogether heterosexual. Friedman is using the jab as humorous segue into a discussion of the gay-marriage ban, a ban he opposes and Perry supports. “The fact is that the gay-marriage ban has not affected our lives in any way,” he says. Friedman’s support for gay rights is from the left side of his á la carte menu of political positions, which also includes legalized casino gambling to pay for education (“Slots for Tots”) and support for school prayer.

The bookstore throng is open to Kinky as unvarnished teller of truths, an appeal that stretches across demographic categories. “It’s across the board,” observes Dean Barkley, Friedman’s campaign manager. “I tried to pick one up about who’s showing up at his events, and I couldn’t. It’s everyone: little old ladies, rednecks, conservative Republicans who can’t stand their party because they feel it’s abandoned them.”

An informal survey of about half of those at the event found teens, retirees, self-described Republicans, Democrats, independents, liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders. And almost every one of them shares a dismay with politicians and politics as usual.

“I love his independence, and I’m sick and tired of politicians running the state, and I like what he has to say,” says attendee John Barnett. The 63-year-old money manager “was a very Barry Goldwater Republican when there were no Republicans in the state of Texas.” He voted for Bush in 2000 and has now shifted to the left.

Richard “Kinky” Friedman was born in Chicago, grew up in Houston and Austin, and attended the University of Texas. Following a two-year postgraduate stint in the Peace Corps in Borneo, he started his band the Texas Jewboys. His debut album was “Sold American” in 1973. He became famous for songs like “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed,” “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” and “Ride ‘Em Jewboy.”

But by the end of the decade, Friedman’s recording career had petered out, and he was reduced to primarily being a resident weekend attraction at the Lone Star Cafe nightclub in New York’s Greenwich Village.

A few hours after the Boerne bookstore visit, as a weary yet still restless Friedman rides back to Austin on a dark Texas highway, the reporter in the back seat asks the candidate a question that finally stumps the garrulous wiseacre: What did you learn from your years living in New York City?

Friedman pauses, ponders and rolls his ever-present cigar around a bit in his mouth. “You know what? I really don’t know. That’s a good question.”

He chews on the query like his cigar for a bit. After all, Friedman spent his Big Apple days from 1979 to 1985, to borrow one of his lines, “flying on 11 different herbs and spices,” or more accurately, liquids and powder.

“I will tell you this,” he finally says, pointing with his cigar for punctuation as our drive skirts near Johnson City, the birthplace of Lyndon B. Johnson. “The Texas hill country saved my life.” And now, in return, Kinky Friedman wants to save Texas.

On returning to Texas in ’85, he moved into a trailer at Echo Hill Ranch, the children’s summer camp his family has run in the Hill Country since 1953. Drawing on the milieu of his New York years and the characters he knew there, he tapped out his first soft-boiled mystery novel, “Greenwich Killing Time,” published in 1986, which starred a wisecracking and sometimes politically incorrect amateur private eye named Kinky Friedman.

The book enjoyed good reviews and solid sales and launched a series of fictional works that now includes nearly a score of volumes. He eventually landed a back-page column in the Texas Monthly and has in recent years branched out in his books as a humorist and social commentator.

The Texas gubernatorial campaign of 2006 has in some ways been an obvious opportunity to expand the tongue-in-cheek Kinky product line. His Web site streams KinkyToons touting his candidacy, and his campaign store sells bumper stickers that say “My Governor Is a Jewish Cowboy,” “He Ain’t Kinky, He’s My Governor” and “How Hard Can It Be?” There are also posters, T-shirts, mugs, pint glasses, a campaign cookbook and even a talking Kinky Friedman action figure.

“We’re like a Willie Nelson concert. We’re selling everything we possibly can as merchandise,” says Barkley. It has even helped finance a campaign that can’t compete with the millions raised by some of the other candidates.

But he also seemed to have a chance to win. Even months later, with Election Day approaching, the other candidates still seem like the supporting cast of a comedy starring Kinky.

First, there is incumbent Gov. Rick Perry, aka “Governor Goodhair,” as dubbed by Austin-based columnist Molly Ivins. He inherited the governorship in 2000 when President-elect Bush resigned the office. He was finally elected to the post in 2002 by a little less than 21 percent of all registered Texas voters in an election with a mere 36 percent turnout. His current poll numbers are unsurprising.

