Kinky Friedman: A Breath of Fresh Air for Brown County Texas !

Carlos Guerra: Kinky: Less a humorous interruption than a breath of fresh air

Web Posted: 06/18/2006 12:00 AM CDT
San Antonio Express-News

One day with Kinky Friedman convinced me that he is mining a rich vein of popular discontent about politics-as-usual, with startling success. But his quest isn't just a novel interruption of politics-as-usual; he is reviving what once made elections important: voicing regular folks' concerns; offering common-sense, common-man solutions — with humor.
Greeting me outside his hotel, he paused to oblige two guests who wanted pictures with him when a woman stepped off an airport van and repeated what the two men had said earlier: "Kinky! I'm voting for you."
"I love that they don't say, 'Good to meet you,'" he said later. "They say, 'I'm voting for you.'"
Arriving unannounced at Guajillo's, packed with a mostly Latino lunch crowd, the astonished owner, Carlos Barajas, pledged his support before escorting us to "a quiet table," an eight-minute trip because patrons kept stopping Kinky, including one who wanted an address "to send you money" and who advised: "Don't let (Perry) keep it quiet and you'll win."
"I'm 61, too young for Medicare and too old for women to care," Kinky said when I asked his age, and then launched into 90 minutes of quips punctuated by surprisingly cogent policy discussions.
Public schools' failure is the biggest issue, he said, so he will end the TAKS test and give teachers the pay and respect they deserve, funding much of it with legalized casinos so that Texans will stop funding other states' schools. Health care for children and seniors is next in importance.
"Texas is probably the richest state after California," he said. "Why are we dead last in so many things? The only thing Rick Perry's done is make George W. Bush look smart," he jabbed before noting that the last school-tax bill is a shell game plan adopted only after years during which Perry led lawmakers into repeatedly outlawing gay marriage while public schools sank to new lows.
But voters' greatest concern, he says, is the vast chasm that has grown between regular folk and a two-party system that "spent $100 million in the last governor's election to make sure that only 29 percent of us voted."
He connects with Texans, Friedman says, because they know he isn't a politician and he's honest.
Publicly funded campaigns must replace pay-to-play politics to level the playing field, he adds, and as governor, he'll hire the best people instead of the biggest contributors.
"I'll get people who know about the problem and who are passionate about fixing the problem," he says earnestly.
On what he said was "an off day," wherever we went Kinky readily obliged greeters — who recognized the frizzy man with a cigar, black hat and "preacher's coat" and stopped him to shake hands — and shared a laugh with them.
In the evening, he took one last puff off his stogy while standing next to a dumpster behind a North Side bookstore before walking inside, where 200 people eagerly were awaiting a "reading" from his 23rd book, "Cowboy Logic" (more than 100 had tickets to get his signature). It was his most difficult book, he says, since it is a life-long collection of purloined material.
Early into a five-way race that will be won by the top vote-getter, Kinky believes the polls understate his support because "they're only polling people who voted in the last governor's race, and those aren't the people out for me."
But the latest poll showed him second among likely voters, too. Watch out.

To contact Carlos Guerra, call (210) 250-3545 or e-mail cguerra@express-news.net. His column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

source: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA061806.1B.guerra.12b2ae5.html