Texas: The Two-Party Party

If the Lone Star State has little room for the two-party system, many Texas Democrats will fight to extinction if necessary to maintain a two-party party.

Their struggle, waged for decades with near-Sicilian ferocity, is less a political schism than a blood feud between so-called liberals and uncompromising conservatives. Last week, Texas’ liberals threatened to bolt in a body from the Democratic Party in order, of all things, to support a conservative Republican.

In a generally unfriendly climate, Texas’ liberal rump flourishes mostly along the state’s industrial Gulf Coast, among its Mexican-American minority concentrated in the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere in south Texas, and on some college campuses. As a group, it has rarely been able to wrest control of the state government from the oil, land and financial barons who have traditionally kept conservative Democrats in power. The liberals’ chief foe nowadays is Governor John Connally, an old L.B.J. ally, who nonetheless has repeatedly blocked such Great Society-oriented proposals as state minimum-wage and industrial-safety laws.

Strengthened politically by what his detractors refer to as “the Bullet”—the shot that wounded Connally as he accompanied President Kennedy on the fatal motorcade in Dallas—the Gover nor has systematically squeezed liberals out of what few party posts they enjoyed. To U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough, the liberals’ Washington oracle, Connally is “the worst, most vindictive, most reactionary Governor in Texas history.”

A “Used Carr.” Since Connally is a shoo-in for reelection, liberals decided at the state Democratic convention last month to visit their revenge on Attorney General Waggoner Carr, the Governor’s hand-picked candidate to oust first-term Republican Senator John Tower. Stomping angrily out of Austin’s City Auditorium, liberal delegates yelled through a resolution authorizing their followers to support Tower, who stumped Texas for Goldwater in 1964 but has moderated his views somewhat.

The liberals reason that a sizable vote for Tower, 42, the state’s first G.O.P. Senator since Reconstruction, would enhance liberal influence in Democratic ranks and ultimately help to open the way for a genuine two-party system in Texas politics. Coolly watching the Democratic fight from the sidelines, Tower says simply that he “welcomes support from wherever it occurs.” No easy target, Candidate Carr, 48, piled up more votes (1,900,000) in 1964 than any other office seeker in the state’s history. All the same, there are some 30,000 to 40,000 hard-core liberal Democratic voters. In a tight race, they could well ditch what they derisively call Connally’s “used Carr.”