Then there’s the much-married Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander Strayhorn, aka “One Tough Grandma.” She’s the mother of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan (now working on her campaign) and recently resigned Medicare director Mark McClellan.

A former schoolteacher, “Grandma” Strayhorn was the first woman to be elected mayor of Austin. Now an independent, she has switched parties as often as husbands. After being appointed to the State Board of Insurance by Gov. Mark White, a Democrat, she became a Republican before the end of her term to challenge popular Austin-area Democratic Rep. Jake Pickle. She lost. Since 1998 she has held the elective post of Texas comptroller of public accounts — in essence, state treasurer. One of her ex-husbands is a minor Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist.

Lonely Libertarian James Werner is the forgotten man of the race. He was excluded from the sole gubernatorial debate on Oct. 6, which made him even lonelier. So, presumably, do his poll numbers, which hover around 2 percent.

Democrat Chris Bell is the straight man of the bunch. A former journalist and lawyer, he began his political career in 1997 on the Houston City Council. In November 2002, Bell was elected to Congress, but served only a single term as a result of the Tom DeLay-engineered 2003 Texas congressional redistricting, which caused him to lose his bid for reelection.

Until recently, Friedman’s fellow candidates seemed reluctant to even acknowledge him, as if to talk about the bozo on the campaign bus might also cast such suspicion on all of its riders.

Yet despite the other bozos on the bus, and despite the humor in his pitch, Friedman’s campaign is not Pat Paulsen or Joe Walsh for President. Underneath the jokes simmers a serious concern for the state by a resident whose doorbell at his Austin home chimes the melody “The Eyes of Texas.”

“I’m angry about what’s happened to Texas,” Friedman asserts. “It shouldn’t have happened. We’re just too powerful a state, we’re too strong, and we’re too rich to let this happen. And it’s a God-awful shame.”

He looks at running for governor not as a new way to do shtick, but as a logical extension of what he calls “the truth-telling” of all his endeavors. “The people are drooling for honesty, they are begging for a little bit of truth.” It was not humor but a deadly serious encounter with mortality that inspired his run. During a seaside vacation in Mexico, he was swept away from the beach by a freak wave while swimming. “I ended up spending the night trapped on a cliff with the waves rising higher and higher,” he recalls. “I thought I was going to be drowned. It was dark and I had nothing but a bathing suit and a soggy cigar … And I just thought, I want to do something more with my life if I can. And I didn’t know what.

“And then I was in Ireland doing a show, and I was having a lot of fun with the audience between the songs. And a guy comes up to me afterwards and he says, man, you’re not a musician. You’re a politician.”

His campaign manager Barkley heartily agrees. “I’ve had to do less work in managing a candidate than I have with anyone,” he notes. “I’ve never seen a guy that can read an audience as well and just talk to them.”

Part of Friedman’s playbook, however, comes from “The Minnesota Mafia,” as he calls them, of Barkley and media guru Bill Hillsman, the team behind the successful gubernatorial run of Jesse Ventura, who recently barnstormed Texas college campuses with Friedman. Yet Barkley insists that Friedman sets much of the campaign’s tone.

And he does so by adopting ideas wherever he finds them, with a special fondness for the sort of biblical allusions he’s used ever since he first emerged into the public eye more than three decades ago. In his Texas Independence Day speech last March, Friedman railed about throwing the moneychangers out of the temple — a line he had immediately jotted down in a little notebook a few weeks earlier after this reporter used it in response to his comment about purging the state house of lobbyists.

But Friedman’s charmed campaign hit road bumps early. In the Boerne bookstore, no one objected when he couched his criticism of Perry in mildly homophobic humor. Under the spotlights of the media, Friedman’s persona and his penchant for racially insensitive humor began to dim his luster.

In the early days of his campaign, Friedman answered a TV interviewer’s question about how to deal with sexual predators by saying, “Throw ‘em in prison and throw away the key, and make ‘em listen to a Negro talking to himself.” He also made waves in September by attributing Houston’s rising crimes rate to “crack heads and thugs” among the Katrina evacuees that had relocated to the city. (A statement by his campaign in response citing his 1960s picketing for integration barely seemed to register.) A Democratic blogger unearthed concert tapes from the 1970s featuring racist stage patter.

Anyone familiar with Friedman’s songs and novels already knows that he’s “an equal opportunity offender,” as he puts it, who has trafficked in politically incorrect language from the moment it helped him enter the public eye more than three decades ago. Yet that didn’t stop his opponents from upbraiding Friedman for such comments during the Oct. 6 debate.

Friedman’s response? “If you ain’t offending people, you ain’t getting anything done.” He insists that any attacks on him “will be the bull kicking the rodeo clown, and Texans will see it for what it is.”

Yet the debate diminished his stature further. In his signature black cowboy suit, he seemed a bit unnerved under the bright TV lights. He came off like his talking action figure, repeating lines that by then were already more than familiar to many Texans. According to Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor at the University of Texas, Friedman’s chances took a beating on live TV. “He lost some elevation on that occasion.”

Bell, on the other hand, raised his stature. He also seemed to think he’d found an ally in Friedman, according to Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “There were two occasions in that debate,” recalls Jillson, “where Friedman acknowledged Bell privately and even threw him a softball. That suggested to Bell that Kinky thought of him as the logical place for his votes if he didn’t complete the race. And I think Kinky was in fact signaling to his supporters that Bell is the more reasonable choice among these three others.”

Not long after the debate, Bell made a move that many observers had long expected, and called Friedman. He asked him to step down and throw his support in Bell’s direction. It was met with yet another Kinky anti-politician quip: “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

Even without Friedman’s help, according to the most recent SUSA poll, Bell has risen to 26 percent and Rick Perry is at 36 percent. Internal Democratic polls say the race is even closer and suggest Bell would be in striking distance if Friedman or Strayhorn or both dropped out of the race.

Strangely, however, it’s not the maverick gay-marriage-endorsing cowboy who’s cutting into Bell’s Democratic base. The late October SUSA poll showed that fully 48 percent of Texas voters consider themselves Republicans, compared with 34 who are Democrats. Of the self-identified Democrats, 23 percent support Grandma Strayhorn, compared to 15 percent of the Republicans. Kinky, meanwhile, pulls 16 percent of the Republicans, and only 10 percent of the Democrats. Where Friedman is hurting Bell is among liberals and independents, of whom 30 percent and 27 percent, respectively, are supporting Kinky. Of course, in Texas, only 13 percent of the electorate admits to being liberal, and only 14 percent calls itself independent.

In reality, neither Friedman nor Strayhorn is a spoiler. Even if both dropped out, Perry would still win, despite his lack of popularity. Explains UT’s Buchanan, “If this were a two-candidate race between Perry and Bell, Perry would win that by 15 to 18 points. It’s not that in a straight-up Democrat versus Republican race in Texas, Bell would stand a better chance. He wouldn’t.”

As we close in on the day of decision, Friedman and his team continue to maintain that he has a pull that isn’t registering in the likely-voter polls and if the turnout of disaffected and occasional voters is strong enough, he can still win. Online polls and radio talk shows all produce outpourings of support for Friedman that traditional pollsters don’t measure, and there is also anecdotal evidence of a continued appeal to people of varied ideological allegiances.

In coastal Brazoria County south of Houston, the daily Brazosport Facts endorsed Friedman, citing his wins “by a huge margin” in the paper’s online polls. Like the neighboring Galveston County Times, it feels that “Even if Friedman doesn’t win … a strong showing will send a message to Austin that we’re sick of the double-talk and tired of special interests having the ear of power while Joe Taxpayer gets pushed to the back of the line.”

The Daily Texan, the weekday paper at the University of Texas at Austin, the nation’s largest college, also came out for the Kinkster, stating that, “while we hate to admit it, we believe Kinky’s independence would serve the most self-described independent state in the union.” In the true-blue city of Austin, Friedman bumper stickers have been a common sight ever since he declared, and one can barely spit without hitting left-leaning Austinites who proudly declare, “I’m voting for Kinky.” And in the north Texas college town of Denton, a drinking straw poll at Beth Marie’s Old-Fashioned Ice Cream and Soda Fountain has Friedman with a significant lead over Bell, then Strayhorn, with Perry coming in last.

In the already event-filled race, Yogi Berra’s maxim still holds true: It ain’t over till it’s over. “Well, nobody knows,” Friedman ponders at a week out against the tide of the pundits, polls and newspaper endorsements. “If it works out right, we’ve got an ass kicking four years ahead of us.”

And if it doesn’t, he plans to remain a counter-politician to the very end and not play the role of the gracious loser. “I’m here to see if I can fix Texas. And I guarantee that if Perry wins, I’m retiring in a petulant snit. If Bell wins, I’m moving to France with Barbra Streisand. If Grandma wins, I’ll blow my fucking head off.”

Their situation grew dramatically worse on Tuesday, when one of their number, state Sen. John Whitmire of Houston, enraged his comrades by deciding to return home because he saw no end to the deadlock. Without him, the Democratic group doesn’t have enough people to deny Republicans a quorum and thus stop them from passing their redistricting plans. Yet the remaining Texas 10 still say they’re not going home. While most press accounts cast them as opponents of a Republican plan to grab power by redrawing legislative districts, the lawmakers-in-exile here see something at once more subtle and more important: the latest chapter in the South’s long, ugly war over minority voting rights.

Nine of the 10 senators remaining in Albuquerque are black or Hispanic; the other one represents a district that is mainly minority. And within a few years, experts say, Texas will join California as a state where Latinos, African-Americans and other minorities will outnumber Anglos.

So it is not far-fetched to say that how this drama unfolds will determine whether minority voters in Texas gain power proportionate to their numbers. That’s why several Texas Democrats are trying to hold firm even as their audacious gambit gives way to a protracted, depressing slog and their unity begins to crack.

“This is an effort to seriously gut minority voting rights,” says Sen. Leticia Van De Putte, head of the Texas Democratic Senate delegation. “We could not protect our constituents without breaking quorum” and fleeing Texas to short-circuit the Republican plot.

Redistricting — the creation of new electoral districts to ostensibly reflect new population patterns — is done once every 10 years in every state, based on census figures. It was last done in Texas in 2001. But Texas Republicans, having swept state offices in the last election, are determined to remake the voting landscape there while they have the power to lock in their party’s dominance. They have the votes in the state Legislature to prevail, but because the Texas constitution requires that two-thirds of the senators be in the Senate chamber before business can be done, the Texas 11 were able to use their self-imposed exile to thwart their opponents, running out the clock on two special sessions called by Republican Gov. Rick Perry.

They couldn’t go home because Perry would have immediately called another session and had them arrested and forcibly brought to the Senate. Whitmire’s departure changes that equation, because with him, the Senate Republicans, and the one Democratic senator who stayed behind, the Senate has a quorum and can do business. According to the Houston Chronicle, Whitmire has suggested he might flee again if the governor calls yet another special session, but without him, the Democrats’ boycott is largely symbolic. Still, as of Tuesday night, they were pledging to stick with it.

If the senators are stubborn, it’s partly because they’ve come to see their stance against redistricting as a civil rights struggle, not a political quarrel. At first, it’s difficult to see that the battle over Texas redistricting is all about race. Spurred by Texas powerhouse Tom DeLay, the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and by White House maestro Karl Rove, Texas Republicans are trying to ram through a redistricting proposal that would virtually ensure that Republicans would replace between five and seven white, moderate Democratic incumbents. The GOP proposal would redraw the state’s legislative boundaries so that minorities are concentrated into a few districts, likely leading to a net increase in the number of minority members of Congress. But the voting power of blacks and Latinos would likely be diluted in other districts, giving Republicans a net gain of as many as seven seats.

Yet Texas Democrats insist that the Republican redistricting plan is a deviously clever update on the party’s old-fashioned divide-and-conquer Southern strategy. The Republican plan, Democrats argue, would redraw the boundaries so that blocs of Hispanic and black voters would shift from districts where they’ve voted in coalitions with white Democrats and independents into solidly Republican suburban districts, where their influence will be almost meaningless.

It’s an attempt, Democrats say, to lock in Republican power ahead of demographic changes that bode ill for conservatives. Republicans, they believe, are trying to both reduce minority voting power and to stigmatize the Democratic Party as the party of blacks and Hispanics (who still vote largely Democratic, despite some Republican inroads). And, by targeting white congressmen elected by coalitions of minorities and white Democrats, the Republicans have found a way to disenfranchise minorities without violating civil rights laws that prohibit states from gerrymandering electoral districts on racial lines.

Among many of the exiled Democrats, there’s a strong sense that the most crucial political story in the nation is being overshadowed by the more colorful electoral pageant in California. “Were it not for California, this would be the biggest story in the country,” says Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos of Austin.

That analysis of the Texas standoff is shared by the liberal group MoveOn.org, and later this month it will raise the story’s profile with an advertising blitz funded by a million dollars raised online through its “Defend Democracy in Texas” campaign. Many of its radio, television and print ads, some of them in Spanish, will target Hispanics in Texas and in key swing states. The plan is to make Texas redistricting into a national issue about Republican hypocrisy on Hispanic issues.

“Republicans are trying to have it both ways,” says Zack Exley, MoveOn’s organizing director. “They’re trying to make this very strong appeal to Latinos to get some voters to switch over and vote for Spanish-speaker George W. Bush, but then at the same time they’re blatantly trying to disenfranchise Hispanic voters in Texas to solidify the Republican grip on Congress.

“Republicans from Bush on down to Perry reach out to minorities with their left hand, then knock the hell out of us with their right,” says Barrientos, a dapper, eloquent man who spent his childhood as a migrant worker in Galveston.

No Republicans returned calls for this story. But the redistricting standoff comes at a time when blacks and Latinos are on track to become majorities in Texas, leading some Texas Democrats to believe Republicans are using redistricting to limit the effect of demographic changes. One exiled Democrat recalls the candid comment of a Republican colleague: “We have 10 years until Hispanics take over.”

The Republican isn’t wrong. “A lot of people think that what’s going to happen in Texas is going to be what happened in California,” says Michael Lind, the author of “Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.” “It went from being a right-wing state based on lower-middle-class whites to being one of the most liberal states because of a coalition of blacks, Latinos and white liberals.”

In the same way, “Texas is going to go from being one of the most reactionary states in the union to being one of the most progressive,” Lind predicts. “At this point, the white Texans who vote for the Democratic Party tend to be very affluent, well-educated people who are very liberal, similar to California. The old white Texas populists, once the mainstay of Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic Party, are mostly Republican now.”

Thus, breaking up members of this coalition into different districts is key to preserving Republican power in Texas.

“Demographic changes mean that a majority of Texans will be people of color,” says Garnet Coleman, a state representative from Houston. With the growing Hispanic population, “for the first time Anglos would become the minority. It doesn’t bode well for them [Republicans] in terms of electoral demographics, but as long as they stack the deck by gerrymandering districts that favor them beyond the time that they naturally would be able to keep those districts, that’s to their advantage.”

Republicans don’t have much time. Hispanics currently account for a third of Texas’ population; according to a 2002 Washington Post story, the continued growth of the Latino population will leave Anglos as less than 50 percent of the population in Texas by 2005. Hispanics will exceed 50 percent of the state population by 2026, the Post reported.

Redistricting may blunt their political power, though. Once established, electoral districts are very difficult to change, says Rob Richie, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Voting and Democracy. As proof, he offers the case of Democratic dominance in Texas.

Texas Republicans have a point that the current congressional map doesn’t reflect Texas’ voting patterns, Richie says. More than 50 percent of Texans voted for Republican congressional representatives in the last election, but Republicans won just 15 seats, while Democrats took 17. (Of course, given the last presidential election, there’s something audacious about Republicans arguing that the system is invalid because its party won the popular vote in Texas but lost the electoral vote.) The Democrats dominate, says Richie, because of the electoral maps that state Democrats drew in 1991.

A panel of Texas judges redrew those maps in 2001, after statehouse Republicans blocked passage of a new map drawn by Democrats, who were then a majority. Republicans defended those court-drawn maps, which gave their party two extra seats, from a challenge in U.S. Supreme Court brought by civil rights groups, who said the map was unfair to minorities. Nevertheless, that round of redistricting didn’t reverse all the advantages Democrats had built into the system in 1991.

Indeed, Richie calls the Texas Democrats’ 1991 maps the most effective gerrymandering of that decade in the nation. But Democrats were hardly alone in trying to draw maps to their advantage. During the same decade, Republicans successfully gerrymandered Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Right now, Richie notes, Pennsylvania Democrats could win a clear majority of the statewide vote and still not have a chance at taking the majority of House seats.

The point, he says, is that electoral maps drawn now will determine who can get elected a decade from now. That’s why the Texas Democrats have such a sense of mission, even as their costs multiply and they grow weary of being away from home.

“Our Senate colleagues, they think we did this for show. They’re very uncomfortable every time we bring up the black or Hispanic issue,” says Van De Putte. “But this is about the consolidation of power and trying to direct control of the U.S. House for the next 20 years.”

One great irony of this whole imbroglio is that the Republican plan would create more minority seats in the U.S. Congress than currently exist. On the Texas Republican Party Web site, party chair Susan Weddington boasts that redistricting will “provide new leadership opportunities for minority Texans.” She’s right — while redistricting would dilute minority influence in many districts, it would pack a couple of districts with minority voters, who would be likely to elect minority candidates.

Democrats find it maddening when their opponents tout their plan as a kind of electoral affirmative action. “If anyone believes that Tom DeLay and Susan Weddington are really interested in what’s good for black and brown people, then they believe that the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is interested in what’s good for black and brown people,” says Coleman, who is black.

In exchange for two new minority members of Congress, Democrats say, blacks and Hispanics would lose a handful of white members whose voting records are relatively well-ranked by civil rights groups.

The argument that a handful of sympathetic white congressmen beats two minority representatives would sound grossly self-serving if put forth by the white congressmen themselves. But the main proponents of that argument are the Texas 11. “If you look at their voting records, you will see a stark difference in how [white] representatives from the two parties vote” on black and Latino issues, says Sen. Judy Zaffirini of Laredo. “Redistricting is a weapon of mass discrimination.”

If it is, though, it’s a subtle kind of discrimination. One might think the senators were being oversensitive, even paranoid, if a key Republican operative hadn’t confirmed their suspicions that Republicans, led by Rove and DeLay, are playing a devious race card.

In May, the Denver Post reported on GOP attack dog Grover Norquist’s strategy, saying, “The GOP can live with urban liberals, such as [California Rep. Maxine] Waters; it’s moderates such as [Texas Democratic Rep. Charlie] Stenholm who are its main target.” If the Texas redistricting plan is adopted, Norquist was quoted saying, “it is exactly the Stenholms of the world who will disappear, the moderate Democrats. They will go so that no Texan need grow up thinking that being a Democrat is acceptable behavior.”

For those attuned to the signals, Norquist’s message was clear — redistricting would drive Southern whites out of the Democratic Party. In July, he went further, telling the New York Times that Sheila Jackson-Lee, a African-American congresswoman from Texas, “will be the spokesman for the Democratic Party.”

“Basically you’ll be labeled a nigger-lover if you’re a Democrat,” Coleman says of the Republican plan. “We’ve already been through those times. It’s all part of the Southern strategy.”

Whitmire’s departure makes it unlikely that the Democrats can block that strategy, even if some of them hold out until Christmas, as they’ve threatened to do. If they remain in New Mexico, they’ll probably prove the Houston Chronicle right — it will be a Democratic Alamo, brave and doomed.

Hogtied for the moment, and still well short of victory, angry Republican legislators have taken to calling their colleagues the “Chicken D’s” for leaving Austin. New GOP Gov. Rick Perry unsuccessfully dispatched state troopers to find the wayward pols, arrest them, and drag them back across the border. DeLay, calling the Democrats “cowards,” investigated putting federal agents on their tails. If so, FBI agents would stop hunting al-Qaida and instead try to smoke out security threats hailing from San Antonio, Fort Worth and El Paso, instead.

For Texans, the dramatic political fight has become the equivalent of a summer movie blockbuster — filled with busy troopers, back-stabbing, stalkings and skullduggery. But the fight holds serious national implications.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans currently outnumber Democrats 229 to 205, with one independent. But in the 32-member Texas delegation, Democrats outnumber Republicans 17-15. If the Republican redistricting plan passes, strategists say, Democrats could lose from four to seven congressional seats. In a Congress where the balance of power is so close, seven additional Texas Republicans who owe their jobs to DeLay could make it significantly easier for Republican President George W. Bush to give tax breaks to the rich, slash health programs for the poor, undermine environmental safeguards, and push through other central elements of his legislative agenda.

“The stakes are extremely high,” says Gary Keith, a lecturer on Texas politics at the University of Texas at Austin. “If you think about it — each of the last few national elections has been a battle over five to 10 House seats. Now [with the new redistricting plan], boom! [Republicans] could win with just one state.”

To prevent what they called a “relentless” effort by “Washington Republican political leaders” — read: Tom DeLay — to ram through the redistricting plan, the Texas House Democrats simply took the best and most effective political option available: They left town. The exiles — discovered last Monday in a Holiday Inn in Oklahoma — refuse to budge from their hideout until key legislative deadlines expire on Friday.

The GOP won control of the Texas legislature for the first time in 130 years during the 2002 elections. That all but assured they would have the clout to push through a plan that would redraw congressional district boundaries to the advantage of Republicans, allowing the party to solidify its power in Texas and in the U.S. House.

But the drama accelerated last Sunday night. Facing certain defeat over the redistricting plan inspired by DeLay, more than 50 Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives fled the state capitol in Austin — sneaking across the state line on two chartered buses to Ardmore, Okla. They vow to remain there — holed up in the motel off Interstate 35 — until their GOP colleagues shelve the controversial bill.

With Republicans the majority party in Austin, the bill’s outcome was never in doubt. But Texas law mandates that 100, or two-thirds of the house’s 150 representatives, be present for a quorum.

The math isn’t complicated. The Democrats knew that a well-organized boycott could hamstring the GOP juggernaut, and so they counted heads and decided to make a run for the border. With 51 politicos missing and at large, the Republican redistricting bill will expire on Friday — effectively derailing the GOP’s plan, at least temporarily.

Furious Republicans asked Perry to issue warrants for the Democrats’ arrest. They urged him to send “wanted” bulletins to neighboring states. New Mexico state Attorney General Patricia Madrid, a Democrat, replied with a sarcastic promise of cooperation:

“I have put out an all-points-bulletin for law enforcement to be on the lookout for politicians in favor of healthcare for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy.”

By most accounts, the proposed congressional districts are blatantly political — designed to ensure the DeLay keeps his job and Dubya’s home state is colored red for a generation.

“The districts are drawn by Republicans to the advantage of the Republicans,” says Keith, who also points out that Democrats, when they ruled Texas, redrew districts to suit them.

What’s new, however, is how blatantly the plan gerrymanders Texas cities and towns.

“This plan takes the white conservative camp in Texas and institutionalizes it,” Keith says. “It completely smashes up communities all over [the state].” Keith uses liberal Austin as an example. Currently one congressional district, the city — under the Republican plan — would be redrawn and quartered — chopped up into four pieces. Each portion would be sewn onto a rural, Republican district.

To deflect the partisan nature of the dispute, the Democrats argue their boycott is about local control. There are also other issues caught up in the fight. Now that the Republicans hold the top jobs in Texas government, the Democrats are fighting a conservative assault on the environment and on health and home insurance reform. But the redistricting plan remains the flash point. The Dems insist they will return to Austin only if the GOP kills the bill.

“We will hop on a bus two minutes from now and go home as soon as the Republican leadership agree that other issues are more important than redistricting,” says state Rep. Pete Gallego, a Democrat from Alpine who’s residing, temporarily, at the Holiday Inn in Ardmore. “We will be back in the capital post haste.”

So far the Republicans haven’t caved, and the state is gridlocked. “It’s a train wreck,” Keith says.

It’s also thrilling drama — even if most of the participants resemble actors on the suburban dinner theater circuit and not the buff, nostril-flaring thespians of “Matrix Reloaded.”

Depending on one’s politics, the spectacle resembles two different movies.

To Democrats, the Republican redistricting effort is a partisan “Frankenstein,” with the monster cobbled together by mad Dr. DeLay. House Democrats play the role of the torch-bearing, rake-rattling peasants, united in their efforts to destroy the monster and save the Democratic congressional delegation from destruction.

Republicans are more apt to believe Democrats are playing Glenn Close’s scorned yuppie from “Fatal Attraction.” As the GOP sees it, the Dems, dumped by voters, are out to avenge their rejection. The redistricting bill is the bunny they’ve dropped in the stew pot.

DeLay is nobody’s boiled rabbit. When the Dems went on the lam, the Republicans went ballistic. This being Texas, they called for the sheriff. State House Speaker Tom Craddick, a Republican, ordered Department of Public Safety troopers to go forth and arrest the missing legislators.

On Monday, staffers at Gallego’s offices in the West Texas town of Alpine were treated to the sight of three armed troopers arriving to capture the 74th District’s democratically elected representative. To no avail. Gallego was safe — already in Democrat-ruled Oklahoma, where the Republican troopers have no legal jurisdiction.

DeLay waded into the dust-up on Tuesday. The irritated majority leader ordered staffers to see whether the FBI might be brought in to arrest the absent Democrats.

Calling DeLay’s idea “incredible,” Keith warned that such tactics could backfire, especially if voters watch popular pols dragged back home to be displayed like Caesar’s captured Gauls in chains.

“I can’t imagine anything that would blow up in DeLay’s face more than having FBI agents arrest the Democrats,” he says. “The Republicans can be really hurt by this.”

Others have similar opinions. “When this goes down in history they [the Democrats] will be heroes, and we’ll be a bunch of schmucks,” Republican state Rep. Pat Haggerty of El Paso warned the El Paso Times.

That seems to be the impression in Gallego’s Alpine, a conservative town near Big Bend National Park. Voters here expressed a certain dismay upon learning the governor had ordered the Democrats’ arrest for, well, being Democrats.

“Does that mean they can come to my door and pick me up whenever they want?” wondered bartender and independent Michael Espinoza.

With the Republicans left hyperventilating in Austin, the Democrats are staying put north of the Red River.

“They’re still here,” says Shelba, who works in the Denny’s that adjoins the now famous Holiday Inn, “and they’re eating a little bit of everything, especially the Grand Slam [breakfasts].”

The Democrats-in-exile are eager to show the voters they’re not enjoying their time off. For instance, they’re not openly quaffing cosmos in the adjoining Gusher Lounge; nor are they enjoying Ardmore’s tourist marvels, which include the Gene Autry Oklahoma History Museum, which is “Dedicated to the Singing Cowboys of the B Westerns.” Instead, they’re holding meetings, scripture readings and working groups while dutifully turning out for the TV crews making the drive north from Dallas.

Republicans, meanwhile, have few options but to heap ridicule on their missing colleagues. Images of the wandering Democrats were pasted on milk cartons. Texas GOP’s Web site published a downloadable deck of cards of the “Chicken D’s,” each one sporting a photograph of a missing Democrat. Gallego, for example, is the 10 of spades.

The results only energized the Democrats. Ardmore was soon lousy with fruit baskets and Texas Democratic loyalists who drove north to Oklahoma to cheer on their heroes.

Such twists and turns might seems absurd to voters in other democracies, but Texas has a soft spot for cussed stubbornness. The cry “Remember the Alamo” is still taken seriously in the state — which was an independent country for nine years before joining the United States.

“We Texans are schizophrenic,” Keith says. “On one hand we want things to work smoothly, but when someone stands up against the odds we admire their chutzpah, to use a non-Texas term. There’s a rich history of Texas populism, of people liking it when those without power stand up to those with power.”

During the 1971 legislative session, 30 mostly liberal Democrats and even a few conservative Republicans revolted against state House Speaker Gus Mutscher. The legislators, dubbed the “Dirty Thirty,” pushed for a vote to investigate a scandal swirling around him. Mutscher retaliated by killing bills and ordering the reformers’ state districts redrawn to destroy them politically. The reformers retaliated by barnstorming the state urging Mutscher’s overthrow. It worked — the speaker was later voted out of office and convicted of bribery charges.

In 1979, 12 Democratic state senators called the “Killer Bees” hid out above an Austin garage for five days to stop the state legislature from recasting the presidential primary date to favor a former governor, the Democrat-turned-Republican John B. Connally.

Keith doesn’t see the Republicans buckling. The Democrats refuse to return. The redistricting bill will most certainly die. So what happens next?

“I think Tom DeLay wants a congressional redistrict so badly that if the bill expires this week, his supporters will try to resurrect it and attach it to another bill during the session’s final weeks,” Keith predicts. “At that point, Democrats won’t flee again, but probably use a filibuster or other guerrilla tactics to kill it.” By making speeches long enough to rival Castro’s — a whole series of them, in fact — they would block a vote and, in effect, talk the measure to death.

But even if the Democrats win this battle, Texas still needs to be governed. Bills on home insurance, healthcare and the state deficit — which is running at $9.9 billion — need to be debated, voted on and passed. What will happen if the entire legislative session collapses like the Hindenberg?

The result, Keith says, could well be an even bigger fight later this summer when the legislature will return for a special session before the fiscal year ends on August 30.

In Oklahoma, Gallego reiterates he and his fellow Democrats will cooperate fully with the majority Republicans — as long as redistricting’s a dead issue.

“The Republican leadership is out of step with folks at home. If you ask anybody in Del Rio, Fort Stockton or Alpine if lowering property taxes is more important than redistricting, they say yes. Is funding for education more important than changing congressmen? They say yes. Redistricting is not the fundamental priority of Texans.”

Will Texas stand down? Keith isn’t optimistic.

“Who can step in and cool things off?” he asks. “There are no candidates that have arisen yet.

“It’s always hot in Austin during the summer, but when the politicians get back here, the tempers are going to be so frayed it will be a very hot summer, indeed.”